RE: [GD-Design] Game UI's

[Tom F. <to...@mu...>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ham...@tm... [mailto:ham...@tm...]

> Please note that 3 can have an extra advantage, depending on 
> precisely how much the implementation fits within the mores 
> of whichever OS(es) it runs on: thanks especially to nVidia, 

Ouch - careful with that hype - you'll have someone's eye out. IIRC, nVidia
were almost the last major IHV to introduce multi-monitor cards.

> an awful lot of "normal" games-playing people now have two or 
> more monitors on their PC - it's no longer the preserve of 
> professional graphic artists etc - and number 3 allows them 
> to actually take advantage of that extra monitor, without the 
> GUI designer having the headache of designing specifically 
> for multi-monitor.

[snip]

> [confession: I tend to get really pi**ed off when a game with 
> loads of dialogues refuses to play nice with multi monitor - 
> I've got the hardware, I got it working under 
> windows/X11/whatever, and its extremely frustrating not to be 
> bale to use it].

The problem with multimonitor is that it's a huge pain at the moment.

If using OpenGL, the moment you enable the second monitor, all hardware
rendering support vanishes. Various IHVs have fudged it so it doesn't (by
tricking Windows into thinking it's running on a single large monitor) but
that causes all sorts of problems of its own, especially the different-sized
monitor case.

Under DirectX, you can use multimonitor, and have been able to do for some
time, but itmeans keeping track of multiple devices, each with its own set
of texture, VBs, etc, even though they actually all live on the same card.
This is changing for the better in DX9 I believe, so that a single device
can have multiple RAMDAC surfaces (which is the way to go), but it does
require new driver support, etc - so you need to decide when you're shipping
and what the market support will be.

So I'm going to express cautious support for multimonitor, especially if
using DX9 and shipping in a year or so. But it is cautious.

> Adam M 


Tom Forsyth - purely hypothetical Muckyfoot bloke.

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