Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

Option to use your second screen in game

    • 11 posts
    May 29, 2016 9:27 AM PDT

    One thing I haven't seen an MMO do, is give players an option to use one of their extra screens for in game windows (like your chat spam windows, inventory screen, bags, map, task/quest window, skills screen, spell book, extra hotbars ect). I know Pantheon isn't using a map, but I think it would be cool to have the option to utilize one of your extra screens to remove clutter from your main screen you adventure on.

    I have attempted to do this myself in games by making the resolution big enough to cover both screens, or even just part of my second screen, but then it throws your character off center and makes things wackey.

    • 793 posts
    May 29, 2016 9:31 AM PDT

    EQ used to have a viewport. It was essentially your play window sized, leaving blank space around for your UI components, which would then not overlap your play area.

    I don't thing you could offset it to one side or anything, it had to be top center but it was very handy.

     

    • 11 posts
    May 29, 2016 9:37 AM PDT

    Wow, this will should work for exactly what I want in EQ.. How did I not know about this? Hope to see it in Pantheon

    • 1468 posts
    May 29, 2016 5:03 PM PDT

    Makes said:

    One thing I haven't seen an MMO do, is give players an option to use one of their extra screens for in game windows (like your chat spam windows, inventory screen, bags, map, task/quest window, skills screen, spell book, extra hotbars ect). I know Pantheon isn't using a map, but I think it would be cool to have the option to utilize one of your extra screens to remove clutter from your main screen you adventure on.

    I have attempted to do this myself in games by making the resolution big enough to cover both screens, or even just part of my second screen, but then it throws your character off center and makes things wackey.

    I agree that would be really cool. One thing though is that I have two different monitors at different resolutions. The primary one is 1440p and the secondary one is 1200p. So the game would need to support using two monitors with different resolutions to be useful for me. I can't just change the resolution in-game to have it scale across both monitors as one is 16:9 and the other is 16:10 so that wouldn't work.

    If they did support this though it would be an excellent feature. I think more and more people are using multi monitor configurations these days.

    • 11 posts
    May 30, 2016 12:05 AM PDT

    I just set up viewport on P99 with 2 monitors with 2 different resolutions and it works great.

    • 1468 posts
    May 30, 2016 12:54 AM PDT

    Makes said:

    I just set up viewport on P99 with 2 monitors with 2 different resolutions and it works great.

    Ah, cool. Well if that worked in Pantheon that would be great.

    • 84 posts
    June 2, 2016 8:10 PM PDT

    I would love to see such a feature.

    • 363 posts
    June 3, 2016 3:39 PM PDT

    Remember when a 2nd screen was a luxury? Wow, how times have changed!

     

    Anyways, it would be a cool feature to implement, as long as it doesn't delay the release of the game.

    • 83 posts
    June 3, 2016 3:51 PM PDT

    Well, viewport does exactly this as others have noted.   In reality all you need to do is have the game support widescreen.   If you must have the side screen black, and you are running with 2 displays, then a viewport feature would pretty much be required (otherwise you'd have the game split between two displays).


    When running triple display you can simply run the game across all three and move the UI windows where you want them to be but still within the game window.  Since your game is rendering at widescreen you aren't losing anything.   

    I do hope that the game will support Nvidia's multi-projection system for widescreen gaming with proper fov... distorted side displays suck ;)

    • VR Staff
    • 587 posts
    June 3, 2016 5:46 PM PDT

    This is a great question and I'd love to see us support multiple screens.  That said, I need to ask our CTO/Lead Programmer because I really don't know the answer -- I don't know if Unity supports it and how much we could use tech like Nvidia's.  I'll get back to you guys.

    • 83 posts
    June 3, 2016 8:56 PM PDT

    Great to hear your position on it Brad.  The Nvidia tech is new to the Pascal based cards (currently the 1080/1070) and essentially allow for rendering a scene from multiple viewports (up to 16 but 3 would be used for 3 displays) so that each screen has an undistorted display.  The "simultaneous multi-projection" tech does this in one pass instead of a separate rendering for each viewport... so there's no extra performance hit.  In the past this wasn't really possible because 3 camera views would each need to render separately.   Just some background... since I'm really excited about the capability :)

    Here's to hoping Pantheon will support it!