Enhanced Multi-monitor support

[hozzdutch]

This is a difficult one to explain, so I'm drawn some pictures to help explain it.
So at the moment we can have the game spread over 3 monitors using spanning. It gives a superwide view but everything on the sides are stretched out and looks a bit nasty.

With a single monitor we see this -



The black line is the cockpit, the blue line is your monitor, the dotted red line is the viewing area, the camera is at the bottom.

When using 3 monitors, the view area is widened like this -



The two side monitors image gets distorted as the view is very wide.

My suggestion is enhance multimonitor so instead of one view, it's actually 3 views and gives the player the impression of actually being in the cockpit a bit more. Do this by making each monitor a seperate camera looking a different direction -



Camera A is displayed on monitor 3, camera B is displayed on monitor 2 and Camera 3 is displayed on monitor 1. Because a different view is being displayed in each monitor, there would be no stretching occurring that is seen with very wide angled views.
The 3 cameras are joined together so if the players in game 'head' is moved, all 3 camera move together.

In the game options we can currently only select one resolution. If a player is using multi monitors, then each monitor will be displayed, a resolution is selected for each and the game works out camera positioning so that each monitor is then aligned to the next

 

[Malic]

IRacing does this, the *proper* way to do three screen, a lot of other games that say they have "triple screen support" is not done correctly. The rendering of three views is the only correct way to do it, but in this game would need a really good computer because you are asking it to make three separate views.

99% of games calculate the FOV as if all three screens are on the same plane, so as soon as the side screens are angled, it causes the stretching on the side screens.

if you take a standard game and stretch it, the farther on the side screens, the more it is stretched.. this leads to things appearing to be massive, covering 1/4 of the side screen , but then you turn to look at them and they are tiny, because of the FOV.

Because a proper triple screen set up has three separate planes of view, it needs three proper views rendered.

I use an Oculus Rift in elite, but had a triple screen set up in the past for games so I am fully aware of this stretching issue on games... if they want to do it right for triple screen users then they need to do this, but just know, the rift makes it require 2 images to be rendered , one for each eye and that is a hit in performance.. this will need three images rendered...

 

[hozzdutch]

I've just bought myself a AMD r9 295x2. I think I can manage the 3 screens without too much problem :-D

 

[Psycho Romeo]

This reeks of sound logic.

 

[Ben1ss1m0]

I would like to bump to this thread as another triple-screen-maniac Also I would like to request a new feature to go with this, namely an ability to define the angle and the spacing between the 3 views to match our physical locations of our monitors and their bezel widths.

 

[trollson]

I thoroughly support this suggestion.

Each screen should have its own normal vector and field of view.

Frankly, this applies to any game trying to present a 3D world.

 

[Magic Man]

Nice idea but a very niche market. Would be difficult to justify the development work required for the amount of user gain it would get.

 

[who?]

(slightly OT) I have a bay-window with white black-out curtains, and it just occurred to me looking at those images that it's the perfect setup for projection of a ED cockpit. Except with the modified layout that the OP is requesting, I'd probably need 3 distinct projectors which starts to get a bit expensive...

 

[Ben1ss1m0]

Surely FD could contact the rFactor team to ask about how they did it can't they? The performance hit is barely noticeable but the effect, oh my, simply awesome...

 

[walac]

If you have any amount of monitors then you can already do this with the eyefinity group tool in the AMD catalyst control centre. If you have a AMD machine (basicly it just creates a group so that all your monitors are like 1 big monitor all together)

 

[Ben1ss1m0]

If you have any amount of monitors then you can already do this with the eyefinity group tool in the AMD catalyst control centre. If you have a AMD machine (basicly it just creates a group so that all your monitors are like 1 big monitor all together)

I don't think we're on the same page here mate
We can already span our view across all monitors with a resolution of about 5800x1080 (dependant on bezel widths) however that creates a lot of zooming/stretching on the far sides and gets even worse if you rotate the monitors in an arc towards you like in the photo OP posted. What we want is a view of 1920x1080 times 3 sent separately to each monitor and each having its own POV so instead of one super wide view we get 3 normal views angled the way we want them This cannot be done from third party programs, it has to come from the game engine and most likely we will need to disable Eyefinity/Surround for it to work so that windows gives the game 3 monitors instead of "one".

 

[Magic Man]

Issue with that is that then you're rendering three separate view rather than just one over a larger resolution.

What you ideally want is a client/server approach with separate PC's running the side monitors and a client renderer that just produces the side views. You'd also need ED to support multi-viewports.

Flight Simulator did all this years ago along with third party apps, Shame multi-monitor/viewport support has never really been supported by anything much since.

 

[Jahn Ntago]

Oh yes please

Independent Nx monitor view support in a game as beautiful as Elite would be amazing.

To add further to the wishlist, the ability to change the physical location of the screen "centre" to avoid monitor borders would also be awesome. For example, an even number of monitors will have the viewport "centre" at the boundary between at least two monitors. Being able to shift the "centre" vertically/horizontally a couple of hundred pixels would let your viewport "centre" avoid the join.

 

[Cmdr Bolamshea]

This is an older thread, but damn. This is a great idea.
I'm rocking 3 monitors and would love this. The distortion at the sides of monitors when in 5960x1080 is awful.
For those who haven't seen it, I made this wonderful video demonstrating the problem
[video=youtube;2L09HsD0du4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L09HsD0du4[/video]
or a simple screenshot -

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've never seen a sun that's this shape before!