Does this game have any way to be run in a window or any 'resolution' adjustments? The in game options are surprisingly sparse!

EDIT:

Ok i found out how to do it.

1. Go to where you installed the game (e.g. mine was in drive E:/GOG/Distant Worlds Universe)

2. In the main /Distant Worlds Universe directory scroll down until you find the 'Startup.ini' file

3. Open that (with Notepad etc) and after adjusting the SCREENWIDTH and SCREENHEIGHT values to what you want, remove the single quotation mark in front of both lines. So....

"SCREENWIDTH 1024
"SCREENHEIGHT 764

becomes:

SCREENWIDTH 1024
SCREENHEIGHT 768

Removing the quote " activates the required screen size to run 'windowed'. Save the changes to the Startup.ini file and your good to go in windowed mode :)

Do you have multiple monitors, by chance? I do, and experienced the same behavior. If you do, you have to disable all but the sole monitor on which you want to play the game. It is a pain if you just want to jump in and play, and is quite inexcusable in this day and age of computer game development ... that and non-scaling text. There are likely to be one or more third party utility work-arounds, but again, this is poor development and with the game's age, unlikely to be fixed.

Thanks ditchinit, that looks like what it was. I have a 2nd monitor that is vertical/portrait. The game launches on my primary monitor at 1920x1080 but running a tutorial or game put it on the same resolution as my secondary monitor for some reason. I set that secondary monitor to landscape and 1920x1080 and voila, the tutorial finally launched properly finally. Kinda annoying that I'll have to go thru this same re-configuration every time I launch this game. Was hoping to have a guide up on the 2nd monitor that I can read properly as I learn to play this game. Ah well, will figure something out.

Thanks though for the tip!

For those of you trying to deal with this BS, there seems to be a way to get the game to actually use the correct resolution. If you're on windows 10, anyway. I just spent too long dealing with this. Someday I'll figure out why so many of the devs that release stuff on Matrix Games can't figure out how options or resolutions work but hey, at least the game is decent so far.

Alright anyway, create a shortcut to distantworlds.exe. Not the launcher, it has to be the executable. Right-click the shortcut and select properties. You should see a few input sections 'Run' is the important one. It's a dropdown menu. Select 'Maximized'. Ok. Then right-click on distantworlds.exe and go to compatability settings. You (I) only need one option - click on 'change high DPI settings' and check the box for 'Use this setting to fix...' The dropdown should also say 'I signed in to Windows.' If you don't know if you need to change that you almost certainly don't. That should be it. Make sure you confirm your changes.

edit: I checked the shortcut I made and it has the same compatability options selected. I do not know if that matters. The game ALSO can't seem to decide which monitor it wants to start loading from, but the game does finally load up on the correct one. If it's acting weird try it a couple times.

Oh and if you've messed with the Startup.ini in the vain hope that you could run in windowed mode... make sure you comment those back out. You want the game to start up like normal.

Now if the game REALLY wants to run in some bonkers resolution that may or may not exist, Windows will force it to match your screen resolution anyway. Yay for actually good features from the endless Win10 patches.

disclaimer:

This worked for me. I have two monitors, 1680x1050 and 1920x1050. The 1680 is my primary for games and junk. Windows knows it's my primary, the game knows to launch on that monitor, but the game kept launching at what seemed to be about 2100x1200 or something. It was cut off just under the bottom left status screen thing and cut off on the right maybe 10 pixels past the beginning of the menu buttons on the bottom right.

So yeah, hopefully this works for you.