I made several experiment of multiscreen renderind , widescreen , 3dstereo -
Now lfs supports dualscreen stretch and dualscreen stereo 3d.(nVida cards of course)
In the first case its uses constant fow and acts 2 displaus like 1 big display.
To use more than 2 displays or 2 display with differren angle and fow u have to use another pc and connetc it though network , choose spectator and configure view. It works quite good - but in fast moving pictures u can notice the 2 pc sometimes have lags and bad syncronisation.



I suggest to make LFS command line parameter and improve protocols that will connect it to specific localhost as a render (through udp maybee) locked on a specific viev - only reciving packets at fastest possible (configurable) rate.


Also receive the view direction (optional) from the host for trackir support.

Examles of apllication -

1(i'm trying to imlent) dualprojector system where the first display is redered with lesser fow and second with bigger -and project them on one screen - first generates clear central picture - second - not-so clear huge wide viev

2. surrounding yourself with monitors

Have you seen this?

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=5504

yes - i 've seen it -but it renders wide view from one point - u cannot put one monitor in front of you and one left side one right side -they have to be in line to make normal picture. I sugessted to use 2 machines or more to render many monitors with fov and angle u want to set

Quote from bez_bashni :

yes - i 've seen it -but it renders wide view from one point - u cannot put one monitor in front of you and one left side one right side -they have to be in line to make normal picture. I sugessted to use 2 machines or more to render many monitors with fov and angle u want to set

Scawen has already indicated that doing a similar thing to MS Flight Sim, which can render seperate "windows" is way too much effort as it will require rewriting the entire LFS graphics engine...

Quote from Scawen :

LFS supports multi screen using a single "surface" as excellently provided by Matrox Parhelia graphcs cards.

It does not support multi-screen with multiple video cards. This is hard to program, and is a bad idea for every single game manufacturer to have to do this individually, when a video card manufacturer can do this in its drivers and hardware, so solving it for all games at once.

U can use seperate pc's to render separate windows-that is what i'm talking about - somone used it to start LFS on 4 monitors - and i want to work this method better...

Which to do natively in LFS would require rendering to seperate windows like MS Flight Sim and Scawen has ruled that out for now... the method that other guy used can work but is no good for online multiplayer as you would need multiple accounts logged onto a server which isn't practicale...

I debated this with Scawen sometime ago. It is definitely something that a Sim of this caliber needs and would cement it as the de facto Car Racing sim, setting it a part from others.

Unfortunately we don't know the exact client server protocol, but I suggested adding a proxy function to the connected client and then launching second/third copies of LFS.EXE (on other hosts even) with command line arguments to connect the proxy. Additional arguments to specify the window position and view angle/fov would be sufficient. Any other configuration could be driven via the proxy protocol.

It wouldn't be trivial to add, but it would be simpler than writing a dedicated spectator app as it would be in the same LFS.EXE code base.

While I appreciate the Parhelia exists, it's an old card and isn't up to the task IMO (20fps max). Matrox does have another offering on the horizon that can help us to a degree to get true multi-monitor displays, but the above is probably the most flexible and best way to get a vendor neutral solution. The Matrox Triplehead2go is VGA only and very low refresh rate, not to mention to the fixed positioning.

I hope Scawen gives this more consideration, but until then I guess we'll have to wait for the Matrox triplehead2go to arrive. http://www.matrox.com/graphics/offhome/gxm.cfm

If Scawen cares to comment on the exact reason against the above, I think many of us would be happy to rest our case until other higher priority features are implemented.

Rob

7 months later, this is just becoming more of a want for folks. To be able to set two laptops on each side of me and have them just be clients to my local machine on the network getting car/track/position , FOV settings and rednering their view, controlled by my local "center" view would be a great thing.