Also funny that in nearly every reply where you say they're not compatible, you advertise your "DeskScapes" software which does basically the same thing.
Seeing as we make them both, we have a lot of control over how they function. Obviously, we can't control how WPE works.
Sean Drohan
Stardock Support Manager
Hey Sean, I am one of the developers of Wallpaper Engine and we're happy to add a workaround for Fences, as it's popular with our existing users and we have received a lot of emails and posts on our forums about this since the release of your update earlier today.
I am somewhat confused as to what you introduced in 3.10 of Fences that broke compatibility with Wallpaper Engine as the apps worked well together until 3.09.
Furthermore, the statements made in your Fences Support FAQ about Wallpaper Engine are also outright false, would you be so kind and remove this wrong statement?
https://forums.stardock.com/486084/fences-support-faq#WallPaperEngine
Wallpaper Engine in specific requires the desktop to be not painted at all outside of the desktop's icon-draw routines.
Wallpaper Engine is below the Fences window and only intuitively requires that the Fences window does not draw the static wallpaper on top of it. Since Fences is expected to be on top of Wallpaper Engine, we don't think that this is unexpected or anything special that Wallpaper Engine is requiring in order to work, like your FAQ makes it sound. Fences merely needs to have a transparent background so the wallpaper of Wallpaper Engine is visible, which seems to have worked fine before.
Wallpaper Engine uses a publicly available method to provide an animated wallpaper which is documented here and used by many similar programs:
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/856020/Draw-Behind-Desktop-Icons-in-Windows-plus
We are happy to add explicit compatibility for Fences if you could provide a public method/trigger/API to make Fences stop painting the wallpaper. But in our opinion would make more sense to make Fences compatible with all other live wallpaper apps by studying the link above (in short, if the icon window is a child window of a WorkerW window and not Progman, then Fences shouldn't draw the static wallpaper over all other windows below it).
Feel free to send me an email via support@wallpaperengine.io or reach out via a private message here for technical details or if you require us to make any changes from our end, though as of right now we consider this an issue introduced in Fences 3.10 that should be fixed from your end.
