Multiple display rendering
by Casey Weidner · in Torque Game Engine Advanced · 08/27/2006 (10:34 pm) · 9 replies
Hi everyone, im looking at a new project design thats being fleshed out and it requires having multiple monitors displaying the same game. The current manifistation is having a 3 monitor set up, one primary monitor and two secondary.. it would probably require enteracting with 2 video cards im asuming. But the primary obviously is going to be the main game window, but the second two are also going to display the world. Basicly its a cockpit idea.. primary monitor in the center, other two, one on each side at angles as if looking out the side windows.. i want the world to wrap around all three semlessly.. thoughts ideas.. comments...
Casey
Casey
#2
08/28/2006 (10:27 am)
Hrm... interesting idea with the networked pc's.. that may work also.. the full project if me and a guy at work decide to go with it.. would be a Mech type game, but we are looking at building an interactive forcefeed back "cockpit" so to say.. sorta like some of the interactive games you'd see at say gameworks or something to that flavor.. thats why i need 3 monitors.. going to have a ton of other display devices.. lcds and what not ammo .. shields.. engines stats.. but those are all going to run through microcontrollers connected to available USB ports on the pc running the game 
#3
Edit: I've been wanting to do multi-monitors in a seemless way to get proper peripheral vision in 3D games for a long time now, but it's just started to be feasible with newer video hardware and software. If I ever have a bunch of money to blow I'm going to build 3 LCD (17") projectors and set them up like this: /----\ (where each is a projector screen about 70" across) and a Matrox TripleHead2Go with some sort of nVidia SLI setup.
09/05/2006 (5:29 pm)
You could do three separate cameras and a wide FOV probably? And just set the monitors up as one wide display.Edit: I've been wanting to do multi-monitors in a seemless way to get proper peripheral vision in 3D games for a long time now, but it's just started to be feasible with newer video hardware and software. If I ever have a bunch of money to blow I'm going to build 3 LCD (17") projectors and set them up like this: /----\ (where each is a projector screen about 70" across) and a Matrox TripleHead2Go with some sort of nVidia SLI setup.
#4
For fairly obvious reasons it's not a major priority on our end to keep working so I have no idea what it's status is now, but architecturally it can do it. :)
Or the network & render solution works pretty well too especially with LAN pings.
09/05/2006 (9:23 pm)
TSE already has a lot of the groundwork in it to support multiple devices (no idea how happy your drivers are about it). You'd have to muck about a bit but it's way easier than with TGE, and has the benefit of having worked properly at one point in time.For fairly obvious reasons it's not a major priority on our end to keep working so I have no idea what it's status is now, but architecturally it can do it. :)
Or the network & render solution works pretty well too especially with LAN pings.
#5
Sounds great, I'll have to check it out. Need to get lots of extra cash and build some projectors :)
09/05/2006 (9:36 pm)
@BenSounds great, I'll have to check it out. Need to get lots of extra cash and build some projectors :)
#6
Check out WireGL if you're willing to do some experimenting... otherwise just have additional client computers with decent video cards to run your other monitors. It's pretty easy to attach observer cams with a pre-programmed offset to make it look realistic.
09/05/2006 (10:23 pm)
I'd stick with the network solution for now... TSE does support multiple monitors and it's not difficult to get it to work, but you lose the 3d acceleration for everything beyond the primary monitor (at least on the 6 series Nvidia cards and unless I was doing something stupid).Check out WireGL if you're willing to do some experimenting... otherwise just have additional client computers with decent video cards to run your other monitors. It's pretty easy to attach observer cams with a pre-programmed offset to make it look realistic.
#7
09/05/2006 (11:14 pm)
Interesting info every one, thanks for the input!
#8
09/06/2006 (1:05 pm)
You can always use an old PCI card to accelerate the third monitor. Would have to be a pretty old card though, Geforce 3 or so.
#9
09/06/2006 (4:01 pm)
I've actually seen newer video cards on pci.. but they are usually priced much higher than the AGP or PCI-E
Torque 3D Owner Phil Carlisle
But I guess a multi-monitor approach would work too.. more hacking invovled though obviously.