Windowed mode and .exe commands

[Dellathane]

For those who have stumbled in from the cold wastes of the wider internet, this is how to run Medieval Total War in windowed mode

- Create a shortcut of your Medieval_TW.exe.
- Go to properties in that new shortcut and look at the target box
- Add " D" (note the space) to the end of the directory, outside the speech marks.
- It should look something like "D:\Medieval Total War\Medieval_TW.exe" D
( D:\ is just the disk I happen to have medieval on. If you have "C:\Somewhere\MTW" you still but a D on the end. Just to be sure )

The D command forces MTW to keep the desktop resolution. Instead of changing it as usually happens on launch. It does mean that you have give the program a little more TLC so that it will run.

To launch it you must change the colour depth to 16bit.
- In Win 7 you can do it by right-clicking on the desktop, Screen Resolution, Advanced Settings, Monitor, and change the "color" depth to 16 bit.
- Be careful when setting the campaign and battle map resolutions, you cannot have a higher resolution than you have pixels in any direction, or MTW will crash horribly. So those of us hoping to run in 1280x960 on 1440x900 screens will be disappointed.
-If you're having problems just bear in mind that the program is not allowed to do anything for itself, so you have to change everything for it.


So my question is this. Can this "window" be given a border? What other commands are there for MTW, is there a full list?

[drone]

I've never tried windowed mode, but there are several other game options you can specify on the command line. I think most of them are listed here, but there are probably a few others. The most popular are the -ian, -loyalty, and -green_generals modes. -ian is great for debugging mods and just messing about, and -loyalty can improve the AIs stability in-game.

[Dellathane]

Thanks Drone

I did a little more testing in windowed mode today. Battles are fine, but campaign map would CTD instantly on starting anew or loading an old one. I've never had a problem like that on my current system, but just for a laugh I thought I would try the "button fix", and it worked!

Now that i have fully functional windowed mode (no side scrolling with the mouse, but there are arrow keys for that), i thought i would break it and try playing it on my mobile (Android 4.xx Nexus S) using splashtop streamer. Conclusion - MTW works really well on touch screens. Splashtop (which is otherwise a very cool app) is awful for dragging things around on screen; but even so the campaign map was almost a joy to use. and battles were functional, although a way of looking around the battlefield is needed. With a half decent attempt, porting MTW to mobile would be really worthwhile IMO. Dunno about the legalities of such a move though.

edit -
Just to make it clear. Splashtop puts an image of your computer on your phone that you can interact with. All the actual computing is still done on the PC.

[drone]

That's really cool. I don't have a smartphone or tablet myself, but that's a pretty neat trick. Is there any kind of keyboard functionality from the phone, or is everything touch ("click") based?

[Dellathane]

You can get a keyboard with Alt Ctrl Del and stuff, as well as all numbers and letters, but no arrow keys as far as I can tell. Though come to think of it reassigning the keys to WASD would do the trick. I don't know how effective it would be though. Splashtop is designed for much more mundane tasks like listening to music, watching films and doing work.

speaking of which....