Keep music playing when SC4 loses focus?

[Han Solo 34]

Is it possible to have SimCity 4 keep playing it's music when the game window loses focus / I switch to another application?

As I'm planning a new city, I like to switch back and forth between the game and my web browser but I also like to have the music playing through the game itself (rather than an external player). It gets pretty annoying though, when one of my favourite songs gets interrupted because I switch to my browser.

[EDIT] I use Arc-... I mean, I use Debian 12 KDE.

[nos.17 5,136]

I've never used any of these programs and haven't tested, but a search through google and some old forum posts indicate programs like TurboTop or OnTopReplica might help you out.

[Han Solo 34]

Thank you @nos.17, I should have mentioned that I'm on Linux though. I'll edit my original post accordingly.

To be specific, I'm running Debian 12 with the KDE desktop environment. Which has a built in "always on top" feature for application windows but sadly, it doesn't seam to have any effect on keeping the tunes flowing.

[nos.17 5,136]

Oh damn, can't help any further then. The 'always on top' seems to be the easy part (I use Microsoft Power Toys which also has a similar feature), but keeping the focus will be the challenge.

[CorinaMarie 29,627]

Uhm, the music is in .mp3 format. Can't you just play that with some music app and put them all on cycle or random and in the game tell it not to play them at all?

[Han Solo 34]

17 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

Uhm, the music is in .mp3 format. Can't you just play that with some music app and put them all on cycle or random and in the game tell it not to play them at all?

That's the easy way of doing things and where's the fun in that?... honestly though, the reason why I'm trying to get the music played by the game itself, is because of the way it plays only certain tracks whilst in the region view. I know it's a silly requirement but it's important to me for some reason that I can't fully explain.

17 hours ago, nos.17 said:

Oh damn, can't help any further then. The 'always on top' seems to be the easy part (I use Microsoft Power Toys which also has a similar feature), but keeping the focus will be the challenge.

Rather than trying to make the window keep focus, or at least behave like it hasn't had focus taken from it, I'm looking into an alternate method that takes that variable out of the equation.

Valve have developed a piece of software called "gamescope", which is what's called a compositor. A compositor is what handles the way windows are displayed and decorated on a Linux desktop. For example, it handles transparency effects. With gamescope, you can supposedly run an application in it's own compositor that is not effected by your desktop environment's compositor. In other words, when I run SC4 using gamescope, the music keeps playing even when I Alt+Tab to another window.

There is one caveat though. It's only a small thing... a teeny, weeny little issue that, well, barely bothers me to be honest... I can hear the music but I'm only getting a blackscreen in the gamescope window.

It's progress though and hopefully I'll find a work around for it as I think gamescope could offer me advantages in other ways too.

[EDIT] I think I'm running into a bug with gamesscope + x11 + and the nvidia driver. 

 

[nos.17 5,136]

That definitely sounds like a challenge. Good luck! 

[Turnstyled 486]

It doesn't help the author of this post because I'm on Windows, but I was trying to figure this out and I succeeded! I'm using ReShade and Special K with SimCity 4 along with dgVoodoo2. Special K has options to allow for this kind of thing, such as "Continue Rendering" when the game is running in the background. Unfortunately, both Special K and ReShade crash the game when opening a city tile using the RHW/Full option of the NAM Controller. It is my hope that I can once again use the RHW when NAM 50 drops because NAM 50 will drop the requirement for the 4 GB patch.

Edit: I think it's more logical to use the RHW/Full option of the NAM controller, and to wait until NAM 50 drops to, hopefully, be able to use ReShade and Special K again. That's now what I'm doing.

[memo 1,446]

I'm in exactly the opposite boat. My game keeps running with music when it's in the background, but I'd prefer to fully pause the process, since running the CPU at 100% for some music is a bit pointless to me. I don't use a compositor. I'm on an X11 + XMonad setup.

The following commands are what I use to completely pause (and resume) the entire game process to stop the music. Depending on how the process is paused by your compositor, maybe this allows you to resume it as well to let the music continue? (The process might have a different name.)

pkill -STOP 'SimCity 4.exe'
pkill -CONT 'SimCity 4.exe'

Alternatively, you can try to use CTRL + ALT + F1/F2/… to switch to a different virtual console/tty and launch an independent X11 session (e.g. startx) in which you keep the game running in the foreground.