Windowmaker tool updated!

[OmniAtlas]

Your tool might be very useful when the Oculus Rift hits in December (stereoscopic view required).

[hark40]

Hello,

Thanks to Wledzian for the tool, it works perfect!

I wonder if there is any news about to remove the black border around each window. I try to align the projectors but the black lines never disappear.

Do you know about if Nthusim will remove this pixels?

Maybe, it would be possible to use your tool to create only 1 window for my 180º Horaizontal FOV using 3 projectors?


Best Regards,

[wledzian]

I've tried to reply to this post several times, please forgive me if multiple replies show up.

There is no news on removing the window borders. I've asked around in several forums and at Microsoft, and judging by the absolute silence, there is not a way to do this natively.

NThusim has a 'crop borders' feature, but from what I can tell, this only removes the GUI frame that Windows (the OS) adds to an undocked view.

I've tried NThusim (demo) and currently use a trial license of Sol7. Sol7 does have a feature which allows you to apply additional warping to your image beyond what is used to correct the projection to the screen. This can be used to eliminate the borders and generate a true cylindrical or spherical projection from multiple perspective windows. The only downside to Sol7 is the commercial pricetag.

My tool cannot be used to create 1 window of 180°, because no version of MS Flight Sim is capable of doing so. Flight Sim uses a perspective projection; it is not geometrically possible to create a 180° FOV in a single window. Imagine the projection as a window. If you want to see a larger field of view, you can move closer to the window. However, as you get closer, you see more of the FOV through an increasingly smaller part of the window, and the scenery towards the edges passes through the window at a more oblique angle. If you extend this back to your monitor, the result is that imagery gets compressed towards the center and stretched towards the edges. Practically speaking, anything over ~120° starts to become unusable.
Taking it to the limit of what FSX can do, if you use a single window spread across three 16x9 projectors or monitors side-by-side, WideViewAspect = True (clamps your narrow FOV, in this case vertical), and set zoom = 0.3 (the smallest value that FSX will use), your total FOV will be ~158°, ~120° of which will be crammed into the center screen, with each side screen showing a very streched ~19°

[hark40]

Hello,

Many Thanks for the explanation! It has lot of sense.

I will try ImmersaViewWarp because Sol7 was superseded.

Many Thanks again!

[cestlavie2010]

ok..just reading this..will this also work for me?

main pc 3x 27" on th2go but 1st screen about 15deg angle and 2nd screen center and 3rd screen about 15deg agle what is my fov?
left pc 2x27" on th2go 90deg left
right pc 2x27" on th2go 90 deg right

2 person cockpit so I sit on the left and my copiloot on the right ?

currently using Wideview software...

will this work out for me you think....tommorrow I will be testing....

[wledzian]

airberlin, it may be useful for your setup, but you'll have to do some things manually. Namely, Windowmaker doesn't account for bezels, nor does it account for non-centered arrangements. You'll have to do the math for the actual per-window FOV manually, use Windowmaker to calculate the zoom and generate the view config text blocks, then manually re-enter the correct yaw rotation for each window. If you read back through this thread, I have given instructions for those steps already.

[cestlavie2010]

thanks...it worked out pretty good...allthough my performance is very bad...50% less 8fps at EHAM aerosoft. I cannot fly with this...allthough pc is 4.6 ghz and gx580 just 3x 3d window is too much...

Wonder how other people do this...no addons ? or very low resolutions ? i have 3x 1920x1080

[wledzian]

I get ~10-15 fps when flying through the mountains. I usually avoid heavy autogen. I have three projectors running at 1280x800 on a TH2Go, plus one monitor running at 1280x1024.
My specs:
Q8200 (core 2 quad) at 2.33 ghz
2 GB ram
ATI Radeon 4760HD video card

This is by no means a powerhouse, but it delivers usable, if not stellar, frame rates.

As mentioned several times, you need to make sure that the background window is the 2d cockpit with the instrument panel displayed somewhere and not transparent, or you will have a fullscreen window in the background, eating up half your frame rate.

[choffmann]

Hello wledzian

nice tool, thank you!
What are your thoughts about frame rate performances? Do you believe, there will be any kind of PC configuration that will give us framerates above 20? Or is this an inherent problem of MSFS itself that will never be superseded?

Chris

[wledzian]

Sorry I've been away so long - just added a new member to the family, don't have much spare time.

Regarding frame rate performance, FSX is CPU-bound by the geometry processing being done CPU-side, single-threaded. Every extra window you use is that much more work that FSX is doing on the CPU. I don't think we'll see a machine that shows stellar performance for multiple windows and high settings with FSX, especially as CPUs are trending towards more cores instead of higher speeds. Prepar3d is, however, doing lots of work to convert the FSX core to multithread.