Monitor arrangement
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Three 27" across the top in Surround, and one touch center below main set, running MFDE and Helios.
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Why is that?
It’s a problem when you are using fullscreen and BMS is switching the resolution between the UI (which is fixed in 1024x768 by code restrictions) and 3D: if the desktop of the additional gauge screens is placed BELOW the BMS window the gauges are switching forth and back and that can sometimes screw up the positioning of them.
If the gauges are placed ABOVE the BMS windows, that means the gauges are in the negative range of the windows resolution coordinates they are not affected by the resolution switching.
This applies only for using BMS in full screen, if you are flying in windowed mode (like me) your on the safe side.
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It’s a problem when you are using fullscreen and BMS is switching the resolution between the UI (which is fixed in 1024x768 by code restrictions) and 3D: if the desktop of the additional gauge screens is placed BELOW the BMS window the gauges are switching forth and back and that can sometimes screw up the positioning of them.
If the gauges are placed ABOVE the BMS windows, that means the gauges are in the negative range of the windows resolution coordinates they are not affected by the resolution switching.
This applies only for using BMS in full screen, if you are flying in windowed mode (like me) your on the safe side.
Yes, I understood the implications of the gauges being moved, refer to the original post in this thread.
I was asking why place it ON TOP of 0/0 monitor instead of to the LEFT of 0/0 monitor.
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Yes, I understood the implications of the gauges being moved, refer to the original post in this thread.
I was asking why place it ON TOP of 0/0 monitor instead of to the LEFT of 0/0 monitor.
When you place it only to the left the gauges are horizontally in the - range but still in the + vertical range so they are still moved during resolution switching. Its important they are in the negative range on BOTH both coordination layers, x AND y.
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Interesting… I’ve not thought of that, thanks!
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Some advice from Dunc on the subject:
If you run additional screens for instruments on your flight PC, and you run in full-screen mode, you should position them in the “windows resolution” desktop menu above your main screen - regardless of where you have them positioned physically. Why? Well, the main screen has it’s upper left corner at 0/0 coordinates. Imagine you put a screen underneath your main screen. Which coordinates does it have? It will have 0/“resolution height of your main screen” as upper left corner. So when your main screen is running at 1920x1080, your monitor underneath your mainscreen has it’s starting coordinates at 0/1080. Which means that if you want e.g. position your external MFD in the upper left corner of the screen underneath your main screen at a size of 500x500, its “world” coordinates would be 0/1080 upper left MFD corner, 500/1580 lower right corner.
Now… imagine your main screen resolution changes to 1024/768 when you enter BMS 2D fullscreen. Suddenly, the upper left corner of your 2nd screen is no longer 0/1080, but 0/768. Which means that your MFD coordinates are now “way off”.
However, if you put your 2nd screen ABOVE your main screen, the “world coordinates” for your 2nd screen upper left corner will be “fixed” at 0/“minus height resolution of your 2nd monitor”. So if your 2nd monitor is running at e.g. 800x600, the upper left corner of that screen would be 0/-600 in windows world coordinates. Regardless of resolution shifts of your main screen. Why? Because the upper end of your main screen is always at “0”. Only the lower end is changing its coordinate numbers with resolution changes.
So. if you have that 2nd monitor above your main scren with a 0/-600 origin, the MFD coordinates would now be 0/-600 upper left 500/-100 lower right corner. And they will not change, even if BMS changes its resolution.
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When you place it only to the left the gauges are horizontally in the - range but still in the + vertical range so they are still moved during resolution switching. Its important they are in the negative range on BOTH both coordination layers, x AND y.
Some advice from Dunc on the subject:
I appreciate both inputs, but I just tested this using YAME64 and MFDE with the following monitor configuration:
The gauges did not move at all even after several TEs of testing. While I see the point of the main screen changing resolutions when in fullscreen mode and on the 2D menu, that change in resolution only happens to the main monitor. 0/0 is the upper left, and going from 5760x1080 to 1024x768 will only affect the monitors to the RIGHT and/or BELOW the main screen. Monitors ABOVE and/or to the LEFT of the main screen retain their coordinates.
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Now it would be interesting WHERE you have placed your PHYSICAL screens: are they placed left of your mainscreens like in the diagram or are they placed elsewhere?
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The physical setup is
[1] [2] [3]
[4] [5]where [123] is the Surround setup, [4] is displayed as 3 and 5 is displayed as 1 in the above graphic.
Why is that interesting?
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It’s interesting because of the mouse movement you ned to reach the additional screens: to get on no. 4 you have to leave the main screen on the left side, very unnatural.
Sure: if you place the desktop of no.4 on top of 1-2-3 you have also to move the mouse up to get the pointer down to 4. But first, it’s easier and you get used to it fast and second, the movement is a bit faster.
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It’s interesting because of the mouse movement you ned to reach the additional screens: to get on no. 4 you have to leave the main screen on the left side, very unnatural.
Leaving the main screen by going left is indeed very unnatural, that’s why I always had the secondary screens to the RIGHT instead of the left, but after a few tests with the left-side config, I figure I’ll get used to that sooner or later and I also get rid of the problem of having to drag my browser and program windows back to the main screen after every game or test of BMS.
Sure: if you place the desktop of no.4 on top of 1-2-3 you have also to move the mouse up to get the pointer down to 4. But first, it’s easier and you get used to it fast and second, the movement is a bit faster.
I don’t like the mouse migrating when going up/down, I tried that before. I’ll just have to get used to “going left.” Also, this is a bit of a remnant of when I was using SoftTH. If I had my monitors set up as:
[1] [2] [3]
[4] [5]
in SoftTH, what it would actually do is render one BIG picture but because it’s an odd layout, it would actually render
[1] [2] [3]
[4] [5] [X]
where X is a blank space the size of monitor 3, just to make the entire setup a proper rectangular setup. Having to render that blank space still did eat up GPU resources, so it was best to avoid having any “wasted” blank spaces, so I always had my monitors in alignment horizontally even if they were not laid out like so in the physical world. -
You don’t Surround/Eyefinity your 1-2-3, Stubbies?
Sure do. Guess I just misinterpreted the question but still falls in line with special as I run the fourth monitor from a secondary computer and run MFDE in server/client mode so this problem you are seeing doesn’t exist for me.
From my experience MFDE has better stablity in this setup than in stand alone mode. Yet another advantage I see is that if I see a disconnect or a crash it is almost always client side which means I can kill the process and start it up again on the client computer without affecting my flight.
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This may not be exactly the right place to ask, but still, it seems on-topic. I have my monitors in a T setup physically and generally play BMS in windowed mode using only the center monitor for 2D/3D, and the bottom for gauges via MFDE. Naturally I would enjoy using all 3 as I do for DCS. Is it possible to set a custom resolution for windowed mode so the window spans all 3 main monitors?
It seems like “no”, and that eye-finity / nvidia surround is required, but I’d prefer not to use that. Is it possible I could edit a ini file or similar to set my custom resolution?
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T setup so I’m guessing you mean you have 4 screens? 3 on top and 1 on the bottom? I’m not sure if you can force BMS to display across all 3 monitors without having to do some hex editing, but even then, I’m still not sure if it’ll work. Best bet is Eyefinity/Surround if your top 3 monitors have the same resolution or SoftTH if they are different resolution. Note I say “resolution” and not “size.” If you have 2x 19" 1920x1080 res for the sides and 1x 24" 1920x1080 res for the center, you can still Eyefinity/Surround those three monitors. Otherwise, use SoftTH. My “proof of concept” setup used to have a 24" 1920x1080 res for center screen and two 19" 1280x1024 res screens.
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T setup so I’m guessing you mean you have 4 screens? 3 on top and 1 on the bottom?
Exactly. In my case the top 3 are all the same size and resolution, so the physical / virtual screen area math is easy. I’ve resisted eyefinity/surround because in DCS you get 3 different cameras, so there’s no perspective distortion on the sides, and plus its a generally working / happy setup that I use for work + gaming, e.g. its not exclusively a machine for BMS/gaming.
My hope was to be able to just type in a window size somewhere and set a custom FOV, but it seems like that’s not possible. I’ve got some cpu power to burn, so the hit for windowed mode isn’t a big deal.
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Yeah, DCS is coded differently. I’m not sure now, but years ago, I got a FPS hit for doing that “different camera angles” thing compared to doing a Eyefinity/Surround setup. Anyway, BMS has no such capability so you’ll have to combine your main monitors.