One question that might not have been asked - sub-displays/monitors

[Cdaragorn]

I asked about multiple displays in another thread.

There are technical reasons why this wouldn't work, but a more important factor is that it would utterly destroy the immersion. Being able to move interactive displays within your cockpit might be nice, provided it made sense within the 3D game environment, but then they couldn't be Windows-windows. Making them Windows-windows and being able to drag them around your desktop would dump you back in the real world in a most unpleasant way.

CBJ is wrong. Plain wrong. Immersion is not provided by displaying a fixed cockpit on a (in my case) 25" monitor with flowery wallpaper behind it. Immersion comes from the gameplay that lets you ignore the flowery stuff, and focus on the game. Moveable windows, no problem if you get the game right.

Immersion comes exactly from the flowery wallpaper behind the gameplay. If this wouldn't be the case, you would be able to "play" any spreadsheet software by calling it a space game.

It's called using your imagination. You can absolutely have an immersive experience from a game in a spreadsheet. Gameplay is the only thing that determines a good immersive experience.

CBJ is completely wrong here. It honestly sounds like the excuse they made back with rebirth for not letting you fly capital ships by telling us it's boring. You don't get to decide for us what we do and don't enjoy. It is a far less immersive experience for me to not be able to pull another window over with extra info that's important to what I'm doing right now.

[Cdaragorn]

I asked about multiple displays in another thread.

There are technical reasons why this wouldn't work, but a more important factor is that it would utterly destroy the immersion. Being able to move interactive displays within your cockpit might be nice, provided it made sense within the 3D game environment, but then they couldn't be Windows-windows. Making them Windows-windows and being able to drag them around your desktop would dump you back in the real world in a most unpleasant way.

That's odd. I thought they were using Vulkan. Assuming they are, there isn't a single technical barrier to doing this. I'd really like to know why he thinks there is.

[Ketraar]

You don't get to decide for us what we do and don't enjoy.

You are wrong here though. A company making any product will have to decide beforehand what "you" will enjoy and what not. The confusion only lies within the notion that "you" stands for you personally and not as an audience composed of many "yous".

My other beef is then with the irony of being in a devs forum, telling them how they should make their game.

Still I dont think that CBJ put much emphasis on the technical part as such and defined it as more of a design choice, which is where the irony can be found of who gets to tell who how the game should be made.

MFG

Ketraar

[patient zero]

There are technical reasons why this wouldn't work, but a more important factor is that it would utterly destroy the immersion. Being able to move interactive displays within your cockpit might be nice, provided it made sense within the 3D game environment, but then they couldn't be Windows-windows. Making them Windows-windows and being able to drag them around your desktop would dump you back in the real world in a most unpleasant way.

That's odd. I thought they were using Vulkan. Assuming they are, there isn't a single technical barrier to doing this. I'd really like to know why he thinks there is.

Windows doesn't allow more than one window to be active, therefor you can't have one window active on one monitor and another window simultaneously active on another monitor. It isn't that MS couldn't do it, they just chose not to.

[RainerPrem]

Windows doesn't allow more than one window to be active, therefor you can't have one window active on one monitor and another window simultaneously active on another monitor. It isn't that MS couldn't do it, they just chose not to.

Hi,

it's a little different.

There can be only one window which has the keyboard focus. This is marked as the active window, so the user can see, where his next keystroke goes to. Today many programs use their own style of decoration, so it is possible to have several equally looking windows. But this is not in the least useful, since only one can have the focus.

cu
Rainer

[jack775544]

Windows doesn't allow more than one window to be active, therefor you can't have one window active on one monitor and another window simultaneously active on another monitor. It isn't that MS couldn't do it, they just chose not to.

Hi,

it's a little different.

There can be only one window which has the keyboard focus. This is marked as the active window, so the user can see, where his next keystroke goes to. Today many programs use their own style of decoration, so it is possible to have several equally looking windows. But this is not in the least useful, since only one can have the focus.

cu
Rainer

This is correct in terms of things that aren't in fullscreen but when it does come to fullscreen that is where things start to become a little funky. There is actually 2 fullscreen modes you can have, fullscreen windowed and exclusive fullscreen.
Fullscreen windowed is basically where the game is running in windowed mode but the application doens't have any borders. In this case having the OS manage secondary monitors would be alright since it is just more of the same.
Trouble starts to happen when you are in exclusive fullscreen, this means that the game completely controls 1 screen (there is no desktop behind it) so there is a much worse transition between game and other programs.

To deal with the issue of exclusive fullscreen the devs would have to enable different behaviour of in game components based on graphics settings which adds a whole layer of complexity onto things. For such a small company this just wouldn't be high priority.

[ajax34i]

Capital ships can have as many screen devices on the bridge as are needed to display all sorts of external views, the map, comm logs, etc. The difficulty is in providing the same views / information when you're in an M3 / small fighter-class ship.

The difficulty is the fact that the player is a special snowflake who progresses from one measly scout ship (or whatever), to the commander of a possibly large fleet, and with an inflated ego to always demand to take personal control of any ship they own, without losing access to data or visual feeds about all their other ships.

One laughable solution could be text-to-speech. As in, you choose to jump into the control chair for that capital ship, fine, the captain stands up and moves out of the way, then stands behind you and recites to you the commentary of what's happening to the rest of your property. You don't get any screens, just a lot of audio commentary.

[Cdaragorn]

You don't get to decide for us what we do and don't enjoy.

You are wrong here though. A company making any product will have to decide beforehand what "you" will enjoy and what not. The confusion only lies within the notion that "you" stands for you personally and not as an audience composed of many "yous".

My other beef is then with the irony of being in a devs forum, telling them how they should make their game.

Still I dont think that CBJ put much emphasis on the technical part as such and defined it as more of a design choice, which is where the irony can be found of who gets to tell who how the game should be made.

MFG

Ketraar

I honestly think you're gleaning meaning from my statement that has nothing to do with what I meant.
Of course they have to make difficult decisions about what they will and won't do in the game. That has nothing to do with my issue with CBJ's statement. If they just stuck to "I'm sorry, but that's just more than we can do with the time/resources we have" that's fine and a perfectly good explanation.
His statement clearly goes far beyond that and tries to tell me personally why I wouldn't enjoy what I think I want anyway. And no, addressing the statement to "everyone" does not make it different than addressing it to an individual. If it is not true of any individual in the entire group then it is simply even more false.
No one as far as I've seen is trying to tell them how the game should be made. We're expressing desire for a feature we think would be awesome. That's fine. There's no irony, you're pretending we're doing something we simply aren't.

[Cdaragorn]

To deal with the issue of exclusive fullscreen the devs would have to enable different behaviour of in game components based on graphics settings which adds a whole layer of complexity onto things. For such a small company this just wouldn't be high priority.

There's no need to go to that kind of complexity to find a solution for this. One could easily just accept the user's choice to use multiple windows when the main one is in exclusive mode. We could easily just be using the other windows for information and have no need to directly interact with them.

Another simple approach would be to not allow multiple windows when the main one is in exclusive mode. Both of these solutions wouldn't require anything other than the graphics settings to even be aware that there are multiple windows.

[brevi]

To be fare I'm not a developer so I don't know how hard it is to implement this feature even if just on a single screen.

But.....

Welcome to 2009 WoW
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/surround ... w/wow8.jpg

And Rift from 2011 (picture is large, I didn't want to post it)
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FoHti-gHu74/maxresdefault.jpg

These are old (ancient?) games that can do what we would like a new game to do.

Full disclosure: WoW does not support that ability natively but UI elements can be moved around with some modding. Rift natively allows you to remove/move UI elements around even on 1 screen.

I understand if Ego doesn't want to do it, but don't make it sound like it's technically impossible.

My humble two cents.


{Images posted directly to the forums should not be greater than 640x480 or 100kb, oversize image now linked - Terre}

[Tomonor]

Regarding question #2: Bernd said no to that in the presentation.
#1 sounds cool but my personal experience would say that since it's not really in Rebirth, it probably won't be in X4.

Additional monitors wasn't part of X2 either and they implemented it in later X titles.

Uhm...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dua ... 759-6.html
[ external image ]

[WildDoktor]

I'm *very* new to the X Universe, but have been playing MS Flight Simulator since it's inception...we're talking *thousands* of hours.

I have four 27" monitors on my desk (3 across, one on top in the middle) specifically to fly Flight Simulator. (Running Windows 10)

MSFS has giving the choice for a long, long time to run full-screen or windowed. In full-screen, you get one screen, on one monitor. Period. In Windowed mode, I can "undock" any window or panel I choose and drag it to any physical monitor I want. Hence the 4 monitors! Overhead panel on the top physical monitor, gauges / throttle / GPS / etc on the right physical monitor, cockpit on the main (bottom middle) monitor, and email, chrome, etc. on the left monitor.

I miss that in X3TC/AP/LU. Running in borderless mode let's me alt+tab to use my cursor in other apps (like chrome, where I always have a universe map in its own tab, along with about 90 other X3 related tabs to figure out what the heck I'm supposed to be doing! ), but of course I can't drag any X3 panels / views to a different physical monitor, where I could keep info handy and "immerse" myself in my main cockpit monitor.

Just my 2 cent's worth, but X4 with multi-monitor display support would rock...and get my money!

[vrod]

What i always wanted to do on X3 and it was not possible is just to send the secondary monitor to another physical monitor, or maybe having the sector map on a second monitor, etc.

THIS!!!

Please oh please please please

Even if the second monitor is only text information!

Just think.. a spreadsheet like grid showing trade prices & availability color coded with trends.

*swoon*

I am able to grab some limited info from X3TC/AP and display on a character display. The info is from an X19 data logging script. Sector name, station name (if docked) your name and credits, ship name and health, and target name and health. The info is updated every second or 2.

I also use "Actual Windows Manager" to grab portions of my display and place them onto another physical monitor. I have my shield/hull indicators and gravitar placed onto (physical) monitor #4, and targets shield/hull and the secondary monitor display (also comms display) onto my (physical) monitor #3.

My primary display is actual triple screens. So gravitar and the comms display is way off to the right. So the mirroring makes it easy to see and adds a cool touch.

[WildDoktor]

I am able to grab some limited info from X3TC/AP and display on a character display. The info is from an X19 data logging script. Sector name, station name (if docked) your name and credits, ship name and health, and target name and health. The info is updated every second or 2.

I also use "Actual Windows Manager" to grab portions of my display and place them onto another physical monitor. I have my shield/hull indicators and gravitar placed onto (physical) monitor #4, and targets shield/hull and the secondary monitor display (also comms display) onto my (physical) monitor #3.

My primary display is actual triple screens. So gravitar and the comms display is way off to the right. So the mirroring makes it easy to see and adds a cool touch.

Wow; "Actual Windows Manager" seems like the ticket...too bad it's so expensive. I'll keep it in mind, though!

[vrod]

I think there is a free trial version to try out for some days.
I paid 30 for the full version.

I was using it in Elite Dangerous, but found it was slowing down my computer at times.

There is no slowdown with X3.

Right now, I am trying to get the gravitar to have a solid black image behind it. It will help it display better. If I can do that, I will try to do the same for the ships' health bars.

I plan on making a video real soon of it in action. I've been bust adding onto the cockpit and configuring Roccat power grid on the tablets.

[vrod]

Here are some pics for now.

Front console: All buttons are programmable with the exception of the 8 lights at the very top of the panel (4 on either side). (notice the right MFD shows the secondary in-game monitor as well as the communications animations, since they appear at the same location on the main screen)



Left MFD: I would like to provide a black background on the portions that were clipped from the main display. Would look so much better on the MFD. (note that I use the MFD graphics for ED as well, so some button commands do not match X3. I can easily graphics for each game, but it is a low priority ATM.))




LCD Character Display and Right MFD: The character display shows game info and changes screens with other data every few seconds. The right MFD shows target health as well as the in-game secondary monitor and comms display. Again, black backgrounds instead of transparent backgrounds would look much better here)

[[FFCW]Urizen]

#jelly

[stormtrooper68]

I use multi-monitors both at home and work. I must agree that this would really be a nice UI to incorporate for options. Even if it's something simple like sector/universe map, or station/ship list.

[vrod]

I tell you, what was once a narrow niche (cockpit builders) is growing.

The more interactivity I can get the better! This is one of the reasons I am STILL playing X3!

Thank you Egosoft for such a really, really, cool game!

[vrod]

Please let me use my displays for X4!!!