Just putting this up in here. If mods want to move it to the public forum later that's their choice. I've been playing the black ops mod for supcom:FA as i've seen the link in this forum, and it kindled my interest. I haven't tried really any mods for supcom but this is beyond the scope of this question. On my pc I have a 1920x1080 monitor, and a 1280x1024 monitor. I can use both of them! The square monitor becomes my map screen, and the rectangular one my focus screen. It's not totally essential. I find 90% of the time I'm looking at the big screen, but probably based on years of only having a single monitor. Was it hard to implement this in supcom? If so, why so, would the lessons learned there make it easier here?
You really should check out the Sticky threads in the General Discussion SubForum, in Particular the Confirmed Feature List and Topic Index. Mike
I don't mean to be rude, but how have you missed the massive emphasis Uber have been placing on multiple monitors and multiple windows for this? I only have a single monitor so I've been sat here getting envious and contemplating buying a couple more.
This is a more interesting question. I believe neutrino has touched on this topic here and there in the forums and live streams, but my understanding is multimonitor support was a huge pain for SupCom. Video cards, drivers, and graphics APIs have come a long way since then and many of the issues that had to be overcome to support multiple monitors don't exist anymore. Maybe neutrino will talk about it publicly some more some time because I do think it's an interesting story.
There are a couple of challenges. The first one was simply getting it working. At the time it used a not well supported driver path that was kind of whacky. The second challenge is making sure the UI etc. can actually work correctly with multiple windows. That's still a challenge for us.
If you get it working seamlessly then you'll probably force me into getting a second Monitor... ... No rush guys
I would have bought it sooner had I the money, but yeah. Found out Mavor had worked on TA as well as Supcom, and that he even made Radix, which back in the day I really enjoyed. Based on his previous track record of the people involved in this, I knew it was a safe bet that this game is fun, and worth £30 (or however much $40 is). It's interesting playing supcom with dual monitors. The primary one has the UI, and when you focus on it that's where sounds come from. The secondary has basic UI, mouse pointer turns to windows default, and if you zoom in with it, there's no sounds. Overall I wish more games could implement some multi monitor support. I'll just mention planetside 2, as it's one I'm currently playing, and having the map screen on another monitor would be lovely. But that's a seperate gripe, beyond the scope of this thread, just things that I am grateful for.
I'm sure many of us alpha/beta backers have multiple monitors so we'll make it work in time :mrgreen: It really does seem a bit strange making it work properly. Would be good to have the ability to choose what you want to put on each screen, to organize your priorities and screen but then again when you record it it should be the same for everyone. Customizable UI can really confuse people when they watch videos from several different people.
Ive got 2 monitors, and was hoping to use them to great effect! Given that the UI is probably going to be the easiest thing to mod (as its basically a webpage) I would have thought there would be mods which are targetted at smaller window size - windows being mentioned by Mavor re: the Chrono cam death replay stuff. My real interest has always been in the more epic games, rather than the fast and furious ones, so having 1 window per planet/asteroid you control, if its a really big solar system seems like an obvious use for an extended desktop with multiple windows, though too many may start taxing the GPU a bit too much, unless Uber build in some kind of auto quality setting or frame rate reduction. Mike
As an alpha access backer with dual screens I look forward to testing multiple monitor support. Actually I am rather worried that my rig won't be powerful enough to do PA justice with piles of windows open across both monitors. (Phenom II x4 965 w/ 2x Radeon 5770's in crossfire and 8 gigs of ram) I am considering upgrading to a Core i5 4670 and a GTX 660 sometime later this year depending on how PA runs on my current machine.
I really hope it will be possible to configure the setup far better than in FA. SupCom was the first (and only) game where I ever used 2 screens to play, but the implementation was problematic. It worked only full screen and only with exactly 2 screens. I now have 3 screens, which results in FA not working in dual-screen mode anymore. It seems the game just cannot decide which screen to use and it cannot be configured afaik. Always disabling my 3rd screen to play FA kinda defeats the purpose of my 3rd screen. PA will need options for this, preferably it should just use all 3 screens with a windowed fullscreen-mode. I wonder if my brain will actually be able to deal with input from 3 screens.^^ When playing dualscreen and after alt-tabbing FA still has a chance of ending up with a black screen while the sim continues to run just fine. Even after I upgraded my whole computer it still occurred. It only happens in maybe 1 out of 50 games or so, but it still is part of the reason I stopped playing dualscreen. So I really hope the situation has improved tech-wise.
To be honest, at least I don't mind having to play the game in Full Screen to be able to utilize both monitors. Another game which would have greatly needed this was Sins of a solar empire.
I had this weird issue with Supcom the other day. Just bought a pair of Samsung SA850T 27" monitors, and yet for some reason Supcom absolutely refuses to play full screen on the the 2560x1440 resolution, let alone play on two of them. Kind of hoping that won't be an issue with PA - I'll certainly be testing it in the alpha!
