DCS on 3 large televisions

[Slartibartfast]

I've been impressed recently by "Home Sim Pilot"s

and was wondering if a similar setup could be built for DCS World. Basically his setup largely consists of 3 (55") televisions arranged in a square box around him.

 

X-Plane 11 has very nice camera options where by you can configure separate view-ports for different monitors so you can perfectly set the viewing angle (and there for perspective displayed in each screen). This has the effect of eliminating the horrible "fish-eye" effect one normally gets when trying to stretch an extended display around angled monitors. Would this be possible in DCS?

 

As it is Aldi have a special coming up on 65" 4K televisions and I'm kind of thinking of going out a ordering 3 as a COVID-19 project and giving it a go but want to be confident it will actually be possible before ordering anything. Can anyone direct me to an explanation of how to set up multiple view-ports with different viewing angles to achieve this result?

 

I've watched several videos and read several articles about editing the LUA file to manage multiple monitors but these all seem to amount to extending a single view rather than establishing independent camera positions for each screen. What I really need is the ability to configure view-port angles such that views will render properly when displayed on angled monitors. Is this possible in DCS?

 

Thanks.

 

Edited April 27, 2020 by Slartibartfast

[Yeti42]

If you're running 3 X4K TV's and DCS you better have some serious hardware or your going to see framerates hit the floor. For instance, my RTX 2080 can just about handle 4K at 50-60 fps with an i7 9600k OC'd @ 5Ghz. The bottleneck is my GPU in this setup....

[Plivez]

What does a 4k TV picture look like close up? Is it good enough for normal monitor viewing distance?

[streakeagle]

Use 3 x 4K TVs. But run them at 1080p resolution. The instruments won't be nearly as clear as they would in 4K, but it won't kill your frame rates. 3 x 1080p < 1 x 4K, so if your pc handles 4K, then the only limitations will be how DCS handles that widescreen resolution. It sure would be nice if DCS was aware of your hardware and scaled the image appropriately.

 

Since it doesn't, you may need a software solution to rescale the output from DCS, which could even require an intermediate PC to take the image from the DCS PC and process it for your display. Not my area of expertise, but I know this kind of stuff exists, though it surely isn't cheap.

[Slartibartfast]

What does a 4k TV picture look like close up? Is it good enough for normal monitor viewing distance?

 

At the moment I'm sitting even closer than that to a 42" television to play DCS and while the image quality isn't great it's still perfectly serviceable. In fact there's no problem playing DCS itself, it's using the same screen for other computing tasks that I see it's short comings. Things like the left edge of some tall thin letters appearing slightly "pinkish" when reading fine text and so forth. Honestly though it's really not a problem and only really noticeable if you actively look for such imperfections.

Edited April 27, 2020 by Slartibartfast

[Slartibartfast]

Use 3 x 4K TVs. But run them at 1080p resolution. The instruments won't be nearly as clear as they would in 4K, but it won't kill your frame rates. 3 x 1080p < 1 x 4K, so if your pc handles 4K, then the only limitations will be how DCS handles that widescreen resolution. It sure would be nice if DCS was aware of your hardware and scaled the image appropriately.

 

Since it doesn't, you may need a software solution to rescale the output from DCS, which could even require an intermediate PC to take the image from the DCS PC and process it for your display. Not my area of expertise, but I know this kind of stuff exists, though it surely isn't cheap.

 

I'm not too concerned about the resolution issues at this stage (I'm sure I'Il be able to tweak that and find a happy medium somewhere :)). What I'm more concerned about is the displaying an image intended to be placed in the same plane as the center screen on a monitor that is perpendicular to it.

[Thick8]

The issue with three TVs is that you can use 3 separate viewports which produces a slideshow. Or you can set it up as 1 screen but the outer edges become skewed. I had 3 42" 1080p TVs setup as a single monitor with a 22" touchscreen for HELIOS. The framerate was good. when I switched to 3 viewports it was unplayable. I also had head-tracking which helped mitigate the edge issue. I took the whole thing down and sold it about two and a half years ago; 3 weeks after I bought a Samsung Odyssey.

[streakeagle]

This is the kind of software that can take the stretched single screen output and correct the warping for various screen layouts: https://www.immersaview.com/display-software/

 

It is meant for projectors, but it should work okay with conventional flat panels, too. It is just a matter of programming the screen geometry and the desired correction correctly. I would contact this company and explain what you are trying to do and see if their cheapest solution can solve your problem and determine if a single PC with a strong enough multicore processor can run the sim on some of the cores and warp the image on others. This might not work, or it might be too expensive, but you won't know unless you ask.

Edited April 20, 2020 by streakeagle

[Slartibartfast]

This is the kind of software that can take the stretched single screen output and correct the warping for various screen layouts: https://www.immersaview.com/display-software/

 

Thanks streakeagle.

 

I've actually spent a lot of time looking into the problem and the issue with all software image warping solutions is that they necessarily have to either expand pixels in the middle of the view (leading to poor image quality) or compress the edges (meaning your video card wastes a lot of effort rendering what are ultimately wasted pixels). Also, if they only have one camera position to work with (which I suspect will be the case for DCS) they really have trouble with anything much beyond 45° and are utterly incapable of rendering any pixels past 90° left and right. It's just a fundamental limitation of working with rectilinear projections intended for flat surfaces I'm afraid.

 

Some flight sims will allow you to setup independent cameras pointed in different directions allowing you to display additional views in separate windows. If you set up the camera positions correctly then assign the associated windows in the right orientation you can produce what is a perfect rendition of what the scene would look like (which is basically what "Home Sim Pilot"'s done in the video linked in the first post) but it all centers around having multiple camera views to begin with, something I fear DCS lacks.

[Thick8]

Thanks streakeagle.

 

I've actually spent a lot of time looking into the problem and the issue with all software image warping solutions is that they necessarily have to either expand pixels in the middle of the view (leading to poor image quality) or compress the edges (meaning your video card wastes a lot of effort rendering what are ultimately wasted pixels). Also, if they only have one camera position to work with (which I suspect will be the case for DCS) they really have trouble with anything much beyond 45° and are utterly incapable of rendering any pixels past 90° left and right. It's just a fundamental limitation of working with rectilinear projections intended for flat surfaces I'm afraid.

 

Some flight sims will allow you to setup independent cameras pointed in different directions allowing you to display additional views in separate windows. If you set up the camera positions correctly then assign the associated windows in the right orientation you can produce what is a perfect rendition of what the scene would look like (which is basically what "Home Sim Pilot"'s done in the video linked in the first post) but it all centers around having multiple camera views to begin with, something I fear DCS lacks.

DCS does have multiple camera views. With angle adjustments. There is a menu selectable 3 screen setup. That was the slideshow I mentioned earlier.

[Slartibartfast]

DCS does have multiple camera views. With angle adjustments. There is a menu selectable 3 screen setup. That was the slideshow I mentioned earlier.

 

Are you sure?

 

I was trying to look into that before however it seemed like it was all rendered from a single camera. Can you point me to somewhere that shows how to set it up with multiple cameras? It all looked like it was rendered to a single plane to me but I would be delighted to discover otherwise.

[Thick8]

There is a YouTube tutorial that is pretty in depth for the 3 viewport setup. Bring your calculator 'cause there's math involved.

[Slartibartfast]

There is a YouTube tutorial that is pretty in depth for the 3 viewport setup. Bring your calculator 'cause there's math involved.

 

Linky?

 

As I said in the opening post I've watched several videos and read several articles about editing the LUA file to manage multiple monitors but these all seem to amount to extending a single view rather than establishing independent camera positions for different screens. If you could point me to a resource that shows how to set up multiple view-ports with different viewing angles I would be most grateful.

[Noluck]

I'm new to DCS and very interested in just how to do the same thing.

 

 

BTW. the '3screen' setting in the DCS Options menu creates 3 viewports/camera's. I can't run it due to outdated hardware (that I am in the middle of updating), that causes my FPS to drop dramtically. Running '1screen' is what I do for now, even though there is distortion to the left and right displays, not to mention the fuzzy text/lines on the MFD's and HUD in the center view.

 

 

 

DCS is very lacking in easy to find sources to answer questions, in particular this type of setup. I just wish DCS had a monitor setup like Xplane 11, it's so easy to configure once you play with it. DCS = I'm at a loss. I wish we had a way to talk to a systems/software person directly.

 

 

 

If I find anything I'll let you know, but don't get your hopes up. Good luck!

 

 

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[Slartibartfast]

Thanks @Noluck. In particular I'm wanting to understand what the "ViewDx" and "ViewDy" values represent. While ViewDx seems to "pan" the image to the left and right and ViewDy seems to "pan" up and down and "1" seems to represent a "screen width/height" it's not clear as to whether this is a "rotation" pan or a "translation" pan.

 

As it is I've been digging a lot but haven't been coming up with much gold.

Edited April 29, 2020 by Slartibartfast