[Alephmodular-devel] Re: Br'fin's Multi-Monitor-Support Patch: A Belated Review

[Br'fin <br...@ma...>]

On Thursday, April 3, 2003, at 01:07  AM, Aaron Davies wrote:

> OK, so I finally got around to testing Br'fin's multi-monitor patch, 
> and I'm happy to report that it works great. I have a ColorSync 17 
> plugged into my ATI Radeon Mac Edition card and an ancient Magnavox 
> 15" 640x480 plugged into the motherboard monitor port. I selected the 
> second screen in both A1 and AM and played a few seconds, and it looks 
> fine.

Oh thank you very much, Aaron, that's great to hear. Alexander, do you 
need the patch again to apply to A1?

> Just two caveats: first, the menu screen system dialog boxes (open 
> game, save film) come up on the main monitor even when I have second 
> one selected. I don't know if this is fixable, but it's annoying.

I don't think anything really specifies a screen for the dialog boxes, 
so they just come up centered on the screen that would normally hold 
the menu bar. No clue about fixability myself. (I presume its fixable, 
but I don't know how.)  ... by the way what screen do the preferences 
and network dialog boxes show up on?

> Second, I seem to be getting significantly worse framerates on the 
> secondary screen than on the primary. With A1 on the Infinity map, I 
> got about 9fps on the second screen and 15fps on the first, without 
> changing any graphics settings. (This is of course with OGL off, as 
> the second screen isn't plugged into a card.)

Try switching the game down into Low-resolution for a better frame 
rate. Software rendering is known to be extra-slow in both A1 and the 
main trunk of AM. (Improper usage of a window's back buffer.) But with 
low-resolution mode on the game should be trying to blit directly to 
the screen more or less. So it tends to fly even when high-resolution 
has no legitimate reason to be sluggish.

Technically, Low-resolution mode is doing the WRONG thing, so I don't 
advocate making everything blit to the screen that way. :)

> Oh, one other thing--in AM, a new game would sometimes come up with 
> the HUD but no game graphics, and I'd have to change the screen size 
> (F1-F4) to get the graphics to show. I don't know if this is specific 
> to the patch or not.

Hmm, most curious, does this problem ever show up without the patch 
applied? On one hand the patch is in a different file and area, but 
it's a close enough realm that something could have been missed when 
the screens were being organized internally.

-Jeremy Parsons