Why can't KSP load in the background, or while minimized?

[r4pt0r]

When I get home from work(3rd shift ughh), I like to boot up my game O'the day, and surf the net while I eat cereal. As the steam browser can be slow sometimes, I ALT+TAB to desktop and run chrome. However, When I boot up KSP and ALT+TAB out, it pauses the loading. Stops it completely. Obviously people with lots of mods have longer load times, and mine is only ~1 minute or so and isn't really inconvenient, but I just wonder why KSP won't load if it isn't the active window?

[NathanKell]

If you run KSP windowed (or in a borderless window, so it looks like it's full screen) it will run in the background.

You can do that via the launcher, or via setting FULL_SCREEN = False (in settings.cfg) and using the argument -popupwindow when starting KSP.

[Starwhip]

Didn't it run in the background before, even when it was fullscreened?

I swear that I remember it as such...

[NathanKell]

Yes. In one of the recent releases, they mentioned that was disabled.

[Starwhip]

Yes. In one of the recent releases, they mentioned that was disabled.

Ah.

I remember the days when I could browse the Forum and load up KSP at the same time... Yeah.

[steve_v]

The GNU/Linux build still loads / runs in the background, at least for me.

I'm eating toast & posting this while the game loads

I assume it's not supposed to, but this kind of breakage I like.

[Vaporo]

Why not let it load in the background? In fact, there could be a setting that says "allow KSP to load when minimized." I like how it pauses when minimized in the flight scene, though.

[p1t1o]

Yes. In one of the recent releases, they mentioned that was disabled.

Why?!

(I have too many mods, my loading time is >5mins, I would like this feature, cant understand why it was removed...)

[Red Iron Crown]

I believe this was a Unity change, to make Unity apps consume less power on mobile devices.

My current workaround for this is to start KSP, press Alt-Enter to put it into windowed mode, then switch to the forums or some other app without minimizing KSP. The last part is important because it will stop loading if minimized (or at least it did the last time I checked). Once I hear the music I switch back to KSP and press Alt-Enter again to go back to fullscreen.

(This is on Windows, keyboard shortcuts may be different for Linux or OS X.)