Sgt_Baker

Yes to all the above. The only reason the demo vids and screenshots are single-monitor is that it's a pain to capture video from multiple monitors. If you look carefully at the latest vid, you'll notice three button fading in/out as I mouse over the MFCDs. They are the three size/position memories, which can be toggled either by clicking the icons or with a keyboard/mouse/joystick combination of your choice. Regarding iControl: I am already in discussions with the developer with a view to feeding iControl directly, thus removing the need to have exported displays visible on the desktop while the external touch device is in use.

It's got nothing to do with DCS's exports. All of the exporting stuff is done automatically by uMFCD. Can you drag any given window to the display?

Questions and suggestions are where it's at! The ultimate goal, of course, is for the system to be completely intuitive. It's sometimes difficult to keep on top of that particular aspect as the developer. Many be the "interesting technical issues" etc.

Double-click/tap the display. There will be an A-10-like SOI yellow box around the input to make it clear that you're in the entry mode. A single click/tap/escape/anything else will exit said mode. Edit: I.e. one has to click an LSK or OSB to assign the new input. That action would implicitly end the keyboard input mode. Additionally, Escape maps to CLR. It too could cause the mode change.

It'll be very soon (he said, again). I'm in the position where I have to spend some £££, so putting it off as long as possible. :lol:

Direct typing:

If you can put a normal window on the 8" display, you can put an UltraMFCD there. The system turns the displays in to normal windows.

:)

Aaaaand with some "polish".

Yet to undergo the usual graphical "polishing", but here's a quick peek of the latest (and most complicated of all) addition to the family: This one has some cool time-saving features that I'm sure you'll like. Want, for example, to type (Edit: using your keyboard) coordinates directly in to the CDU without tediously mapping a tonne of keyboard commands? No problem! UltraMFCD's CDU has an automatic mapping mode.

And now it works properly in multiplayer, providing the server doesn't explicitly enforce the default export.lua*. :) *In which case everything works except the ability to click the displays.

I know exactly what you mean. Looking at that setup reminds me of something similar I used to run back when I was working on autostereoscopic displays. Just throw in some oscilloscopes and Frikkin' (low-power holography) Lazors and you get the idea. Back to the point: In the interests of proof-of-principle I knocked together a multi-dissimilar-gpu setup earlier. All went without a hitch: the exported displays appear happy even while straddling monitors owned by different GPUs. This, I should add, is entirely down to Windows having been "done right" under the covers.

Bloomin' heck! It's like you're the patient zero of testing novel graphics subsystems. I assume you're running at least two gfx. cards in taht setup. Mind if I enquire as to which makes/models? B

Thanks for that, Sobe. Something for me to get my teeth in to. :)

Yep, we've already performed quite a bit of work in this direction. It's a case of there being a 100% certainty of seeing Android/iOS functionality in the future.

uMFCD is designed such that it should operate alongside other mods and custom configurations. This is not to say that there will be absolutely no conflicts whatsoever, but we will respond quickly to any such issues as soon as we become aware of them. In the first instance, could you send me the exports file so as to put another data point on the proverbial graph in terms of what to expect from Helios? The bottom line, however, is this: ultraMFCD never overwrites or modifies anything on disk, so at the very least it's not going to screw up other mods. :)

That's the idea, yes, except the portable devices will be identical in functionality to the desktop equivalent. This takes a bit of negotiation with Apple/Google, by the way, so perhaps expect swearing on my part? As for the external USB screens: Providing Windows recognises them as proper displays there should be no problem. B

No such thing as too much testing, Rivvern. Testing schedule as per last reply. B

Yep, you read that correctly. If you scroll back to the very first post in this thread there's a video of an early version of UltraMFCD. It fully supports touch-screens, and will happily run on any monitor you have connected to your machine. We're stupendously close to a broad-scale test, which I will announce here, via the website and on Twitter. B

Hi folks, Been a while since I posted here - real life etc etc. The mod now has a name: UltraMFCD And a website, https://ultramfcd.com, where you can keep abreast of progress. :) Baker

Always get a bit nervous when DCS auto-updates. Everything is still working perfectly. Have spent the past month on all sorts of little details which make the app as natural to use as possible. Will be creating some new demo vids in the near future...

As it so happens EDGE couldn't come soon enough, as there is distinct evidence dotted around the innards of the game that we'll be moving to a more modern version of DirectX. Doing so would implicitly eliminate the 10% FPS drop presently associated with windowed mode, which is why I was mumbling about diminishing returns. Edit: It'll probably involve a fair amount of reworking the code, but the resultant code would be far less geared towards getting DirectX to do things it doesn't want to do. :)

As yet I simply do not know. The only modules I've had any meaningful interaction with, as a user, are A-10C and KA-50 I/II. It wouldn't be prudent to provide a yes/no without using the FC3 end of the system first. :)

Something I really want to avoid is over-optimising the windowed mode. As I do most of the testing for this on something that could be considered "just about a gaming machine", it could be that the FPS drop is much smaller for the majority of players, thus rendering further optimisation a game of diminishing returns.

It'll run fullscreen too, but in that case the exported displays will be constrained to whatever screen(s) the game itself is using. There's approximately a 10% FPS drop in windowed mode at present (optimisation of this is precisely what's going on at the moment) and 0% FPS drop in fullscreen mode when compared to exporting MFCDs the old fixed/static way via modifying .lua files. Of course enabling the "turn off cockpit MFCDs" option improves things in general. Come to think of it, if you're desperate for more FPS you could simply run the mod with that option and nothing else - fly like they did in the old days!