Hi all. I just installed my old video card alongside my shiny new Viper (which isn''t really new since I''ve had it for ten months), and my roommate loaned me a shitty monitor to use (no red channel). Anyway, it''s really sweet having two monitors instead of one, because now I can debug like a banshee. How many of you guys are privileged with multiple monitors? The reason I ask is because I''m thinking of adding multi-mon support in my game engine. That way you could have a monitor dedicated to status while you played the game in the other. No more need for switching screens! Would you consider buying a new monitor and video card if you really liked the game? Video cards seem to sell like water these days, and you can pick up a crappy monitor at any garage sale for super cheap. Take me, for instance: my second adapter is a 3DLabs Perimedia 2 (8MB), and the monitor was free. Just curious.

I thought the refresh was limited to the slower of the two cards? I had two monitors set up like this for development, but always disabled it when I was playing a game because it would slow down to much.

Ut

I personally have 4 monitors running on my coding machine. 1 of them I have open to the platform sdk/debug window, one to my current code, one to DirectX SDK and the other is for getting web research done. The 3 secondary monitors are Pieces of crap, but they serve their purpose well.

Dazz

Ut: This only happens if you use v-sync.

MultiMon presents an interesting design issue. For example, let's say you're making an RPG, and you decide to add support for a second monitor, which will display character info. This is a novelty at best, but some players will find it useful enough to keep both monitors running while they play.

The second display will only need to be updated when character info changes, and even then only parts of it may need to be redrawn. For example, if the character takes damage, only the health region will change. Most of the time, focus will remain on the primary display.

When the player wants to access the status window, he should be able to do so one of two ways: The first is simply to move the mouse cursor to the far left of the primary display. When the program detects "mouse_x = 0" it will know to pause the primary display and switch focus to the secondary.

I can see how this would get annoying (i.e., accidentally sliding the cursor too far left), so players should have the option of toggling this feature. The second method is to provide a button that, when clicked, changes focuses like I just mentioned.

There are dozens of uses for a second monitor. If you have good enough video cards and a fast computer, you could even add multi-player support using two separate monitors, and if you wanted to go all the way, you can split both screens and have two players per monitor. (Only one device would ever have focus at any given time, but that's irrelevant since all screens can be updated at once.)

Anyway, I'm thinking of trying this out with a simple game, like a Bomberman clone or something. Would you guys be interested in checking it out?

Edited by - Tom on January 2, 2001 5:57:15 PM

I''ve got multi-monitor support. The primary is Matrox G400-TV, which runs a VGA monitor (as Primary on a Gateway EV700 and a Television (as Secondary on a Sony WEGA 21 inch TV (M/N KV-20FV10).) I also have a 3dFX V2 1000 card which, with some fancy programming, could be used as a Tertiary display card. By the way, the G400 is not limited to the same frequency for both cards when v-sync is enabled. It was designed that way.

Anyway, I use the G400''s Secondary display primarily for video editting and playing back video. I do sometimes use it to display a second web-page or a document while I''m in another program. What I''d love to see, though, is widescreen (okay, multiscreen) gaming. The most obvious application of this would be in FPS games, where a wider view hihgly benefits the player. I have heard of this being done on PCs before, but only with additional computers running the addidtional cards. I have yet to see multiple monitors on one computer for this. (Hmm, a API wrapper sounds real nice right about now.)