Homeworld Cataclysm... Emergence Multiscreen Wine

[Johannes Frank]

Hello!
I am trying to run Homeworld cataclysm from GoG in Windowed mode using Wine 5.16.
Trying to run the game with "-window" causes the menu to crash so I try using dxwnd.
DXWND gets the game into windowed mode perfectly fine, however when trying to click or click and hold, the mouse always jumps out of the window (I have three screens and am moving the window from the left to the center screen).

I fumbled about with a lot of options but could not get this behavior to stop - setting the "Keep Cursor within window" option only causes it to spasm around inside the window (as soon as I click, normal mousemovement seems, despite a little flicker, unaffected).

I also tried to "fix" the issue by setting the window start coordinates so that it is starting in the correct location, however that just results in a black window (nothign is rendered) even though I have the sound.

It's quite possible the fact that I'm running it via Wine is contributing to the problem but is there anything obvious I am missing?

[gho]

Well, the obvious solution (but that doesn't grant that it's also a working one!) would be to set the clipper selector (see your screenshot) to "on". This way the mouse cursor should be bound within the window borders and you could free it by Alt-Tabbing outside.
The "Keep Cursor within window" option works differently: the cursor is free t move everywhere, but the game detects coordinate values always within the window border, so maybe it doesn't crash.
Of course, the fact of being an untested game plus Linux / Wine environment makes this clipper solution absolutely not granted. Please, let me know how it works ...

[Johannes Frank]

Hello!
The Clipper did advance me by a huge margin. I now don't have that extremely jumpy mouse anymore but I still have another artifact considering the mouse: It seems to be moving on its own slowly (around 1cm/second) on one axis (usually horizontally to the left) for around one to two seconds after I moved the mouse around.
Note: This behavior was already there before I activated clipper, though it was not as annoying as the constant jumping out of the window that caused the game to loose focus so I didn't mention it before.

Also, is there a way to prevent the game MINIMIZING when it looses focus? I already selected "Do not notify on task switch" but somehow the game still appears to notice.

Edit: Thank you for helping me by the way! I do not take this granted, given that I have a somewhat obscure Setup

Edit 2: I just did a short video to demonstrate the behavior. See https://youtu.be/vkUe-rkQcUw for me trying to put the mouse in the middle of the circle. When approaching from above or the left, the mouse is actually fighting against my slow movement, when approaching from the right, the mouse escapes to the left. I demonstrated it on different locations of the screen to proof that this has nothign to do with the control mechanism but instead is apparently somewhat dependant on where on the screen I'm moving the mouse around

[gho]

It's not easy to help without a replicated testbed. About the slowly moving cursor, I may guess that it could depend on a rounding problem when making scaling calculations about the cursor position. You may try to set the window size as an integer multiple of the game resolution (or set the W, H sizes as 0, 0, which will set automatically the resolution size) and see if the problem disappears ...

[Johannes Frank]

You're a genius! Setting W and H to 0 removed that issue. A thousand thanks!

Edit: sorry I celebrated a bit too soon. Now the fact that the game minimizes when it looses focus is biting, since when I restore it, the window size falls down from roughly 1280x1024 to 800x600 and the window is black. The game is REALLY bitchy about it's screen size ^^
I already read up on https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/general/thread/bf89a76e/ and tried to keep the window from minimizing when it looses focus, to no avail. Do you have any more tricks up your sleeve how I can force the window to stay visible even if focus is lost (what is bound to happen when I try to move it around or click around in e.g. OBS)?

This game is getting me. I just found out that it was having issues since it was trying to do OpenGL via 3DFX. I deleted thos libraries (as suggested here https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Homeworld:Cataclysm#Video) and now I don't have those issues with the black windows anymore - however now I don't get any window at all (I mean it's still not fullscreen but without decoration and not moveable) with DxWnd even though I have "Run in Window" set?!? It's now running with native opengl (Without detour via 3DFX which was apparently buggy)

[huh]

I don't know if you know, but OpenGL can be controlled on the OpenGL tab.
Of course, in Wine the behavior can be different...