Multiple Monitor Advantage

Does this worry anyone? Will multiple monitors be mandatory for competitive play?

Previous Games
Supcomm and Spring both have dual monitor support and there is no great divide between dual and single screen players. I think there are a few reasons:

• Previous dual screen support amounted to a very large minimap. PA will feature arbitrary viewports
• Other games had a fully functional minimap. See the minimap threads for how hard it would be to make a minimap for PA.
• Strategic zoom allowed players to see absolutely everything with a quick zoom action. With multiple planets (each in possession of a backside) it will be impossible to see everything with one view.
• Map awareness is always important.

I don't know whether multiple viewports will be an important part of playing PA. But there are a lot of changes in map awareness tools since previous games so it is reasonable to assume that they will be important.

What do we do?
Firstly I like this feature. In many cases the number of screens a player owns will not matter. I would like to use multiple screens all the time. But it could also be unfair. There are people here who are against personal UI mods, screen count is a pretty big personal mod with a much larger barrier to entry.

I don't know what to think about this and it seems to be an overlooked issue. If it is an issue I don't see a perfect solution, limiting competitive play to a single screen wastes potential and I think it is unreasonable to tell people to buy extra screens.

A person with multiple screens has as much ability to actually PAY ATTENTION to those screens as someone with one screen and multiple "Viewports".

They get a higher resolution for those Viewports, but that inherently doesn't make them a better player.

Player Awareness across multiple Viewports, whether displayed in a single monitor or on many monitors is what counts, not how many you can display.

In SupCom I'm concentrating so hard on my first monitor I find it impossible to glance at my second monitor. The speed of strategic zoom in supcom means it isn't really necessary to have 2 screens to be competitive. This may be different with the sheer amount of things you need to view in PA.

I disagree based on the evidence you, yourself provided. You concentrate on one monitor at a time. Having two merely means you need one less hotkeyed camera positions.

For each monitor you add you need one less saved camera position... but you still need to change your focus and move your head instead of your fingers.

Well I find it quicker and less awkward to zoom out and back in than look at my second monitor. In PA I imagine this will not really be the case. I'm not sure what in particular you are disagreeing on.

It might be important to note that for casting/esports the game will have to be adequate on a single screen.

Maybe disagree was too strong a word. I merely posit that multiple monitors won't be at a distinct advantage over a single screen setup, mostly due to humans lacking the ability to focus their eyes on two (or more) screens at once.

Maybe if we were descended from chameleons there'd be a problem, but as it stands;

Everything that Multiple Monitors can do, hotkeyed camera positions and "Viewports" can do.

There's a loss in the size of viewports of course, but I doubt ANYONE could open enough Viewports and pay equal attention to each of them, for it to be an issue

I think we're fairly close in agreement then

I'm pretty sure I can train myself to use dual monitors effectively but I don't think this will give me a significant advantage over a single screen setup.

I find 2 monitors very convenient. When I am zoomed in on a situation in SupCom I can at the same time look on the other screen and prepare to switch to another scene in necessary without wasting time and confusing people with zooming in and out.

Still getting used to it though.

But as for basic gameplay I think it won't make a big difference in PA.

Well, multi monitor support COULD be useful if the game would support multiple sets of keyboards and mice. This should be no problem at all, at least not in the Linux world. (Yes, there ARE games for Linux with multi cursor support for split screen mode!)
Wanna play a two headed game? Up to 4 players on the SAME PC should be no problem at all.

Apart from this, a side monitor can indeed be useful. Not when used like the regular main monitor, but with even more subdivisions so you have just many small tiles and each one shows another location or unit selection you want to monitor. When you see movement in one specific tile, you can swap that location with your main screen and take the initiative.

This does offer an huge advantage as it improves the situation awareness, but it SHOULD be possible to help players with a single monitor to catch up by providing a smart notification system. It won't be as powerful as the ability to monitor all the locations directly, but it should help.

I played SupCom:FA dualscreen for years and had to go back to single screen after I added a 3rd screen, which breaks dualscreen for FA for technical reasons. Playing with one screen again I had to reenable the minimap at low zoomlevel. I felt so blind while zoomed in, cause I am very used to always seeing the minimap. But I doubt it was a huge advantage, if there is an advantage at all. It felt better to me, though.

I do think that there will be an advantage in PA if Uber does not find any solution to the "overview over multiple whole planets"-problem. Even though it is hard to focus on 3 screens it definitely is easier than to constantly jump around between multiple cameras. If 3 screens would really be "too much" for humans to process nobody would use them. But I can tell from working that 3 screens are epic to get everything in view without zooming/tabbing. A player with 3 screens and maybe 4 or 5 viewports on them will be able to sit in front of them and see everything by just looking at the screens. A player with only one viewport will have to zoom around constantly just to get an overview.

If this were true nobody would ever use multiple screens. But many people do. Using tabs is inferior to having multiple viewports.

I am not sure how big the difference will be.
Worst case it will be as big as the difference between the view you get in Starcraft2 compared to the view you get in FA. Jumping around between camers in SC2 is possible, but definitely harder than using the zoom in FA.

Will the alpha actually support multiple screens?

EDIT:
Another pretty good example why multiple screens will be > single screen.
Why do you think these people use this kind of setup:

and not just one screen?

Not currently in, so no.

IDK, I mean, you can have multiple screens at once in PA, like multiple monitors but within the same monitor. This gives you a flexible minimap you can stick on the corner, AND/OR one could have tons of hotkeyed viewpoints where the task of turning their head to see another monitor is DIRECTLY REPLACED with pressing one key to "turn your head to see" and pressing another to "turn it back".

Just to toss the idea out, there should be a universal key to "undo" a viewport hotkey. That way, you can quickly peek at an area and then use the same key each time to turn your attention back to what you were focusing on mainly in the first place.

Better hardware is an advantage in video games. Nothing you can do there. Nature of the beast, can't be changed and all that.

I have four monitors, so I feel obligated to do exactly that kind of setup in the picture.
Perhaps when I get another card I can move to eight monitors

Multiple people. There are 3 just in that picture alone.

Now, you can have macros, multiple people playing with the same keyboard in-game, a wall of monitors, even seriously-overprogrammed in-game hacks and cheats... but none of this will really be a "thing" to the general game and most it's players.

I would love multi screens, this doesnt worry me on competition though.
In supcom when I had multi screen activated I would get confused often. It was nice to glance over to it but I instinctively used the regular map anyways. Reallly in the end it just looked cool when my friends came over.

I think most people will use the multi-monitor setup by using one fullscreen as a main viewport, and the other as a sort of cctv hub. 4 or 8 viewports tracking units, the commander, various bases, armies, etc. That's how I'd use it. I don't think many people would have the focus to use all ports as main ports. I expect I'd use just the one to issue orders, and the rest to keep tabs on things.

Perhaps this could be a feature though, clicking on a smaller viewport could switch your main view with it? I'd find that useful.

Like the picture-in-picture feature they want to implement with the replay system.
Wait. wow jsut thought of that, replay system on your alternate screen????????
One eye on the now, another on the past. A customizable alternate monitor would be great.
Really build your own personal command centre.

Any serious player will invest in their setup to get any advantage.
It's not a very high barrier to entry - decent new monitors here in Spain cost less than a mid-range GPU - 24" Samsung with a 2ms refresh are about 130 ish Euro currently.

The chroma-cam/separate windows feature is pretty exciting - and allows a lot more than spreading your game desktop over multiple screens - in-theory you can also open windows to your current session on any tablets & Smart-TV's (TV's capable of displaying web pages/content) you have laying about.

As windows also have browser hooks (webkit) for UI controls - you should also be able to control game-play on these devices

I don't have multiple monitors but I play on a 128in Epson projector, it would be pretty cool to make a bunch of view ports in the main screen. :lol: