[Ferret]

Forgive me if this has been brought up before.

I have two monitors, this basically gives me two desktops, and Windows extends onto the other one to the right.
Now Freespace 2, like pretty much all games, is nice and shoves it on the left screen fine and dandy.

My problem is with input, you see the mouse will fly onto the other screen when FS is in full screen mode if it's pushed that far. If I click, FS will stop and deselect causing me to fly back over to it and select it again.

It's a minor inconvienence as I use a joystick for playing, but now and again like te go back to using a mouse, but playing is really frustrating as the window deselects every three seconds.

Just wondering if there'ld be some way of you guys making FSO take multiple monitors into account and locking the mouse to the dimensions of the screen it's on, most games these days seem to do it.

That is all.
Loves.

[Nuke]

you know what would be cool, on one screen you could have your normal view and on the other have that top-down mode or an external view. or perhaps set it up to span the monitors or the capapility to assine each monitor its own view angle. so if you had 3 monitors you couls arrange them in a 90 degree arc, a virtual cockpit of sorts, and then imput the view angles and fields of view for those monitors in a tbl file (in this case they would have a 30 degree fov each, and would be at -30'0'0, 0'0'0, and 30'0'0 thus giving you a 90 degree field of view rather than the usuall 45). it would greatly improve immersion and would be awesome. have it open ended so you can so full vurtial cockpits and such. that would be awesome.

[Ferret]

X2~ is the only space sim I know of that supports multiple monitors natively, but yeah it would be cool.

[Kaine]

i think having "cockpit" view on one screen, and information on the other would be good, like status of wingmen and a larger radar, mission info & a message log... even a quick-reference key guide. the ultimate would be to have a modular approach where you could customize what views and information were displayed 

[neoterran]

It would kill of graphics card performance to have both monitors displaying the game simultaneously.

[Ferret]

But for those that can afford to do it.......

[WMCoolmon]

You know the nifty thing is that if it were possible to change the rendering target to a different screen, you could easily make a script to render whatever position you chose on a given monitor. Well, I'd have to add one more function, which could take a whole minute. Maybe even two.

[CP5670]

It would kill of graphics card performance to have both monitors displaying the game simultaneously.

FS2 doesn't really stress current gen video cards much at all. It should be quite doable. Although I can't think of anything that would be very useful to display on the other monitor.

Dual monitors are kind of pointless for games IMO. You can't use them effectively as a single, large display since they are split right in the middle of the image. What would be really cool is to use multiple video cards (not SLI or Xfire, just two video cards) and connect three monitors for a surround view setup. You can do this with some flight sim games.

[CP5670]

I don't know what you're on about. There is no reason everyone has to use any new graphical features added in, but if someone can take advantage of them, why not? (unless you're just referring to the work/time it would take to implement them as opposed to doing something veryone could use, which of course makes sense)

In any case, what I meant is that FSO is very easy on video cards in general considering how good it looks. As for AA, I don't think it's been working at all in the last several builds (with OGL), although it may have been fixed since I last tried it.

Also, GRAW's graphics are pretty unimpressive.

[neoterran]

It's been working for me, unless I am crazy, in OpenGL mode. At least it looks Antialiased...

As far as Graw goes.. it doesn't look good to you ? I must disagree there.

[WMCoolmon]

I think that the idea of having one screen dedicated to Dradis or HUD or something similar would be very nifty.

[SadisticSid]

Ferret - most games don't, actually. What you need is a program called UltraMon. In there, you can set up a hotkey to lock the mouse to the current screen or window the cursor is currently on. It's what I use, and it works in every game except StarCraft, for some reason. It also gives you an extended taskbar, multi-wallpaper support, icon saving, and the ability to switch configs at will. </corporate shill>

[Ferret]

Ferret - most games don't, actually. What you need is a program called UltraMon. In there, you can set up a hotkey to lock the mouse to the current screen or window the cursor is currently on. It's what I use, and it works in every game except StarCraft, for some reason. It also gives you an extended taskbar, multi-wallpaper support, icon saving, and the ability to switch configs at will. </corporate shill>

Actually I find that the vast majority do indeed. I shall check out UltraMon anyway, thanks for the suggestion!

Neoterran: Jealous, much? XD

[neoterran]

jealous of overpaying 200 to 300 dollars for a card that is out of date by the time games arrive to use it's features ? Nah, not really. Every single card out today isn't going to be able to run Crysis in Direct X 10 mode where it clearly looks better, so I don't feel bad, at all.

[Ferret]

jealous of overpaying 200 to 300 dollars for a card that is out of date by the time games arrive to use it's features ? Nah, not really. Every single card out today isn't going to be able to run Crysis in Direct X 10 mode where it clearly looks better, so I don't feel bad, at all.

Except it'll end up being the same as Farcry and being crap again.
I'm not a fan of engine advertisements. Farcry is the worst one I've ever played, so I couldn't care less about Crysis.

Also, you're obviously paying too much money for video cards. ;D
Personally I upgrade once every 3-4 or so years and never have any troubles at all, the only reason I upgraded recently is for Oblivion, I also got tremendous speed boosts in FSO and am able to run Quake 4 and the like and stupidly high settings without any slow down.

I still don't understand your complaint against supporting multiple monitors anyway, there are features already in FSO that require some pretty beefy hardware, if you can't support them, it's fine. They're not forced on you, don't use them. If you can't support multiple montiors then is anyone going to force you to use that feature?
Will we break into your dwelling and force a second monitor into your PC? I think not.

Geez.

[neoterran]

no, but i'd like it if someone broke in with a new graphics card, maybe. 

also, 200 to 300 dollars is how much decent high end cards cost. Geforce 7800 AGP for example, would be the only reasonable upgrade, i'm not going to upgrade to a crappy 6600GT at this point, that wouldn't make any sense, and I have no need to upgrade my entire system to 64 bit and all that jazz until stuff actually requires it, and DDR3 becomes mainstream ram (DDR2 is just.... ewww)

[CP5670]

I generally upgrade my stuff at least once a year. The key is to sell your hardware (on ebay or whatever) before it gets outdated. If you play your cards right and choose the right time to sell, you can stay on top of any hardware advances while spending fairly little in the long run.

I just upgraded a bunch of things a few days ago (more of a sidegrade actually; I upgraded back in February too but wasn't satisfied with some of my choices, and I needed parts for another machine anyway) and I may be doing it again around the end of the year.

It's been working for me, unless I am crazy, in OpenGL mode. At least it looks Antialiased...

As far as Graw goes.. it doesn't look good to you ? I must disagree there.

hmm, I need to try it again in that case. The last time I tried forcing it through the drivers, it had no effect.

That game's graphics are decent, but there are better looking games that have been out for a while already, and the fact that AA cannot be used doesn't help.

[neoterran]

Okay, that explains it then.

There are those of us that subscribe to the philosophy that it is nice to buy a top end machine, configure it the best you can at the time you get it, and then let it g ride, letting it gracefully decline into obsolesence, getting comfortable with its quirks and limitations, and enjoying the eventual wow factor of doing it all over again many years later. This is in diametric opposition to the "stay on the bleeding edge at all times" philosophy which requires many hours spent reinstalling and reconfiguring operating systems, drivers, dealing with 1st run boards issues, and the like, including reloading from backup, tweaking. etc.

I've been where you are, so I can understand your mindset, but I'm not there now and happy with it.

So I guess we can leave it at that. I'll probably be upgrading my videocard soon anyway, which makes arguing from my viewpoint somewhat a waste of time. I really just wanted to say that there isn't much point it putting in features that few people can use who would be attracted to the SCP (ie, people with mid range cards)

[Ferret]

Okay, that explains it then.

There are those of us that subscribe to the philosophy that it is nice to buy a top end machine, configure it the best you can at the time you get it, and then let it g ride, letting it gracefully decline into obsolesence, getting comfortable with its quirks and limitations, and enjoying the eventual wow factor of doing it all over again many years later.

This is exactly why I leave it so long usually, going "Holy shiit..." again and again and you crank up the detail settings one by one and watch it keep flying at a great speed is awesome and really makes the buy feel worthwhile.

Buying the latest and greatest just to show off isn't the right way to go, most people with top end PCs don't even need them.

[CP5670]

There are those of us that subscribe to the philosophy that it is nice to buy a top end machine, configure it the best you can at the time you get it, and then let it g ride, letting it gracefully decline into obsolesence, getting comfortable with its quirks and limitations, and enjoying the eventual wow factor of doing it all over again many years later. This is in diametric opposition to the "stay on the bleeding edge at all times" philosophy which requires many hours spent reinstalling and reconfiguring operating systems, drivers, dealing with 1st run boards issues, and the like, including reloading from backup, tweaking. etc.

I've been where you are, so I can understand your mindset, but I'm not there now and happy with it.

That's fair enough. But I never need to spend more than one or two hours with those things during an upgrade. I am actually still running off my original XP install from three years ago. I tend to closely follow any advances in hardware anyway, so I'm generally quite familiar with all the issues with products well before I buy them.

I used to do what you described a few years ago, but in the last year or two I've found that I get much more value for my money by doing things this way. (spending $800 or so every year instead of $3000 every three or four years)

So I guess we can leave it at that. I'll probably be upgrading my videocard soon anyway, which makes arguing from my viewpoint somewhat a waste of time. I really just wanted to say that there isn't much point it putting in features that few people can use who would be attracted to the SCP (ie, people with mid range cards)

Well, I don't think it's accurate to say that only people with old systems play FS2. The people here are obviously not into Freespace primarily for the graphics; despite how good FS2 looks, there are many better alternatives out there in that respect.

I keep upgrading stuff as much for replaying old games at progessively higher settings as for playing new games. In fact, once my stability tests (still in progress) are complete, the first thing I'm going to try is to play Fate of Atlantis through the Basilisk II mac emulator. If that game now works without any stuttering music, it will be awesome. The next thing I'm going to see is if I still get BSODs in FSO and D2X-XL when alt-tabbing. I'm betting that they have something to do with the GF7 cards and will no longer be an issue.