If I remember correctly, rF1 suffered from this for a while and probably still does. I was in a nice 10 lap race, just claimed the lead a couple of laps previous and boom.... I was looking at my desktop. rF2 was still running, I could hear the cars passing me. I clicked on the game in the task bar but it would not recover back to full screen. No way no how. I dunno what caused it to lose focus. There were no dialogs on my screen from other apps. Nothing. rF2 seems to be very sensitive to losing focus but if you could at least recover it by clicking on the icon in the task bar at least you could limit the damage. Another good idea would be for the game to auto-pause if it lost focus for any reason whatsoever. Right now rF2 is my only hope of sim-racing offline as the others all have issues right now. But if this is going to happen at crucial moments in races, or indeed at any time, then rF2 will have to get added to the list also. So is this a common thing ? I don't mind if the problem is on my side and it's maybe some rogue background app that caused it, but the issue remains that rF2 just cannot recover from losing focus. You cannot alt-Tab back to it or do anything to bring the game back up. Maybe there are others who don't have this problem, but that doesn't mean the issue doesn't exist. It's clearly very sensitive and surrenders itself to any little thing going on in the background. Anyone with experience on this that could maybe shed some light on this issue ?
Hello F1Racer, Yes, in order for this to occur, some application is stealing focus and it'll also happen when alt-tabbing. For sure it is a bug and seems to have ended worse in this current build. The quickest and easiest thing you can do is run in windowed mode where the problem does not seem to be evident. You may find some things will not work in this mode, like shadowplay for example, and annoyingly application toasts (steam friends popups, windows update notifications etc.) will appear in front of the rFactor 2 screen. Finally, I've read others with the same issue who have had to resort to powering off their PC as they can no longer interact the mouse with the desktop screen. You can press ctrl-alt-del and using keyboard keys only, navigate to task manager and when highlighted press enter. With Taskmanager open, use the down arrow key to select rFactor2.exe and Alt-E to end the task. (shift tab to cycle between the Task manager sections) Hope this helps!
Thanks matf1, very helpful. Windowed mode seems like it would solve it but...ugh, right ? Fingers crossed they can improve this on the next build but I won't hold my breath Maybe another idea is to run the EndItAll app before playing rF2 so it shuts down all unneeded apps before playing.
hi all it's not unrecoverable if ISI keep up this increased drive with development, perhaps now more emphasis on bringing existing features to a state where at least they feel fairly finished & more polished (rain has slight drip effect of visor ...simple stuff like that even if only visual) & in the event of an update making the auto updater totally Rock solid! there are qualities of rf2 unmatched by an other simulator out there, it's just a matter of most things falling into place, I'm sure the league's etc will really start to kick in then. although I'm loving running the radical in Iracing at the moment, I'm on the side lines awaiting for rf2 to have integrated VR support ( roll on the CV1 ! ) I'm sure rf2 will be more updates down the line by then too -so then I'll be looking for a league or starting one ! so happy days & happy days to look forward too. A popular league (& the coverage of it) could really gain a lot of extra interest + new rf2 purchasers & it will become knowledge that rf2 has finally seriously landed even after a few years of initial early Dev release. edit : really nice to see some historic (3rd party mod) tracks happening I really hope their decent , I'll buy the lot when the time comes p.s I should read the opening post before writing my posts lol
in the plr.json you can tell rf2 not to lose focus by setting the value to -1 gotta search for the entry, currently not able to dig it up for ya.
Yup, no need to power off; just use the keyboard. "Tab" key to switch or select between tabs, lists, buttons, etc., "arrow" keys to select the listed program (rF2.exe), and the "space" key to actually press a button (eg. "End").
