Linux - X windows, problem with multible screens

[subby]

EDIT: ooops about the subject should read :Linux - X windows, problem with multible monitors

Hey Guys,
I wanted to have a quick go at arma today. I have a single screen acrooss two monitors using TwinView (nvidia)

Problem is arma spreads across 2 monitors when playing full screen. I want it only to show on a single monitor. Is this possible?

I don't want to set up two screens because i loose the ability to drag windows acoss monitors.

Cheers
subby aka hqqns

[Z-Man]

Oh, hi! They always come back, it seems

What I do for my NVidia cards is that I set up my metamode line so it contains modes that only use one monitor, like
Option MetaModes "1280x1024,1280x1024; 1024x768, ; ,1280x1024"
Then I select a fullscreen res of 1280x1024 if I want to play on my LCD and 1024x768 if I want to play on the CRT.

That approach leaves the other monitor black. If you don't want that, tell your window manager to keep the arma window borderless and give it a fixed initial place so it fills a whole monitor. On KDE, right click on the title bar and select "Configure Window Behavior" for that.

Alternatively alternatively, get a Voodoo card, they have a separate VGA output

[subby]

Hi z-man
Those solution are not really very elegant are they

I think I might go the borderless mode however arma only recognises the smaller of the two monitor sizes.

I have my main monitor at 1980x1200 and my secondary one at 1620x1050, I get no option for the larger monitor. If I remember correctly there is a manual setting somewhere where I can add a resolution. EDIT: It does however pick up the 3000x1200 res

it would be cool if the second monitor could be used as a rearview mirror!

I could never afford a proper voodoo i had a banshee instead.

btw how is the c64 porting going

[subby]

i had a quick look in the code and in rScreen.cpp

seems the screen res options are hardcoded though there is a custom res option.

To be honest with you I think that all resolutions should either be discovered or put into the settings .cfg file and not hardcoded.

my two micro cents worth (hell it's not like im offering to make the changes )

[Jonathan]

Arma has actually discovered resolutions for a while. The old stuff is just still around, and added to the list of window resolutions.

uey+euor or whatever it was

[subby]

In that case it's discovering only the desktop size and not the size of the individual monitors.

[Z-Man]

It only can discover the sizes X tells it about, and for your setup, that only appears to be the full size. That's why I have the metamodes, to remind X that there's other options

Regarding the rear view thing, well, to do that elegantly, we'd need to discover the total screen layout. I wouldn't know how.

[/dev/null]

bumping an old post because I just ran across this problem yet again.

You guys should look into using xrandr to discover screen modes on linux

[Z-Man]

We're bound to what SDL supports, until something better comes along. Discovering the correct modes does us no good if we can't set them.

[/dev/null]

I was doing some reading and evidently there is some experimental xrandr support in libsdl, but its disabled by default for sucking horribly.

[delinquent]

I found something quite peculiar: By disabling your first monitor and using the native detection function in the settings GUI, I got both of my monitors working. I set the screen modes individually, turning the opposite monitor off each time, and when I turned the opposite monitor on again the availability of the modes remained. Bear in mind this is with two CRT monitors though, that might make some sort of difference

[/dev/null]

So after spending a week or two examing how tron acts with various monitor setups, you need to revamp the entire damn frontend for it to not be horribly annoying in the future from now on out. Sure, moving away from sdl will change the feel of the game some, but lets be honest, game aint that damn complex, and theres a lot benefits involved. Plus we have made massive changes to how the basic parts of the game worked a bunch of times before, sure we all whined about it, but we got over it.

[Z-Man]

Let me be blunt here: not gonna happen. This takes way too much time and we have too many other things that need to be done and too little time for even that.

[delinquent]

Is there the possibility of detecting which screen is which, in game? If an OS can depict between monitors it may be simple enough just to add a script to do the same, then add an option to the graphics menu dictating which screen is observed.

[Z-Man]

Not with pure SDL, and OS specific code typically is expensive to maintain.