Celestia Forums

Is there any plan to add dual monitor support to Celestia?

Thanks!

Get a matrox perhelia the best graphiccard aviable (others are faster and so on but not better) it has a 512bit GPU and 3monitor suport, al 3 with full 3D acceleration (play games an 3 monitors). This works out of the box, as you can devine your 2 or 3 monitors as one.

As soon as I have the mony I will buy one becouse I think it is the only way to get blender on more then one screen, blender's GUI is OpenGL based.

Hope this helps

Bye, Dominik

To clarify Dominik's posting: Celestia has no problems displaying a window across multiple displays if they're all controlled by the same graphics card which supports OpenGL on them all.

Most current Nvidia cards support two displays, for example, and Celestia can use them both simultaneously. I've done this with a Ti4200.

selden,

how do I get 3D support on two displays (nvidia geforce fx 5600)? I realy like to know how to do it, the perhelias are a BIT too expensive for me at the moment!!!

Thanks, Dominik

I just hooked up the 2nd monitor and configured it. You don't even have to reboot in most cases. Under XP, the dual monitor controls are available in the Display Properties menu, Settings tab.

Most (maybe not all) of the cards based on Nvidia chips have two separate video outputs. Usually there's one connector for analog video and one for digital video, but sometimes both connectors are digital. The digital video output connectors actually include both digital and analog video signals, but you may need to get a digital-to-analog-connector adaptor if one wasn't included with your graphics card.

This configuration works best if both displays are the same size and resolution. Mine aren't, so I don't use it very often.


Added slightly later: be sure to read nVidia's nView User's Manual. Sometimes the settings are rather confusing. See http://www.nvidia.com/object/feature_nview.html

Strange, the last time I tryed it was no go with blender. Today it works with blender and Celestia.

Thanks selden for geting me to retry.

Early versions of Blender had problems when displaying on nVidia cards. I couldn't even get it to display its on-screen function buttons!

They seem to have fixed those kinds of problems in the most recent version. I don't actually use Blender, though. Its user interface is much too complicated for the simple kinds of modelling that I do.

I was just curious. My current setup at work is dual display/dual vid cards with an AGP GeForce4 MX 440 and a PCI Xpert 128. I guess if I had one AGP card driving two monitors than it would work better.

Thanks!

nacree,

Unfortunately, Celestia assumes that the same OpenGL code is supported by all displays. Cards from different manufacturers do not have the same features.

Even so, I don't know if Celestia will work on separate displays controlled by separate but identical 3D graphics cards. I'm not saying it won't, I just don't know.

You might try disabling all hardware acceleration on all display controllers. Then only Microsoft's software OpenGL routines will be used. Then the same routines would be used for all cards. Maybe that'd work, but very slowly.

If Celelestia

A: Has Dual Monitor Support
B: Multiple Windows

Then

C: How hard could it be to write a stereo projection mode for
GeoWall Projection?

This could be the ultimate 3-D astronomy projection experience.
For those of you unfamiliar with geowall, it uses two LCD projectors onto a
silverized screen, and uses polarizing lens to get a stereo vision effect.
This is the same technology used in theme parks.

Alan,

It's only a matter of finding someone to write the code.

In principle it already can be done if you're willing for the two viewpoints to follow predefined trajectories. Creating those trajectries out of Cel:// URLs might be somewhat tedious, though.

Hmm. An external program could create those URLs or short scripts in realtime and trigger Celestia to load them using the --once qualifier. There'd be a slight lag, of course.

alan_federman wrote:If Celelestia

A: Has Dual Monitor Support
B: Multiple Windows

Then

C: How hard could it be to write a stereo projection mode for
GeoWall Projection?

This could be the ultimate 3-D astronomy projection experience.
For those of you unfamiliar with geowall, it uses two LCD projectors onto a
silverized screen, and uses polarizing lens to get a stereo vision effect.
This is the same technology used in theme parks.

I was beginning some work on this, but then I discovered that only the Quadro series of graphics boards from NVIDIA support stereo rendering into separate buffers. They're targetted at the professional market, so they're much more expensive than ordinary GeForce cards (which is what I've got.)

Stereo is not hard to do, since Celestia already has multiview support. All that's required is to keep the two separate views synched (multiple views are currently always independent of each other) and to alternate between GL_LEFT and GL_RIGHT buffers. Actually, it sounds as if all you're doing is
just displaying views on two different monitors. What needs to be done is to make Celestia to render into a window that spans both monitors (easy to do--I wrote a GL screen saver last weekend that does exactly this), turn on multiview mode with a split between the two monitors, choose two views with the desired stereo separation, then keep them synchronized as the user navigates about.

--Chris

I must admit that I don't get the neccessity for two render buffers.
Shouldn't that be limited to shutter technology. Using two polarizing beamers, you don't need two buffers, IMHO.

maxim

Have been looking at Celestia on span of three 21" monitors for almost 2ys with the matrox perhelia. Result is well worth the investment.

I have done engineering design and development with Walt Disney, Universal and IMAX on several 3D exhibits. Would be very interested Chris if you have prepared anything that you could share.

There are a number of ways this can be displayed but the quick and easy way is to display left and right views side by side and cross your eyes to merge the two images and this will give you an idea of the 3d effect.