GregP

Your SoftTH Config file looks correct to me. What I can't remember right now is what limitations Nvidia cards have compared to AMD cards with regards to running multi-display configs like this. I recall that I thoroughly looked into all this a few years ago when I was developing my own 4-screen T-shaped setup, and I remember realizing that for some reason I could not do it with Nvidia cards. As usual I guess we'll need our resident guru PeterP to drop in and enlighten us. :)

Yes it works, and in exactly the same way it works in the other DCS modules. This is how I do it: In your View.lua, set DisableSnapviewSaving=false and UseDefaultSnapviews=false. Go in-game and set your snapviews by doing the following: 1. Press Lctrl+] to set keyboard view panning to slow; this makes it easier to set your snapview in Step 2. 2. Move your view by using Rctrl+RShift+ numpad keys until you get it where you want it. 3. Press Ralt+KP0. 4. Press Lwin+KPx, where x is the numpad key you want to bind to, then press Ralt+ KP0. Your chosen view is now bound to KPx.

Exactly right: snapviews are extremely useful on a setup like this. I've customized all of mine such that I can easily switch to a static view of the CDU, radios, or MFCDs on the touchscreen, making interacting with them that much easier.

Sorry, hadn't checked this thread in awhile. As for FPS hit compared to Helios, I can't say. But in my standard simple takeoff mission, I can tell you that I get about 40 FPS at 5916x2160 resolution.

I see PeterP already answered your question by posting my video, but just to confirm, yes, I use the 4th as the sole means of interacting with the VC. Yup, I know exactly what you mean. It does take some getting used to. As my upper screen is 27" and lower touchscreen is 22", normally the lower view would tend to look "squished" as I'd be trying to squeeze that same 1080 horizontal resolution onto a smaller monitor ... but since the touchscreen is actually a few inches in front of the vertical plane in which the 27" is in, it actually lines up quite nicely. However, the downside, as you point out, is that you're looking at two different vertical planes. I'm used to it now, but admittedly it was fairly jarring at first. I never even considered a PLP setup until seeing this thread, and I have to admit that would seem to feel and look even cooler than what I am pretty happy with right now. The main thing holding me back from trying it, though, is that it would mess up every other game that I play in Eyefinity -- which is a lot. Unfortunately my current setup does not have any easy way to switch between P and L orientation, so rotating them based on the game I'm playing at the time isn't practical. Maybe I need to look into finding a way to do that though. :)

Guys, just wanted to point out that Joy2Key can be used to get this same functionality, but is much, much simpler to set up. Might be worth a try. I've been using it for a month now after ditching TARGET a while back, and it works great. With J2K you can have any joystick button essentially use what's called a TEMPO command in TARGET, by setting a time threshold after which that button now generates some other character. So, for example, I've got my TrackIR pause and center commands bound to my Warthog's Left Throttle Button. If I hold it less than 0.4 second, it generates 'z', which pauses my TrackIR; longer than 0.4, it generates 'x', which centers it.

My god, 1.4m x 0.8m? That's a 63-inch monitor! What resolution do you run?

Cowboy10uk, With my setup, each aircraft should 'just work', because nothing in your configuration is changing. Any buttons or switches that are clickable in the game are now accessible via the touchscreen. And yes, you would have to use SoftTH to get the touchscreen working, but I haven't found any downside to that yet, aside from its inability to use DX11. Gadroc, Good points about the comparative features between the two setups. I agree with your points, but found it confusing to see two sets of gauges and MFCDs when I used Helios. I suppose the views could be tweaked to only present the HUD and so on on the upper monitors though. Regarding the need to be careful when zooming in and pausing TrackIR, you're right about that, but I've created a fairly simple system whereby with a single HOTAS button I can pause TrackIR and also enter 'precision mode' that dampens your TrackIR movements, which taken together, make using TrackIR use with this setup perfect, in my opinion. Hope I didn't sound too dismissive of Helios etc. in my previous posts; in most cases I think it's an incredibly useful utility for sims like DCS. I just happen to feel that a T-shaped setup, where everything's rendered in 3D, feels more intuitive and realistic than having part of the pit in moveable 3D and part in static 2D. But obviously, it comes down to each individual's preferences.

Excellent guide for those new to JSGME, thanks for taking the time to put that together. With the introduction of the auto-update feature in DCS a few months ago, I did exactly as you've described here and now dealing with updates couldn't be easier: uninstall all mods, update, reinstall all mods. The pain of manually reinstalling mods is now a thing of the past!

Is it just me, or are the HUD indications of having AIM-120s or AIM-7s selected a bit off? According to the manual you should see, in the lower left corner, either "120C X" or "7M X" where 'X' is number remaining. But I'm seeing something more like "A8L" and "S4M" or something like that.

The real O'Grady ran for the Texas Senate last year so ... unlikely that he still lives in Brooklyn, where he was born. Thus, this ain't him. Oh and ... because Santa ain't real. :)

YOU, sir, have my deep gratitude! Your suggestion has, I believe, FIXED my problem. What you said got me thinking -- I *used* to use DisplayFusion, but don't anymore. Then I started thinking, do I use anything else that affects desktop composition? Anything at all? And suddenly I realized -- YES, I use ATI/AMD's "HydraVision" drivers in combination with my Eyefinity setup to allow window snapping to each individual monitor! When I realized that, I went into DCS a few times to see if I could access the escape menu, and it worked -- because I didn't currently have HydraVision installed, as I just recently updated my Catalyst drivers and hadn't yet reinstalled the HV drivers. I then installed HV, started up DCS -- and couldn't access the menu! Uninstalled HV, rebooted, started up DCS -- and I could access the menu! So, I believe this realization has fixed it. Of course I'll need to do further testing to completely verify that this is really what's causing it, but for now, it seems to be the case. THANK YOU, my friend! Very much appreciated.

Yeah, I too am at a loss for why people are so opposed to TARGET. I too came from Foxy and so learning TARGET was a fairly painless transition. Up until a few days ago every sim profile I created was in TARGET. It was only this past weekend when I decided to give a try to setting up my profiles entirely within DCS and not relying on TARGET at all, thus making switching between aircraft so much simpler. To my surprise, within DCS's UI I can recreate about 95% of what I had in TARGET. The big drawbacks, in my view, are the more complicated commands in TARGET that you simply cannot recreate within the DCS UI, things like CHAIN (chaining a bunch of commands to occur in a row with just one button press) and TEMPO (short press of a button generates one command, long press generates another). Anyway, back to the topic at hand -- I too didn't realize that those five white dots were LEDs! I was always wondering what in the heck people were talking about when they discussed turning LEDs on and off. :)

But what about the physical size of your monitors -- all the same? This is important because if they're different sizes, the images won't match up using the settings I've put above. Regarding SoftTH: it's the only way, that I know of, to force DCS to render a larger area than you intend to display, and then being able to choose portions of that area to send to each monitor. By default DCS, and all games, presume that whatever resolution you set in-game, this is how much display area you want to fit onto your monitors; and additionally, games can't make use of an irregular desktop shape like the T-shape we're creating here. But with SofTH, you render a 5760x2160 area, output the top 5760x1080 to the upper monitors, the middle third of the bottom, i.e. 1920x1080, to the touchscreen, and essentially just discard the rest.

At the top of the RP window there are a bunch of icons, one of which is for settings or preferences: in there is a tab for SweetFX. And yes you unzip SweetFX anywhere and then point RP to it.

Sorry, I must not be understanding what you're trying to do here ... I assume you meant BRT up instead of DSP up above. In that case, if you want to assign BRT up to activate Master Arm within DCS, why do you need to get key commands involved? You can just find the Master Arm row in the UI, scroll over to your F-16 MFD 1 controller, double-click on the field there, then push BRT up on your MFD, and that's it. No? As long as you're trying to assign commands to your MFD that already exist within DCS, you never need to get key commands involved; you can just directly map each MFD button to each command within the UI.

May I ask why you're working directly with the lua files? It sounds like for what you're trying to do, just going through the UI would be much simpler. In my experience, the only time you need to get into the lua files is if you have a controller that has a switch or rocker for which one of the directions doesn't get recognized in DCS. For example on the Warthog throttle, there is a 3-position LASTE switch, the middle position of which, ALT/HDG, is electrically 'zero' and thus does not get recognized as a discrete position or press within DCS. Actually DCS sets the Warthog up for you, but if you had to do this yourself, first you'd go into the UI and assign the LASTE 'up' and 'down' positions by pressing each of them; then you'd go into the lua file and for each of those two buttons that you just assigned, you'd have to add a "up = iCommand..." command that would represent the middle position. But it doesn't sound like you're doing anything this complex. I used to have the MFDs too and I'm pretty sure that both BRT up and down show up as discrete button presses in the DCS UI, don't they? In that case just double-click on the Master Arm function in the F-16 MFD 1 column, press BRT down or up, and you should be good to go.

OK, so here is how you'd setup your config files. For the sake of simplicity, I have neglected to use bezel compensation here, so your combined resolution is 5760x2160; hopefully from the way these files are set up, you can see how to change the relevant numbers based on whatever bezel compensation you eventually use. Also, if your touchscreen monitor is physically smaller than the upper three, there is a trick we can do to possibly save some FPS by running an overall lower resolution; so, let me know what your monitor sizes are. \DCS World\bin\config.SoftTHconfig [main] renderResolution=5760x2160 nonlocalFormat=RGB16D keepComposition=1 smoothing=1 debugD3D=0 zClear=1 vsync=0 tripleBuffer=0 screenshotFormat=bmp dllPathD3D9=auto dllPathDXGI=auto dllPathD3D11=auto [overrides] forceResolution=0 antialiasing=0 anisotropic=0 processAffinity=1 FOVForceHorizontal=0 FOVForceVertical=0 [head_primary] sourceRect=0,0,5760,1080 screenMode=5760x1080 [head_1] devID=1 sourceRect=1920,1080,1920,1080 transportResolution=1920x1080 transportMethod=local noSync=0 \DCS World\Config\MonitorSetup\FourScreens.lua _ = function(p) return p; end; name = _('FourScreens'); Description = 'Four Screen Configuration' Viewports = { Center = { x = 0; y = 0; width = screen.width; height = screen.height; viewDx = 0; viewDy = 0; aspect = screen.aspect; } } Gui = { x = 1920; y = 0; width = 1920; height = 1080; } UIMainView = Gui C:\Users\[name]\Saved Games\DCS\Config\options.lua Add these lines: ["multiMonitorSetup"] = "fourscreens", ["aspect"] = 2.6666666666, ["height"] = 2160, ["width"] = 5760, Hopefully that helps. Let me know how it goes.

Well, are you using a Radeon card or Nvidia? If you don't want to use Radeon Pro, or you have an Nvidia card, just install it the exact same way you do with any other game -- unzip all files into your \DCS World\bin\ folder. If you want to use Radeon Pro, download the latest version here, install it, go to the General Settings section and specify where you have SweetFX currently installed, create a profile for DCS and in that profile you'll see a SweetFX tab where you can select the values you want for each effect.

SweetFX on it's own doesn't work with 64-bit executables. However, when it is used as part of Radeon Pro, it does. So no, you won't be able to run the 64-bit DCS executable with SweetFX right now. However, it should work with the 32-bit executable.

Well, when you have two monitors that are that different in size, I'm not sure how well my method would work, because for example if you use 1080p resolution on both monitors, the image on the touchscreen is going to be much smaller than the image on the upper screen. Alternatively, you could scale the touchscreen's resolution such that it 'inflates' its picture so that its roughly the same scale as the upper monitor. When I get home tonight I'll post my config files that you can use as a base as well as some more instructions.

Treudd, You've come to the right place -- I have exactly the setup that you're looking to create. My suggestion would be: forget about exporting MFDs onto the touchscreen, or using Helios, or using Hawgtouch or anything else. These are all unnecessary middlemen if you have 4 screens. Instead, render a T-shaped cockpit view where your instrument panel is on the touchscreen. This way you can naturally pan around the cockpit and directly interact with all of the cockpit switches without having to go through an intermediate layer. I've got a short video showing this functionality . What it requires is SoftTH and some setup steps in your monitorsetup.lua file and your options.lua file. First off, is your touchscreen the same size as your other screens? And what is the combined resolution across your 3 upper displays when you add in bezel compensation? Knowing these details, I'll be able to easily create all the necessary config files for you.

It's definitely compatible, yes -- in fact it was recently integrated into Radeon Pro, and I've been playing with it a bit in DCS World. Haven't quite got the settings right yet though.

OK, and .... how exactly does 'Hot Rocks' in Russian sound appropriate for a combat flight simulator? :)

My understanding was that it was a Russian term that when literally translated worked out to 'Flaming Cliffs'. Although I recall asking a friend who'd been in the Peace Corps in Ukraine, and had learned Russian, and even the Russian term sounded like nonsense to him.