Recently, I got into a talk with my friends about horror games. One mentioned a game that reopened itself after he closed it. I started thinking about how I could make a game that did something similar to that. However, after a hour or two of digging online... I couldn't find anyone who asked the same question. I'm quite baffled about how they did something like that. Does anyone know how to do that?

I suspect it would have been a secondary process, probably the game's updater software that did it. If the game can launch the updater, and the updater can launch the game, then you can easily have one shut the other down, update it and then relaunch it. Sometimes a game is set to relaunch itself but you "intervene" and close the game prematurely. This doesn't stop the updater software from observing that the process terminated and taking that to mean that it's ok to restart it.

I suspect it would have been a secondary process, probably the game's updater software that did it. If the game can launch the updater, and the updater can launch the game, then you can easily have one shut the other down, update it and then relaunch it. Sometimes a game is set to relaunch itself but you "intervene" and close the game prematurely. This doesn't stop the updater software from observing that the process terminated and taking that to mean that it's ok to restart it.

Alright, thanks. I'll try that out, thank you very much!

The game doesn't necessarily need to terminate if its main window is closed. I've had a lot of accidents where I didn't properly shut down my program and it continued to run in the background.

You could use this approach intentionally to "relaunch" the game by re-initializing your game after a period of time.

Recently, I got into a talk with my friends about horror games. One mentioned a game that reopened itself after he closed it. I started thinking about how I could make a game that did something similar to that. However, after a hour or two of digging online... I couldn't find anyone who asked the same question. I'm quite baffled about how they did something like that. Does anyone know how to do that?

Unless you go in and force kill an application, it has the option to terminate whenever it wants. most applications follow the standard program life cycle of when an window is requested to close(i.e: hitting the x in the top right corner), it'll shut down the application, but by no means does the application actually have to fully terminate, and can very easily pop open a new window to replace the one just closed(or not even close that window to be perfectly honest).

A program that re-opens itself after being closed? That sounds quite like a program that I would not have installed for very long.

The game doesn't necessarily need to terminate if its main window is closed. I've had a lot of accidents where I didn't properly shut down my program and it continued to run in the background.

You could use this approach intentionally to "relaunch" the game by re-initializing your game after a period of time.

If you take this approach be sure to release any memory you no longer need and put your process to sleep. You wouldn't want your game to be eating up system resources in the background.

The game doesn't necessarily need to terminate if its main window is closed. I've had a lot of accidents where I didn't properly shut down my program and it continued to run in the background.

You could use this approach intentionally to "relaunch" the game by re-initializing your game after a period of time.

If you take this approach be sure to release any memory you no longer need and put your process to sleep. You wouldn't want your game to be eating up system resources in the background.

You'll likely need to do this anyway to properly reinitialize your game. Anyone relying on the process being terminated to free up resources for them is gonna have a bad time!

The game doesn't necessarily need to terminate if its main window is closed. I've had a lot of accidents where I didn't properly shut down my program and it continued to run in the background.

You could use this approach intentionally to "relaunch" the game by re-initializing your game after a period of time.

Chrome in Windows 8 mode does this. I've lost track of how many times I've accidentally closed the main window just to open it and find it opens right where it was with all my tabs still.

The challenge might be to let application B know when A is closed, if it's some static time, the risk is that you get the game running twice/ redundant.

That's why I would expect it to be different Windows or instances within one main application