Triple Monitor Support

Panigale9 · Feb 15, 2023

Before everyone starts saying to go with VR, not everyone can use or wants to use VR. I have VR, I've played Elite in VR, but I prefer flat monitor. I do not like wearing the headset and it does not agree with my eyes. I do not find the immersion worth the eye strain or headaches after playing. No amount of "getting used to it" changes my comfort or vision. If VR works for you, great! Keep playing in VR, but VR is simply not for everyone and it is not a blanket all solution.

Triple monitor used to be niche, but as popularity in racing sims and flight sims has increased substantially over the past few years, especially after COVID, its far more common to find a triple monitor setup. There multiple threads across multiple forums requesting help with triple monitor distortion, and numerous requests for Fdev to add triple monitor support to the game. With the increase in sim popularity there are many games that already support triple monitor. Games like American Truck Simulation and MSFS that did not originally have triple support have since added support and the update was very well received.

Please add support for triple monitor. This will bring a new level of immersion for many players, and it will help keep the game current with todays simulation/flight gaming market and player base.

MickyG1982 · Feb 16, 2023

You can actually do it:

Source: https://youtu.be/iBB6XWRj2IA
(there are other videos)

Or by using Nvidia Surround.

Panigale9 · Feb 16, 2023

MickyG1982 said:
You can actually do it:

Source: https://youtu.be/iBB6XWRj2IA
(there are other videos)

Or by using Nvidia Surround.

Both the youtube video option and Nvidia Surround create distortion in your side monitors. Issue is Elite only supports one viewpoint. If you display to three monitors youre literally just stretching that view. Theres no way round this unless Fdev implements true triple support with multiple viewpoints. Everything the game runs on should already support this, it just needs to be added to the game itself.

Ski'Thor · Feb 19, 2023

Same Problem as with my 32:9 setup.
But as far as I red, it isn't that easy to implement propber ultra wide Support...

Markov Chaney · Feb 22, 2023

Ski'Thor said:
Same Problem as with my 32:9 setup.
But as far as I red, it isn't that easy to implement propber ultra wide Support...

Indeed, it's hard to implement and hard to support. As a couple of people commented above it needs "reprojection," because a very high FOV will always distort when projected onto a flat plane (ie your screen.) Even cinema's ~2.39:1 needs either in-camera anamorphic optics or post-processing to fix it. (32:9 is 3.55:1 ! )

Sim racing is a niche where it's well-accepted that the benefits outweigh the expense and difficulty of support, so it's now part of the ecosystem; but in that market people are happy to spend money on a rig and they expect, nay, insist developers to keep up. In the case of iRacing people are even happy to pay a subscription, so that shows you how different the market is.

Whilst E: D is a "space sim" it's also a game and the market is gamers of all kinds. I'm sure 1% of us happen to be sim racers too but it's a tiny fraction of Frontier's addressable market, and VR is available anyway.

Plus, nVidia and AMD do it differently and there is no off-the-shelf framework that supports it well. So it's two vertical implementations to devise and support for a very tiny fraction of Frontier's overall market. The high-end gaming market has looked to address this in hardware with curved screens; the whole idea of these is because your screen<->eye distance is constant where-ever you look it really cuts down distortion. It gives you some fraction of the benefit without adding any load to the rig.

I guess one difference between space sims and racing sims is the nature of the world you're looking at and what important cues you need to take from it; judging distance in planetary space is so heckin' difficult anyway that the slight extra issue because distortion doesn't really register in your mind. By contrast in a motorsport sim the advantage of a three-screen rig is you can judge the distance to the apex on the extreme left down to the foot, which you need to be able to do. Elite requires many kinds of precise flying but it doesn't require that one specifically.

NAKEDnick · Feb 28, 2023

I recently started building out a flight simpit thinking it would be a really fun project, but I keep running into roadblock after roadblock, and then finding that the game is really not great at handling ultra-wide display projection was really disheartening. While I do agree that multi-monitor doesn’t even hold a candle to VR, I find that VR gets to be uncomfortable after some time. My eyes get tired, my neck gets sore, and my face gets hot. Additionally, I was really excited to be building custom button/switch panels. It’s still possible to do so and there are mixed reality programs to utilize the camera pass through, but it’s just not the same.

Additionally, FDev seems to be moving away from supporting VR. You can still do it and it still works in ships, but they seem more interested in dropping support for it.

It would just be really nice to have official support for multiple displays or ultra-wide display viewing for those who want it.

Ski'Thor · Feb 28, 2023

Some people, who are using a tripple projector setup, are using a special tool to overlap the images and they can drag every point of a grid, but it's no option for my use case, because I would need to have a resolution way above 5120px width to "squeeze" the picture in order to get a better FOV...

Markov Chaney · Feb 28, 2023

Why is that not an option? And also, why have I never thought of it?

It's literally how upscaling works already!
Triple 1080 is 5760 already...
The map should stretch at the edge instead of squeeze in the middle anyway, so if you had no extra pixels to play with, you lose fidelity at the extreme edges of the side screens and keep fidelity in the centre. But you don't lose any projected space. If you do it the other way around and squeeze the middle, you're rendering detail then throwing it away, which is stupid. Also, I've just accidentally invented foveation for triple screens.