one game... two monitors

[CaebeS]

What I would really like to see in a game interface would be the ability to have a full screen immersive view with minimal clutter on one physical monitor and the rest of the garbage (all the other frames) available on the second physical monitor.

What would be necessary to make this happen? Would some sort of software be needed to make your computer think your two seperate monitors were in fact a single monitor? How would EQII react to this? Would it stretch horribly out of scale?

This is something that i'm very interested in accomplishing and I would appreciate getting a good discussion going on this.

Thanks much

Wes

[darkafflict]

Me 2.

I have one good monitor and one so so. The good monitor I currently have the game on and the other I use for internet maps and such. Would just be great to have all the spell buttons, chat text and the map mod running constantly on the second monitor.

[CaebeS]

Wouldn't this be easier if say there was one executable for the game and a separate executable for the UI? Then it seems like it would be a pretty easy thing to be able to use a two monitor solution.

[sardiaxx]

i have two monitors and honestly never thought of it, i wouldn't even think about touching the executable, not gonna happen. might be feasible if we can have the letterbox vertical instead of horizontal, but don't know if that can be done.

[Hellwulf]

when you run dual moniters, in most cases your just making desktop larger, so the only way to do what your saying is to have a third party program that reads and extracts the ui info from a running EQ2 program and displays it...

so yea you would need a second program, that you would shift to the ****ty screen

[CaebeS]

I guess what i'm saying is, I wonder how difficult it would be to convince SOE to make a seperate executable for the UI... -OR- essentially make it such that each 'frame' would be its own executable, thereby letting you put anything anywhere you wanted.

I just really thought it would be cool for modders - you'd finally get some real, realestate to take advantage of... think of the possibilities with maps etc.

I can't think of anything bad, packet wise, that would have to be touched, you'd just need an instance prototype base that would be setup to be able to read data from EQ and input commands. Same thing that happens now except that instead of EQgame.exe calling them as individual xml files, they'd be executables with the particulars of each frame stacked on top of them.

call me crazy, but i've had a dream since 1985 (with an apple IIe) to be able to have a game setup like that.. commands/toolbars on one monitor and your immersive graphics on the other.

I definately appreciate all the feedback though

[hirebrand]

Why two executables? Just set your resolution to 2048x768 or whatever, do full screen, and move the UI windows to the other monitor. Worked in SWG (but very laggy) I know that.

[Khrag]

Hello all, I am by no means an expert on the subject, but, it shouldn't be to hard for SOE to make this possible. I don't know if any of you were in the "WISH" beta or not. But you could do this in wish, was actually quite nice.

[Skife]

this would be bad as all get out. im gonna try this now on two monitors and see what i can do. one is CRT the other is lcd so not quite sure but ill see what i can do with the idea. this would be bad ass

EDIT:
ok i have been playing with display settings. i have two monitors hooked up to my geforce6800 ultra and both images look very sharp and clear. i tried all the different configs that i could think of.

clone: obvious but makes both screens the same. very wiered to watch but wont be able to accomplish the task

horizontal split(left/right split): this worked ok but wired as heck. your character was right in the middle of the screen and split in two. imagine left eye right eye type of view. this way you can moove all of your hotbars and so forth to either side and resize then and configure to fill the hole left or right screen. this works great except for only getting half of your view and your perspective being way off. it feels as if you are walking sideways when you are walking straight.


vertical split(top/bottom split): this also worked well to a degree. it worked best if you used first person view. using this view also skewed your vision a bit as well. imageing this. the top half is eye level and up and the bottom half is eye level and down. this worked the best in my opinion. with this mode you are able to set all of your windows to either the bottom or top and depending on where you place your monitor left or right.
i had the top view on the left and bottom view on the right. it is a little difficult getting used to moving the mouse down or up to get to the other monitor though.

BTW this was all in windowed mode set to maximize

in my opinion this would be the best idea if there was a way to limit the stretching of the POV but still have the active game window maximized.


post your feed back and ideas


EDIT:

OK some new nfo. i decided to tweak around with the side by side view and see what i could come up with good layout and decent perspective.

so here is a screen shot.
it is in windowed mode @ 2560x1024
the left 2/3 are my main view with hotbars and other combat needed info

the right 1/3 is chat journal map and experience

this leaves the right half of the right window free to open a webpage or walk through of some sorts.

this does make the view a little wiered in the main window but you will get used to it

[hirebrand]

There used to be a sticky post that told how to set your widescreen bars to only cover the bottom or top of the screen, search for that. That will change your P.O.V.

[CaebeS]

Skife, that looks pretty nice. I'm really glad that other people thought this was an interesting idea (i had been talking to a friend of mine about it yesterday and he pretty much blasted me about it)

Once again, Thanks to everyone who is contributing to what i think is a pretty interesting idea.