Heya guys, Just a quick comment on dual monitors. I thought this was something first introduced to me via Sup Com, I felt it was quite revolutionary for the RTS genre. I ran a quick search and I saw "dual monitors" pop up a number of times, but nothing concrete or solid whether it's even on the dev's radar or not. I'm not a programmer so I really have no clue if it's a nightmare to implement on the back-end or not. But from the end-user perspective, I think it would be safe to say that most of us here and most of us supporting this kickstarter project are running at least dual 1080p monitors (if not more). I have a feeling that everybody is wanting a strategic (read: no starcraft-style micro) game. We want to be able to know everything that's going on in our theater of operations with a single glance and execute complex maneuvers with fairly intuitive gestures. Keeping an eye on 2 places on the battlefield at once and being able to manage econ as well as the forward push to me makes perfect sense. I'm just wondering if I'm the only one who would like to see multi-monitor support for this game? Not to stick a pin in the passion of the devs, but I'd honestly rather see a next-gen GUI and very well thought out multi-monitor support before a large-scale metagame. Where does everybody stand on this? Or am I the only one with this on their radar?
Uber said in that interview that the game will support up to 'infinite' number of windows/screens, depending on your hardware power.
Neutrino has already confirmed (more than once) that PA will support multiple windows. Each window can be on any monitor you like, at any zoom level you like, viewing any part of the map you like. In short, PA will have a generalised and enhanced version of the supcom multimon support.
That reminds me of a ridiculous question: How about using two machines, for the same session? Then connect their mouse and keyboard over LAN via Synergy?
One thing SupCom forgot to do for its split screen function: keyboard control toggle. Only the left half of the screen/left monitor would receive keyboard camera movement. Don't forget that, please!
I am humbled by this. Looks like both the devs and community are way ahead of me on this. Sounds like things are going ahead for something way more scalable than I ever dare dream! :shock: Congrats on the successful kickstarter.
A less extreme solution would be to allow players to sign in additional 'observer only' accounts (which can only see what their main account can see) with the same username/password as their main. Lots of people own laptops as a second computer that, while not powerful enough to run the game acceptably, would be capable of running a 'bare bones' version of the game as a minimap. If all the simulation is being done server-side, you're not giving orders, and your graphics are set to 'icons only', there's not much the observer client has to actually do. While a legitimate way of multiboxing would be nice (and allow for shared unit coop multiplayer), it's presumably a lot of work, but allowing players to log on additional observers is not (assuming you intend to allow people to observe matches at all).
To my knowledge, PA will already include shared unit coop multiplayer and observing matches. So including multiboxing does not seem to be a technical one. There is an issue with the game's inability to tell if multiple-device-same-team is really one physical person or more, and thus whether it should require multiple accounts or not. Observer-only logins help somewhat but are still a compromise.
