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Running Vanguard in Windowed Fullscreen mode (ISBoxer)

Posted: Fri Sep 18, 2020 6:53 pm
by Gio-Cefalu
If you're like me, you enjoy your games in Windowed Fullscreen mode. Unfortunately, Vanguard doesn't run like this. I tried a variety of other programs which were "supposed" to run it this way, and they just didn't work (AutoHotkey, Borderless Gaming, etc). This method uses ISBoxer and assumes you have an active subscription to software by LavishSoft. If you are paying for a subscription to Lavish for ISBoxer, then this is how you can get Vanguard emulator to run Fullscreen and Windowed. Note that while ISBoxer is designed for running multiple instances of a game for controlling multiple characters, this tutorial only covers running a single instance of the game, effectively taking the emulator client and running it in a borderless fullscreen window.

1. Download and install the InnerSpace and ISBoxer combo.
2. Once installed, run InnerSpace (the red target icon) from the desktop, and it should be running in the system tray.
3. Right click on the InnerSpace system tray icon and select Add Game.
4. Enter the "name" of the game you're selecting. This can be anything you choose, like VanguardEmu. Select the path to your Launcher (VGOEmuLauncher.exe) as the game executable. You can leave the parameters blank.
5. Now open up ISBoxer, which is the application that handles most of the configuration and then sends it to InnerSpace to be used for game time.
6. Under ISBoxer > Characters, right click and select New Character. Name the character anything you want. This does NOT need to match the exact name of the character in game. I simply used Vanguard_Character.
7. Under ISBoxer > Character Sets, right click to create a new team by selecting Quick Setup Wizard (Recommended).
8. When prompted for the game to use, select Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Then click Next.
9. The wizard will "discover" the character you created earlier. Double click the character name, Vanguard_Character in my case, which makes it show up in the team below. On the right hand side, you should notice that it shows Game: VanguardEmu and Game Profile: VanguardEmu Default Profile (This may vary depending on how you named the game in the InnerSpace step at the beginning). Click Next.
10. Now select a name for your team. This can once again be anything descriptive you'd like it to be. For the sake of originality, I named mine VanguardTeam. Click Next.
11. This is the trickiest part and may vary depending on how many monitors you have and how exactly you want the window to look like. In my case, I have 2 monitors and only want it to run on my primary display. I selected the option for Single full screen-ish window on \\.\DISPLAY1 which happens to be my primary monitor. You'll notice there are 2 options with the same name. Clicking on them both, you'll see that one of them covers the task bar, and the other does not. The "black" area is what the game will cover, and anything in blue is your desktop or taskbar which will not be covered by the game. I prefer the layout where the full screen is "black," which is what the game will fill. Click Next.
12. In this step, you'll have options for using CPU Hyperthreading and a strategy for managing CPUs. Since ISBoxer is designed for multiple clients, this could be really customized in many ways, but in our case, you can keep CPU Hyperthreading OFF and at the bottom select the CPU option for Select all CPUs with every window. Click Next.
13. There are some button layout options on this screen, but they don't really matter since we aren't boxing in this case. Choose Bare for this option and then click Finish.
14. A pop-up will appear showing the option to bind additional keystrokes. Click Cancel to ignore this part as we aren't tackling any multi-boxing scenarios in this example.
15. Note: The work up to this point has only been completed in ISBoxer, but it has not been sent to InnerSpace, which actually runs the game with all the settings. We first need to save and export these settings from ISBoxer and into InnerSpace. From the ISBoxer menu, go to File > Save and then File > Export All to InnerSpace
16. From the system tray, right click on the InnerSpace icon (red target), and select ISBoxer Character Sets > VanguardTeam. Again, this may vary depending on what you named your specific team.
17. The launcher will load as it normally would, but when you enter the game, it will create a fullscreen windowed version of the game without any border, and you can now mouse over to other monitors or use alt-tab to other programs without the game minimizing.
18. As long as the configuration was saved and exported to InnerSpace, then in the future, you simply need to have InnerSpace running and right click to select ISBoxer Character Sets > VanguardTeam (or the name of your specific team) in order to launch the game.

Have fun playing!

Re: Running Vanguard in Windowed Fullscreen mode (ISBoxer)

Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2020 12:35 am
by Zukan
Nice thank you for posting this. It took me a bit to figure out how to properly launch it to activate the boarderless mode but it does work. I got the 7 day trial to see how it worked out hehe. The software is not very user friendly but I guess I only need to set it up once.

I do seem to take a fps hit though at 4k but others' results may be different

Re: Running Vanguard in Windowed Fullscreen mode (ISBoxer)

Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2020 4:29 am
by Gio-Cefalu
By default, ISBoxer will limit your FPS to 60 for foreground windows and 30 for background windows. Remember that this is designed for people playing EQ or WoW with 3-6 instances of the game running. You can, however, adjust it so that even with your one window, the foreground window is limited to 100 FPS (or whatever value you choose), and that may help.

Re: Running Vanguard in Windowed Fullscreen mode (ISBoxer)

Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2020 11:42 am
by Zukan
Ooo found that setting. It doesn't dip in FPS when I click on other windows now too. That's delicious. Thanks