pygame window does not remain fullscreen

Question

I am making a game with the pygame module and now I got a problem. The program itself works fantastic, but the fullscreen mode which I wanted to enable does not work. I made a test program for fullscreen mode which works perfect, but when I tried to make the game fullscreen, the display does very strange. First the program starts. You can see it entering in fullscreen mode and displaying a text saying: "Loading..." Then the window disappears and reappears in it's original non-fullscreen size. the explorer bar on the bottom of the screen is displayed double and then the 2e explorer bar disappears. The game then runs in non-fullscreen mode. This is the program I use:

import pygame, sys, os
from pygame.locals import *

pygame.mixer.pre_init(44100, -16, 4, 2048)
pygame.init()

DISPLAYSURF = pygame.display.set_mode((476, 506), FULLSCREEN)

pygame.display.set_caption('Title of the game')

DISPLAYSURF.fill((128,128,128))
FONT = pygame.font.Font('freesansbold.ttf',20)
LoadingText = FONT.render('Loading...', True, (0,255,0))
LoadingRect = LoadingText.get_rect()
LoadingRect.center = (238,253)
DISPLAYSURF.blit(LoadingText, LoadingRect)
pygame.display.update()


# These files will be created when needed. They are now removed to prevent interference later.
try:
    os.remove('LOAD.txt')
except IOError:
    pass
try:
    os.remove('OPEN.txt')
except IOError:
    pass
try:
    os.remove('RUN.txt')
except IOError:
    pass
try:
    os.remove('TEMP.txt')
except IOError:
    pass

# All parts of the program are split into small programs that are callable with a main function
import ROIM
import ROIM_CreateNewGame
import ROIM_LevelMenu
import ROIM_Menu
import ROIM_SmallMenus
import ROIM_GameIntroduction
import SetupController


# RUN.txt is a file that says wich program to run
Run = 'Menu'
RUN = open('RUN.txt','w')
RUN.write('RUN\n')
RUN.write(Run)
RUN.close()

ChangeRun = False

FPS = 35
fpsClock = pygame.time.Clock()

while True: # MAIN GAME LOOP

    for event in pygame.event.get():
        if event.type == QUIT:
            pygame.quit()
            sys.exit()

    Preferences = open('Preferences.txt')
    PreferencesLines = Preferences.read().split('\n')
    x = 1
    Volume = -1
    Brightness = -1
    for Item in PreferencesLines:
        if Item == 'BRIGHTNESS':
            Brightness = int(PreferencesLines[x])
        if Item == 'VOLUME':
            Volume = int(PreferencesLines[x])
        x += 1
    Preferences.close()
    assert Volume != -1
    assert Brightness != -1

    # The colors will be changed to the right brightness.
    GREEN = (0,255 * (Brightness / 100),0)
    YELLOW = (255 * (Brightness / 100),255 * (Brightness / 100),0)
    RED = (255 * (Brightness / 100),0,0)
    BLUE = (0,0,255 * (Brightness / 100))
    WHITE = (255 * (Brightness / 100),255 * (Brightness / 100),255 * (Brightness / 100))
    BLACK = (0,0,0)
    GREY = (128 * (Brightness / 100),128 * (Brightness / 100),128 * (Brightness / 100))


    # Every small program gets the main variables and constants as arguments 
    if Run == 'Menu':
        ROIM_Menu.RunMenu(FONT, ChangeRun, GREEN, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, WHITE, BLACK, GREY, DISPLAYSURF, Volume, Brightness, fpsClock, FPS)
    elif Run == 'NewGame':
        ROIM_CreateNewGame.RunNewGame(FONT, ChangeRun, GREEN, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, WHITE, BLACK, GREY, DISPLAYSURF, Volume, Brightness, fpsClock, FPS)
    elif Run == 'Game':
        ROIM.RunGame(FONT, ChangeRun, GREEN, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, WHITE, BLACK, GREY, DISPLAYSURF, Volume, Brightness, fpsClock, FPS)
    elif Run == 'SmallMenu':
        ROIM_SmallMenus.RunSmallMenu(FONT, ChangeRun, GREEN, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, WHITE, BLACK, GREY, DISPLAYSURF, Volume, Brightness, fpsClock, FPS)
    elif Run == 'LevelMenu':
        ROIM_LevelMenu.RunLevelMenu(FONT, ChangeRun, GREEN, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, WHITE, BLACK, GREY, DISPLAYSURF, Volume, Brightness, fpsClock, FPS)
    elif Run == 'Introduction':
        ROIM_GameIntroduction.RunIntro(FONT, ChangeRun, GREEN, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, WHITE, BLACK, GREY, DISPLAYSURF, Volume, Brightness, fpsClock, FPS)
    elif Run == 'Setup':
        SetupController.Run_Controller_Setup(FONT, ChangeRun, GREEN, YELLOW, RED, BLUE, WHITE, BLACK, GREY, DISPLAYSURF, Volume, Brightness, fpsClock, FPS)
    else:
        assert False
    # Every program edits the RUN file before finishing
    ChangeRun = False
    RUN = open('RUN.txt')
    assert RUN.readline() == 'RUN\n'
    Run = RUN.readline().split('\n')[0]
    RUN.close()

The game runs fine, but not in fullscreen mode. DISPLAYSURF is not edited in the programs. Which means that I do not call pygame.display.set_mode(). I use windows 8 and python 3.4 . Is it because I pass the window object as an argument? I have no clue of what I did wrong.

Answer 1

I found that the problem was the subprograms. In every imported program you have to import pygame, but I thought that I also had to init pygame again, but that is not necessary. I removed pygame.init() in each subprogram and it works perfect now.

Answer 2

You might need some additional flags passed in to the display surface's .set_mode() function. The following works for me on Windows 7:

DISPLAYSURF = pygame.display.set_mode((SCREEN_WIDTH, SCREEN_HEIGHT), FULLSCREEN | HWSURFACE | DOUBLEBUF)