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scientiamemoria's avatar
scientiamemoria
2 years ago
Solved

Game launches but then minimizes to desktop

I have all updates installed and was able to play the game just fine until yesterday. I can open the EA App, I select 'Play' on The Sims 4, it appears as though the game is preparing to launch by goi...
pc
  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    2 years ago

    @scientiamemoria  Launching the game in windowed mode would have been my next suggestion too.  If you don't want to use the command box, you can instead go into Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4, open options.ini, and set fullscreen to 0 (zero), which is the same as changing the in-game option with the other graphics settings.

    This is not an uncommon problem, and some players find that they can return to fullscreen after launching the game once in windowed mode.  I don't know exactly what causes this issue, but I do see that your monitor runs at 4k, higher than the resolution the game would apply by default, and that you've set DPi to higher than 96 (100%).  These separately or in combination might cause some sort of conflict that Sims 4 doesn't know how to resolve into a working fullscreen game window.  Windowed mode gets around the problem because there's no scaling involved: one in-game pixel corresponds to one pixel on your screen.

    Anyway, see if you can now play in fullscreen, and if not, you can use windowed borderless to (probably) get the fullscreen effect without this problem.

puzzlezaddict's avatar
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
2 years ago

@scientiamemoria  Launching the game in windowed mode would have been my next suggestion too.  If you don't want to use the command box, you can instead go into Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4, open options.ini, and set fullscreen to 0 (zero), which is the same as changing the in-game option with the other graphics settings.

This is not an uncommon problem, and some players find that they can return to fullscreen after launching the game once in windowed mode.  I don't know exactly what causes this issue, but I do see that your monitor runs at 4k, higher than the resolution the game would apply by default, and that you've set DPi to higher than 96 (100%).  These separately or in combination might cause some sort of conflict that Sims 4 doesn't know how to resolve into a working fullscreen game window.  Windowed mode gets around the problem because there's no scaling involved: one in-game pixel corresponds to one pixel on your screen.

Anyway, see if you can now play in fullscreen, and if not, you can use windowed borderless to (probably) get the fullscreen effect without this problem.

scientiamemoria's avatar
scientiamemoria
2 years ago

Thank you very much! I'm glad to know what the issue could be. I was able to get the game to start in regular fullscreen mode, but had to restart the game and the original problem came back. Now I'm running it on windowed borderless/windowed fullscreen. I'm happy to at least know of a fix, so thanks again!

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