I've been playing with dual monitor for LFS, and obviously having a two inch gap in the middle of your combined screen is hardly ideal.

Now we can move the seat position so the steering wheel is (for example) on the right screen, and the left just shows more of the desh. However the drawn center of the image is still where to two screens meet, i.e. the right screen is the right half of the FOV, and the left screen is the left half. This tbh makes it even more awkward to drive.

What I propose is being able to shift the center of the drawn image to either the left or the right, e.g. 75% right, 25% left (instead of the usual even split) so the right display would display the usual image (if you doubled the FOV), and the left display would just display the rest of the car. E.g. FOV would normally be 35° left, 35° right when in single monitor mode, but would be 35° left, 105° right when in dual monitor mode.

Perhaps I should add some edited screenies to show what I mean.


Edit:
OK, since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a 5000 word essay:

Screeny 1 - normal, single monitor view (FOV at 50°)

Screeny 2 - normal, dual monitor view (FOV at 86°)

Screeny 3 - normal, triple monitor view (FOV at 109°)

Screeny 4 - dual monitor view with in-game camera shifted so steering wheel appears in centre of left hand monitor. This looks great as a screenshot but when driving in game I want to be able to focus on the right hand screen, not at the two inches of beige plastic that seperate the two. I.e. the centre of the image is the middle of the car, not above the wheel.

Screeny 5 - Aha, dual monitor view, but with FOV shifted to be in front of the wheel. As a screenshot, it looks really weird, but it provides an alterantive way to use two monitors without having to concentrate on a bit of plastic. This way the monitor boundary is off to one side, I can concentrate on the left screen, and gain lots more vision on the right hand side.

I cannot try in LFS at the moment, but when you rotate the view a bit in the custom view, doesnt it achieve the effect you want ?

Quote from Bob Smith :

OK, since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a 5000 word essay:

I think you will find the images you supplied are more like a 4999 word essay, come on there is no need to use that extra word of padding, it adds nothing

Yep makes sense to me +1

+1, i start to have this problems...

Your images arent working sir.

And id love to have the steering wheel cam on my left monitor and the other side of the car on the right monitor

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=11487

Surely you can do this with a custom view? Just set custom view on, set the car object to 'ext' and position it with the X,Y and Z sliders. You now have an offset centre position

What is the different between "ext" and "ext2" cameras?

steve - yep, this is basically the same thing you suggested.

becky - no, we can't. If you compare images 4 and 5 you'll see the subtle but all important difference. Image 4 is the best we can managed with the custom view in LFS, image 5 is what I'm suggesting.

Of course my website needs to come back online first, but I've fixed the links so they should load once everything is hunky dory.

Quote from Bob Smith :

becky - no, we can't. If you compare images 4 and 5 you'll see the subtle but all important difference. Image 4 is the best we can managed with the custom view in LFS, image 5 is what I'm suggesting.

Of course my website needs to come back online first, but I've fixed the links so they should load once everything is hunky dory.

Can't see the images yet, but I've tried to get offset dualscreen view too, and I know what you mean. Absolute +1 from me.

Website just came back up...

I can confirm images load again.

BOB, perspective center shift for proper dualview experience has been suggested for year or more now...did it privately. better luck to u.

OK well hopefully it's somewhere on Scawen's list already then.

Just had another thought, another use for this is it enables triple monitor support by running another instance of LFS on another machine and connecting to the server and setting a custom view that shows the rest of the image. Works OK now but nothing will line up properly since the FOV centre would need to be way off the screen on the second PC.

example pic

While we're on the subject of triple montior support, i have a Triplehead2Go and i find that the 120 degree FOV limit is not big enough, it would be better to have say 138/140 degree limit.

138 degrees? That's not going to look natural.

In order for a FOV 138 degree FOV to look natural, even if you're only sitting 0.5m from the screen, the combined screen width would have to be 2.66m! That's the same as 3x 40" widescreen monitors. Somehow I doubt you have that.
Using a higher FOV just distorts the image, which kinda defeats the point of having large displays (or multiple smaller displays).

With my three 22" CRTs (20" visible) and sitting about 60cm from them, I only need 91 degrees if I want to keep thing in proportion. So a 120 degree limit is huge really.

i am now running single monitor again, what i used to do was adjust the monitors picture to move over, so the parts behind the plastic bezel were never shown, but i had problems, in that if i was chasing somebody and they were a little way ahead, i could not actually see there car if i was in the middle of the track, and they would only pop into view if i moved to the side, it caused a few crashes so i went back to single monitor, i would prefer the second monitor to show some kind of pit info or car stats

I've no problems with the gaps between the monitors, I'd rather having it looking a little weird than not being able to see stuff. Peripheral vision is limited as it is.

But an alternate use for the second monitor could also be interesting.