Pin cushion compensation for curved screens

[Kite Ryder]

Hi

Some of us have been getting the Samsung G9 screen which is great in many ways but presents a new problem. 

Becuse the rendering engine of nearly every 3D game assumes a flat screen the edges are streteched to compensate for this. But the G9 has the same eye to screen distance across the entire screen. So you get a "pin cushion" or "fish eye" effect that quite severly effects your perception of distance.

It would be great if we could compensate for this in game. As I have to do post processing now (reshade.me) and loose a lot of fidelity in the center of the display due to scaling. 

[upyr1]

this would help ya'll 

[Kite Ryder]

So, I have been messing around with this and if you choose 3 monitors in setup you can clearly see that the rendering engine is completely capable of compensating for the G9 curve. 

The problem is that the 3 monitor setup gives artifacts where the monitor joints would be.

[Kite Ryder]

Doing some further research it is clear that the only way to truly fix this issue is a version of what is done for VR.

That is to render a super sample and distort that into your native resolution. 

Sparing that I am trying to get a decent result out of reshade.me which is a cool software but no level of math or algorithm can get the sharpness needed to distort the perspective correctly and keep the cockpit sharp enough for a good experience. 

Reshade can't force or trick a higher resolution from the system and down sample to the native resolution. 

I desperation I am trying to distort the 3 monitor setup (or more) with reshade hoping to loose less sharpness.

[Kite Ryder]

Here is a workable though far from perfect monitor .lua file.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-3stkwH7wi3FdHFYC7_Ryez67tSkMSM7/view?usp=sharing

1. Drop it in the DCS/Config/MonitorSetup folder
2. Start DCS
3. Choose the G9 monitor under settings
4. DCS restarts

There are several issues with this solution, I know. 

A lot of effects will not look good:

• Water effects make vertical lines (I think this is because the effect assumes the next pixel outside of the screen i is black). <- ED can probably alleviate this in the shader.
• Clouds renders unevenly between "cameras".
• Sun glare renders unevenly between "cameras".
• Shading renders unevenly between "cameras".
• There is not a reverse "barrel projection" effect. <- will work on minimizing this.

Even with all that, the feel is a lot more natural and the distance to objects is now the same how ever you look at it.

Will update with further improvements when I make them.

Any documentation of the syntax would be greatly appreciated.

[Kite Ryder]

I have updated the file so that the GUI now is limited to a large portion of the center of the screen.