Multi-monitor support

[arthurp]

This is sort of a response to the multi-monitor discussion at the beginning of the "Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet)" thread. But that thread was onto other subjects now so I thought I'd start a new thread.

First let me say that I'm not just wining about the lack of any feature. I just had some thoughts on what I would like to see and what I think would be less useful than other things.

My ideal world would be a feature that would allow you to configurably split the screen space (whether multi-monitor or not) into multiple views. Each view could be a planet or the galaxy map. That way I could do something like the following: One monitor would be split between the galaxy and a less important planet that I want to keep an eye on. The other monitor would be my primary planet. I would love to be able to click a planet and have it show up in the main view or control-click it and have it show in the secondary view or something like that.

I am much less interested in having the view of one planet spread across 2 (or more) monitors. The split in the middle would be weird and zooming makes having a large view of one planet much less important.

Based on what was said it sounds like Unity is unable to render more than one scene at a time. So this sort of split view would be impossible. Is that correct?

As I said these are just my thoughts and I'd be interested to see what other people think. I'm not trying to be demanding. I'm just curious.

[keith.lamothe]

Well, using render-textures in Unity we could have it rendering the input from multiple "cameras" onto separate surfaces onto the overall game surface (which has to be a single window, or fullscreen on a single monitor-device).

But I don't know that this technique would be possible with the orthographic-perfect 2D display we have to use for other reasons.

There's also significant performance issues with basically having multiple full-render passes per frame.

And there's also potentially a ton of refactoring since the game is very much used to there being only one "local" planet, so to speak.

[x4000]

Yes, even prior to unity this has been such a huge undertaking to contemplate (with such a high CPU/gpu cost as well) that this never got to be something we were ever contrmplatin in a short-term fashion. It would be a neat feature, and I'd personally would indeed use it, but it's really secondary in my opinion.