Board index FlightGear Support Hardware

Big monitor: How to make best use of it?

Joysticks, pedals, monitors.

Big monitor: How to make best use of it?

Postby nfol » Sat Sep 23, 2017 2:40 pm

I have a 43" monitor (3840 x 2160 pixels; philips brilliance bdm4350uc).

How can I make the best use of that big screen in Flightgear?

For example, can view the whole cockpit and/or look out both the front windows simultaneously?

How about the side windows? (No, I won't bend the monitor :-)

Best regards,

Niels
nfol
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Sep 23, 2017 2:04 pm

Re: Big monitor: How to make best use of it?

Postby curt » Sat Sep 23, 2017 3:09 pm

One quick thought to consider: If you want to make the FlightGear display "lifesize", then set the field of view to match the exact field of view the monitor actually covers. This means pulling out a ruler and measuring how far your display is from your eyeball (careful not to poke yourself in the eye.) :-) Then measuring the side to side length of your display and doing a small amount of trigonometry. If you get this right, then everything that FlightGear displays will be life size and any distortion effects will be minimized. You can apply this same basic strategy with multiple monitors and match the angle offset of the center of each display to what it really is with respect to your eye point. The goal is for straight lines in the sim (like runway edges or the horizon) to project straight from the end of one display to the start of another (i.e. no stair-stepping in banks.) With a small bit of attention to detail and some fiddling around, you can make an awesome and very immersive multi-monitor setup with FlightGear. Long ago when I was a driving simulator engineer at the U of MN, I installed flightgear on our driving sim visual pc's and tested it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwl7OS40o_E In this case it was one PC per display because that was how are hardware was setup, but flightgear also supports multiple monitors connected to a single PC. I know this has been tested with at least 8 displays connected to a single PC (probably even more at FS Weekend.)
Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics
University of Minnesota
curt
Administrator
 
Posts: 1168
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 1970 1:00 am
Location: Minneapolis, MN

Re: Big monitor: How to make best use of it?

Postby Hooray » Sat Sep 23, 2017 4:13 pm

FWIW, some folks have also tinkered with using OpenCV in conjunction with FlightGear for face-tracking purposes, which is to say that many view related parameters can be adjusted dynamically/at runtime. Most things related to supporting Oculus VR-style hardware will need a way to tweak the same settings, so there is quite a bit of existing functionality to be leveraged already, even without touching any C++ code - many things are property-configurable already using a variety of I/O interfaces and options
Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
Help write next month's newsletter !
pui2canvas | MapStructure | Canvas Development | Programming resources
Hooray
 
Posts: 12707
Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:40 am
Pronouns: THOU


Return to Hardware

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests