View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0019233 | AI War 2 | Suggestion | Sep 20, 2017 6:22 am | Sep 20, 2017 9:10 am | |
| Reporter | tdb | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Severity | minor | ||||
| Status | considering | Resolution | open | ||
| Summary | 0019233: Windows splitting support | ||||
| Description | From the moment I saw the immense zoom range and galaxy map in the first tutorial of the original AI War, I knew this game would benefit from using multiple monitors at once. Sadly, it appears that the engine in use (Unity) doesn't support it. So I came up with an even better idea that will benefit single-monitor users as well: window splitting. The basic idea is that the game window can be split into multiple regions, each of which has its own UI. At simplest, each region would be completely independent and not affect each other directly. But as a more advanced feature, it could be possible to designate one region as the primary and lock another one as galaxy map, so that when you click on a planet on the map region, it's displayed in the primary region. Users with multiple monitor setups could then have the game window span more than one monitor and use window splitting to show different things on each monitor. I have two fairly large monitors, so I might like to use one of them as the primary region and further split the other one into four parts to keep an eye on different planets. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Unity actually does support it now, although only in fullscreen mode. And I'm not sure how ubiquitous the support for that is. Doing split-screen camera views with their own GUIs is also possible in most fashions, although it also comes with at minimum a 1.25x cost to performance. Many modern computers also have trouble (even on a single GPU) spanning one high-framerate window across multiple monitors. Having them independently on monitors is different, because the refresh rates can be independently managed, etc. Some video vendors and OSes handle it better than others. On our own front, since we're using screen-overlay level GUI rather than camera-space GUI, it would also mean a rewrite of various sections of our gui code. Our code has a lot of places where it also assumes that you are either in the galaxy map view OR the planet view, but not both. All of those would have to be heavily reworked. It's hard to quantify exactly what sort of hit that would be, but it could take a solid man-month of work split between Keith and I. Give or take. It's certainly a possibility down the line, if this was doing crazy successfully. And if hardware changes and/or the underlying unity platform changes. Right now it's going to redline most hardware out there and eat up a time budget we don't have. BUT there's always Moore's Law, and hopefully AI War 2 remains out platform for AI War for another 5ish years, and so we might be in a pretty different situation somewhere in that span of time. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 20, 2017 6:22 am | tdb | New Issue | |
| Sep 20, 2017 9:10 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Sep 20, 2017 9:10 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => considering |
| Sep 20, 2017 9:10 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0046471 |
