How to turn on “windowed fullscreen” in TF2 and other Source games

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I'm sure Arda mentioned this in chat, and it was mentioned in the site too, but for the life of me I wasted 15 minutes trying to get back into TF2 after alt-tabbing out, then wasted 15 minutes trying to find the relevant piece of information again.

So I'll ask: how do you turn "fake fullscreen" (windowed mode maximized without border) in TF2, L4D, HL2 and the other Source games?

Best Answer

Use the following as your command line: (From the library right click on the game, then pick Properties → Set Launch Options.)

-sw -noborder

-sw means "Start Windowed." -noborder tells Windows to not draw borders (titlebar, window buttons) around the window.

You can also designate screen size (e.g. -w 640 -h 480), skip the intro video (-novideo), turn on low violence mode in L4D (-lv) and other options that may or not mean anything to you. A fuller list can be found here.

Related Solutions

How to create server-wide aliases for console commands in Source games

The server alias syntax is the same as on the client side. You can place aliases inside server.cfg or choose to separate them into their own file for the sake of neatness.

server.cfg

exec aliases.cfg

aliases.cfg

alias "meleeon" "sm_cvar sm_meleemode_enabled 1;sm_cvar example 0"
alias "meleeoff" "sm_cvar sm_meleemode_enabled 0;sm_cvar example 1"

You should also be able to change the default values of cvars registered in SourceMod plugins or have them vary by map. Just ask if that interests you.

In Source engine games, when are server.cfg and autoexec.cfg executed

autoexec.cfg is automatically executed once when the server starts before a map loads

server.cfg is automatically executed each time a map loads, including map changes

There's also map specific configs that are named after the map. These are executed last.

You usually want to put all of your server configuration in server.cfg so that any setting changes, such as from a mapname.cfg file, are reset when the map changes. The autoexec.cfg is used for anything that should be done before a map loads, such as sv_pure settings.

Also, you can change which file is executed on map change using the servercfgfile cvar. This is handy if you want to have different modes on a server, or run multiple servers from the same installation.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to create server-wide aliases for console commands in Source games

In Source engine games, when are server.cfg and autoexec.cfg executed

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