The Darkmod on Amd Eyefinity & nVidia Surround:

[Bikerdude]

Well the vertical eyefinity 3330*1680(monitors on their sides) view is the best mode for TDM and many other games (I played Metro2033 in the config and it was quite frankly, AWESOME!)

 

But for easy of use and compatibility I though I would in the end prefer a single 27"

 

3x descent 20" = £750 and for that money you can get a high spec 27" or if you wanted save a few bucks and still have the big screen experience. Go for 1920*1080 on a 32" LED LCD TV..

 

Regarding the horizontal aspect issue, it has been fixed before. Matrox triplehead2go has been around for a lot longer than eyefinity and people had it working with doom3 1.31 on thata so I dont see why/we can get it working on eyefinity.

Edited February 5, 2011 by Bikerdude

[STiFU]

Perfectly accurate results? Do you mean that monitors look like a window to parallel TDM-world? Complete angular equivalence?...

Exactly!! That would be sooo awesome. But I guess even with such a three monitor setup it could look cool. You'd have some awkward bending, especially close to the borders of the monitors, whereas the angles should be perfect in the centers of the monitor, assuming the bending radius is adjusted to the rendered fov.

[STiFU]

Regarding the horizontal aspect issue, it has been fixed before. Matrox triplehead2go has been around for a lot longer than eyefinity and people had it working with doom3 1.31 on thata so I dont see why/we can get it working on eyefinity.

It's just a matter of tweaking the aspect ratio, which should perfectly be doable (looking at the code snippet Tels posted). stgatilov and I are talking about an even further improved experience, where the monitors on the sides actually show an accurate representation of the scene without fisheye distortion.

[stgatilov]

It's just a matter of tweaking the aspect ratio, which should perfectly be doable (looking at the code snippet Tels posted). stgatilov and I are talking about an even further improved experience, where the monitors on the sides actually show an accurate representation of the scene without fisheye distortion.

 

Yes! Not completely without distortion, but it will become negligible.

 

And you'll be able to set 360 degrees horizontal FOV if you like

 

 

 

[Bikerdude]

stgatilov and I are talking about an even further improved experience, where the monitors on the sides actually show an accurate representation of the scene without fisheye distortion.

Now that would be sex!

 

btw did anyone notice the coincidental syncing of my mouse movements to the guitar rift sequence in the music lol.

Edited February 5, 2011 by Bikerdude

[Serpentine]

Look at you, 16:9 heathen

[demagogue]

Looks fun!

 

btw did anyone notice the coincidental syncing of my mouse movements to the guitar rift sequence in the music lol.

 

I was watching for when the build-up in the music climaxed, what scene would be playing.

It was

when you were crawling through the hole in the wall to the climbing area.

 

Obviously not edited to match the music, haha.

[Bikerdude]

no it was by pure coincidence

 

LOL

[MoroseTroll]

Aside of the awesome Bikerdude's Eyefinity configuration, what about automatic aspect ratio setup: i.e. the game would calculate aspect_x and aspect_y by itself? When I choose 1680*1050 on my PC, it's obvious that my monitor has 16:10 aspect. So why end user should worry about aspect, if the game can solve it by using the Greatest Common Divisor of the width and height of the resolution, right?

[Serpentine]

Strangely enough if you free-resize the TDM window in windowed mode, it seems to adjust the aspect ratio correctly in relation. Only noticed that the other day, and sometimes it just doesnt want to let me resize

 

There's also an API for pulling Eyefinity related stuff, if anyone wanted to make specific support at a later stage, might be quite nice to allow maps and such to be shifted to a single display... Ok we really don't need that but hey!

[STiFU]

When I choose 1680*1050 on my PC, it's obvious that my monitor has 16:10 aspect.

That is only true for the common matrix displays of today. There are however also displays with pixels not of square-form and there are also CRT-displays which can basically show a resolution of like 1983 x 40 on a 4x3 monitor-housing depending on the dot mask for example. So much for nitpicking... ;-) However, using a switch to activate automated aspect ratio correction should be fine.

[MoroseTroll]

Frankly, I've never seen displays with non-square pixels, excluding, of course, CGA (320*200, 640*200) and EGA (640*350) resolutions, but these ones are gone long time ago. All LCD monitors, AFAIK, have a square pixels, and almost all CRT have the same as well.

BTW, guys, some people have a 5:4 aspect ratio on their LCD monitors (I mean 1280*1024 resolution), but the game seems doesn't support it, so these people are running the game with deformed, 4:3 image. So, yes, automated aspect ratio correction, of course, would be nice.

[Tels]

Frankly, I've never seen displays with non-square pixels, excluding, of course, CGA (320*200, 640*200) and EGA (640*350) resolutions, but these ones are gone long time ago. All LCD monitors, AFAIK, have a square pixels, and almost all CRT have the same as well.

BTW, guys, some people have a 5:4 aspect ratio on their LCD monitors (I mean 1280*1024 resolution), but the game seems doesn't support it, so these people are running the game with deformed, 4:3 image. So, yes, automated aspect ratio correction, of course, would be nice.

 

Already tracked here:

 

http://bugs.angua.at/view.php?id=2613

 

In the meantime I added the 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 resolutions to our code and menu, so from v1.05 onwards at least you don't have to enter these manually.

 

Here is a quick overview on what is "common":

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg

 

Edit: Also nice is the hardware survey from Steam, it polls a massive amount of gamer hardware so you can really see what the trends are: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

 

Fun facts:

 

• Less than 10% of gamers have only one CPU core, and over 50% have 2 CPU cores, with 36% already having 4.
  
• 17.9% use 1680x1050 (which we support), but also 3.8% use 1600x900, which we don't support directly in the menu, only via console. Our players can only choose between 1366x768 and 1920x1080. Seems a lot gamers use 16:10 monitors rather than (the bad-for-you-but-cheaper-for the manufacturer) 16:9 monitors, and if they do, it is 1366x768 (6.8%), indicating TV instead of computer monitor.
  
• There are a lot people using various multi-monitor resolutions, the most common are 3200x1080 (9.3%) and 3600x1080 (7.9%) and 3840x1080 (7.07%). However, it's not clear how often these people use multi-monitor setups. Only once to test it? Always? And how many of the are this in percent?
  

 

Fun image of the day:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deutsche-boerse-parkett-ffm008.jpg

[Xarg]

Regarding the horizontal aspect issue, it has been fixed before. Matrox triplehead2go has been around for a lot longer than eyefinity and people had it working with doom3 1.31 on thata so I dont see why/we can get it working on eyefinity.

 

Problem here is, TH2G is quite expensive, and I believe it only supported certain aspect types. Hell I don't think I can even buy one in this country.. It should be rather easy to add eyefinity support, after all it's just a few different aspect ratio changes with a few subset resolutions.

 

16:10, 32:10, 48:10 = 1440x900, 2400x600, 2880x900, 3840x800, 4320x900 etc etc

16:9, 32:9, 48:9

4:3, 8:3, 12:3

5:4, 10:4, 15:4

 

You shouldn't need a terribly large list of resolutions for full support of this, the biggest problem I see is the fisheye when using monitors horizontally. Using them vertically like that pic you posted is a diff set of aspect ratios again, but it doesn't seem to suffer from fisheye so maybe that doesn't need to be added?

 

(unless someone in here is truly insane and possesses either crossfire 5000 series or a 5870 eyefinity edition and has 6 monitors, but I'm pretty sure that goes back to standard aspect ratios, just with a truckload of pixels)

[MoroseTroll]

Tels: Nice!

[Tels]

Support for 5:4 resolutions (1280x1024, 1800x1440, 2560x2048) has been added with revision #11783 (main) and #4697 (source). This will likely not make it into v1.05, but be in v1.06.

 

Other aspectRatios and resolutions will follow shortly, I also started working on allowing arbitrary aspectratios via a new CVAR r_fowRatio. But more on this later.

 

Someone said that the aspectRatio could be choosen automatically. While this is true, there are two reasons we don't want to do this:

 

* The GUI+code would needed to be redesigned quite a bit, adding another one is easy, but creating new entry fields and buttons is more time consuming.

* Currently the aspectRatio works as a filter, if you know you have 16:9, you only get the relevant resolutions. If we did not have this, but an auto aspectRatio, then the list of resolutions gets huge, and every user has to click through (for him) irrelevant entries a lot.

 

So it is better to select the aspectRatio (which you usually know or can compute easily in your head), then the resolution you want to use. In case you don't have a suitable one, you can still manually edit the cfg file.

 

Here is another handy reference I found:

 

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions

 

Edit: The 1360x768 (vs. 1366x768) resolution could be added under "Aspect Ratio" "TV", then TV users could easily choose the for them relevant resolution. However, only one entry seems overkill, does somebody else here have any odd resolutions that you use and want to be supported?

[Tels]

Edit: The 1360x768 (vs. 1366x768) resolution could be added under "Aspect Ratio" "TV", then TV users could easily choose the for them relevant resolution. However, only one entry seems overkill, does somebody else here have any odd resolutions that you use and want to be supported?

 

Added support for a "16:9 TV" aspectRatio setting in the GUI (it is just the same "2" as "16:9"), this contains the 1360x768 resolution now.

 

Also added support for the following resolutions: 1360x768, 1600x900, 3280x2048, 3360x2100, 3840x2160, 3840x2400

 

In addition I also started this article, it lists the (common/used) resolutions with their current % usage from Steam Hardware survey, their status (reachable via menu or not) as well as their true aspect ratio:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Resolutions

 

From the looks of it, before we go for the full-set-custom-fow-aspect-ratio solution, it seems adding a group "3:1" and grouping most of the resolutions close to 3:1 under it would already give us a lot bang-for-the-buck. Even if a resolution comes only close (like 2.9:1), this is still MUCH better than the current max. 1.77 (16:9) one could use.

[Bikerdude]

Tels, thanks for doing this, your a little star!

 

But I don't have a ATi card now, so will either have to get another GTX480 and then find some hacked drivers to allow sli on my mobo, or sell the 480 and buy a HD6970/6950/5970 etc..

 

Maybe by the time 1.06 is out I will be back with ATi....

 

Edited March 20, 2011 by Bikerdude

[Tels]

Tels, thanks for doing this, your a little star!

 

 

But it gets even better:

 

 

 

 

Look at the size of the light gem, and the images. Can you guess what this means?

 

Yes, I implemented "r_fovRatio". Set this to any value > 0.0 (actually 0.01, but who would use 0.02 : 1? and r_aspectRatio will be ignored and instead "r_fovRatio : 1" will be used. The two images above are 1920x600 (maximum I could run without getting grafic corruption) on the normal 16:10 (1920x600), and on the true 3.2 : 1. The light gem proves that this isn't some Gimp trick

[Bikerdude]

so, what are you using the Light gem will still be borked even if the right aspect ratio for tri-screen is in effect..?

 

I have dual screens atm at on my GTX480 so at the very least I can test the dual screen res of 3360*1050, so am happy to be your guinea pig etc.

Edited March 21, 2011 by Bikerdude

[Tels]

so, what are you using the Light gem will still be borked even if the right aspect ratio for tri-screen is in effect..?

 

All GUI (menu, objective overlay, light gem, books you open etc) are still using 100% of the screen and thus are always stretched. (I didn't know this until yesterday either I am not even sure this is fixable, would need to dig into the GUI code and see if we even have a way to influence the GUI sizes. If this is possible, we might as well give you the option to move the GUIs, so f.i. books are opened on the left screen instead of center. But as I said, not sure

 

I have dual screens atm at on my GTX480 so at the very least I can test the dual screen res of 3360*1050, so am happy to be your guinea pig etc.

 

Cool. Do you have SVN access? I cannot build a windows DLL, but the next time someone does, we could give it to you for testing.

[Bikerdude]

Not general svn access, but I could ask Greebs for the purposes of testing this..

[Taffer]

You might want to look into something called SoftTH. It's like a software version of eyefinity that works with any video card (even Nvidias), or like a software version of triplehead2go.

 

It works by using 1 card for rendering. Most cards only have 2 monitor connections, so you need another connection--even the integrated video card on your motherboard will work, as it is just sending the info through it, not using it for rendering.

 

I'm running a 5760x1080 setup myself--3 24" 1920x1080 monitors.

 

I'm using an ATI 4890, which doesn't support eyefinity--but with softTH, I can play with triple monitors.

 

Anyway, might be easier to play with because it is a software solution to multi-monitor or strange resolutions.

 

Oh, and i'll second the multiple cameras--from lurking around other softTH and multi-monitor things, that's a good way to go to remove any fish-eye or HUD stretching. Basically, you leave the center camera alone with the HUD, and add cameras which are at say 45 degrees for the side monitors (like side view mirrors in a racing game, except pointed forward). I really don't know how possible this is with the tools you have available, but I believe that is how it's done. It's likely easier to add some kind of FOV tool to calculate what the user should plug in based on their resolution, but this doesn't correct the HUD being stretched over 3 monitors.

Edited March 21, 2011 by Taffer

[Bikerdude]

well I might be picking up a third monitor in a day so, (if the price stays low) so will be able to test this out on my GTX480 & GTX285 setup.

[Tels]

You might want to look into something called SoftTH. It's like a software version of eyefinity that works with any video card (even Nvidias), or like a software version of triplehead2go.

 

It works by using 1 card for rendering. Most cards only have 2 monitor connections, so you need another connection--even the integrated video card on your motherboard will work, as it is just sending the info through it, not using it for rendering.

 

I'm running a 5760x1080 setup myself--3 24" 1920x1080 monitors.

 

I'm using an ATI 4890, which doesn't support eyefinity--but with softTH, I can play with triple monitors.

 

Anyway, might be easier to play with because it is a software solution to multi-monitor or strange resolutions.

 

That should be definitely added to our FAQ on the wiki!

 

Oh, and i'll second the multiple cameras--from lurking around other softTH and multi-monitor things, that's a good way to go to remove any fish-eye or HUD stretching. Basically, you leave the center camera alone with the HUD, and add cameras which are at say 45 degrees for the side monitors (like side view mirrors in a racing game, except pointed forward). I really don't know how possible this is with the tools you have available, but I believe that is how it's done. It's likely easier to add some kind of FOV tool to calculate what the user should plug in based on their resolution, but this doesn't correct the HUD being stretched over 3 monitors.

 

I have some idea how to fix the stretched HUD, but yeah, multiple cameras would be bette. However, this also mean (very probably) multiple passes through the scene, so it might get slower, plus it is probably not easy to pull off with the closed source.