RE: [GD-Design] Game UI's

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Hubina [mailto:to...@3d...]

[snip]

> Actually .. this isn't accurate any more (and hasn't been for 
> quite some 
> time). Right now my buddy runs a GeForce2 as primary AGP, and 
> PCI TNT card 
> as secondary. Both are hardware accelerated with OpenGL. The 
> place where 
> things get ugly is when a window straddles two monitors ... 
> only the part 
> of the window on the display where the window was created still works 
> properly by default ;) If a window moves from one monitor to 
> another, you 
> can destroy the old RC and get a new one within that monitor and get 
> acceleration again. You _might_ even be able to use the 
> shared texture and 
> display list stuff and only use one copy of textures and 
> display lists for 
> dual-head cards ... but that's probably a stretch ;)
> 
> I don't know how things work with mutli-mon and going full screen .. 
> specifically switching resolutions and generally dealing with 
> devices, but 
> I suspect there's some form of solution.

Sorry, my bad. I haven't kept up with multimon OGL for a while. So now it's
just as klunky as DirectX 8 is, i.e. two devices, two contexts, two copies
of everything and all that. Gagh. That's far too much work for most apps to
cover such a tiny portion of the market.

[snip]

> >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.
> 
> I wouldn't make multi-mon a required feature ... nor would I 
> put a lot of 
> effort into it. Maybe a couple of days or a week ... tops. There just 
> aren't enough people that use it yet.

Agreed. The problem is that "a couple of days" doesn't sound like long
enough to port any engine to knowing about multiple contexts, which seems to
be what is required under both OGL and DX8. Things should be better in DX9.
Obviously it's still in beta right now, but it looks like you can simply
create a second display chain of surfaces, SetRenderTarget to them, render
your scene, and it all Just Works. Now _that_ is something that would only
take a few days, assuming you already had the concept of multiple viewports
in your rendering engine (which most do).

> Tom

Tom Forsyth - purely hypothetical Muckyfoot bloke.

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