Multi-Screen Functionality - Essential Modification - Adjustment for Main View

[FearlessSwan217]

My dual control/dual seat Fully enclosed surround screen cockpit
CPU - Intel Core i7 12700K GPU Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Ti

The Main MSFS Window cannot be placed in Full Screen on my front TV monitor because my Instrument panel dashboard hides the lower portion of the front screen - thus I cannot access General options, Control Options, home screen, world map, and any of the associated dialogue menus… like for example selecting the airport departure point… or creating a flight plan.

What is required is for the flying view of the main MSFS window to have the same adjustment of position controls as the additional experimental windows.
This would allow the MSFS main window to be in FULL SCREEN mode on the RHS with no need for an extra window (FPS killer).

The current floating “windowed” mode destroys the enjoyment because the menu bar and associate in flight options are not available without pausing to bring the floating window to the front.

Hopefully, I can get the attention of Asobo to make this improvement otherwise we are stuck with a default front view that we are forced to use - with no ability to place the main window anywhere but the front.

Another view of my Cockpit.

[MichaMMA]

nice home cockpit

A question: the topic is meant as a wish and not a bug-report , right ?

Then #bugs-and-wishlist:wishlist might the correct category.

PS: and word “Asobo” in heading makes the heading only one " worst readable ". We know that the developer is adressed.

[FearlessSwan217]

Thanks for the Cockpit Compliment.
I guess the category depends on where the best effect will be for getting action.
The whole multi-screen design is a bit of a bug. Seems to have been put together by someone without much idea of what was needed. I waited for nearly 2 years to see a Multi-screen function and when it came out I could not use the main screen because it was “fixed” on a front view with no means of adjustment (and there are other “adjustment” issues too - but I have not mentioned them here).
Just being on a “wish list” seems a lower priority so I think I will leave it under this category.

Thanks for the tip about the heading… I didn’t think it was that bad… but I have made the correction you suggest.

[Pieter2427]

@FearlessBead399

The whole multi-screen design is a bit of a bug.

It’s also still under “experimental”

Also: Why not simply make your center monitor the primary display in Windows? You can show/drag your taskbar on another screen or have that taskbar shown on all screens.

Edit:

I just did a few tests here (3 monitor setup) and I really can’t see what your problem is. If you drag your central MSFS screen to the middle monitor, make it full screen via Alt+Enter, you can then just enable to additional screens left and right of it. Despite the right monitor being the primary monitor.

[MichaMMA]

no worry,.. its just that a bug can be closed as “invalid”, a wish is never invalid

[FearlessSwan217]

Thanks… Yes… that would solve the access to the flight menu, but as explained in my original post, (with pictures) the Central MSFS screen cannot be located on the Centre Monitor because I can’t access General options and Control Options.

Or these… … …

or this… .. ..

Not to mention any of the associated dialogue menus… like for example selecting the airport departure point… or creating a flight plan.

================
Trust me, I did begin with the Central MSFS screen on the front Monitor - as well as the front monitor being the main Windows display. It was just not viable.
So I created the extra window to make Flight Sim life bearable.

(BTW. I only recently changed the Main Windows 10 display to the right monitor when upgrading to Windows 11… … Windows 11 does not allow the Task bar to be positioned at the top with Auto hide… … It is easier now that the main display is on the right monitor, but that is not the main issue.)

Surely it is not a major difficulty for the in-flight display on the Main MSFS screen to be made adjustable… as I recall X-Plane has that capacity as normal.

And yes… it is Experimental…which is why I expect feedback and suggestions would be welcomed would they not???
Surely fellow simmers would have no reason to argue against my suggestion?

Cheers

[Pieter2427]

@FearlessBead399

And yes… it is Experimental…which is why I expect feedback and suggestions would be welcomed would they not???
Surely fellow simmers would have no reason to argue against my suggestion?

It’s a fine suggestion and indeed feedback is welcomed. I was trying to find a work-around for now

[Sling380]

Nice setup you have there. I have to say that to date It has been shown by the actions so far that there appears to be very little motivation to do any of the things that the cockpit building community wants and needs. This is a big one but there are many others. Pretty much everyone of these items has been either ignored or had a half baked implementation so they can call it done.
My cockpit will end up similar to yours but I’ve been hanging back hoping that changing the viewpoint and FOV per screen would be implemented at some point.

[FearlessSwan217]

Pieter2427
Also: Why not simply make your center monitor the primary display in Windows? You can show/drag your taskbar on another screen or have that taskbar shown on all screens.

I just did a few tests here (3 monitor setup) and I really can’t see what your problem is. If you drag your central MSFS screen to the middle monitor, make it full screen via Alt+Enter, you can then just enable to additional screens left and right of it. Despite the right monitor being the primary monitor.

Update: I made another (very nervous) effort to do as you suggested. Not that I was unaware of this option… just that I had originally discarded it because of the REAL difficulty in lining up windows without having access to adjustment bars in the experimental options window at the same time as having all the windows in full screen.

HOWEVER… now that I am well past that (and have the numbers settled and recorded on paper) I was able to “take a risk” and move the main MSFS window to the front - thus eliminating one additional window.

Although this option still results in a few inconveniences, I have to agree that it is now a better option - largely because the GPU is not working so hard to produce that extra screen.

Some of the inconveniences are:

• Having to hit Alt+Enter every time I want to access the home window & options.

• As mentioned further above, if you want to “tweak” the position of the left and right windows, you cannot do that while the front window is in full screen - so you need to guess and then return to full size to see if your guess was right.

• MSFS task bar windows open in full size right in front window thus needing to be moved to a side window so we can see the forward view… however, that problem is minimized with the //42 FLOW application which replaces the MSFS menu bar and has its own menu windows that can be adjusted to a more elegant size… … as well as provide so many more features

So thanks for the challenge. I think this is an improvement on the way I had it.
I can only hope that Asobo will sometime in the future implement adjustment for the main window as well as the additional windows … and ideally with the home and options menus as a separate window aways available during flight with all flight windows in full screen.

A dream wish would be to also be able to adjust each camera view of the plane independently in each window. At the moment, you can line up the “world” independently, but the plane itself is “fixed” so that all windows move together with whatever cockpit camera position is made.

This means that it is not possible to make the left and right cockpit view join perfectly with the front view - there are either some bits missing or there are duplicate bits where the windows join. (this is to do with the size of screens - 55inch in my case - not being the actual width of the particular cockpit of the selected plane… … eg. the difference between a single seater and a dual seat aircraft.

Anyway… I have all my views set up pretty well to disguise these small imperfections.
Cheers.

[Pieter2427]

@FearlessBead399

Having to hit Alt+Enter every time I want to access the home window & options.

A work-around can be to memorize the keyboard shortcuts (Home to restart and End to return to main menu) Or bind custom keys on your peripherals(s) to certain menu actions.

Isn’t //42 FLOW capable of making shortcuts to those actions?

I fully symphatize with your request, by the way. Just wanted to give you a few options to try

Great to hear you now have better performance!

[FearlessSwan217]

Thanks for your encouragement and empathy.
Yes I understand your suggestion, but of course it still does not help because while the main MSFS window is in full screen, half of the options are hidden below the dashboard.
That is what I meant be hitting Alt + Enter to “access” home and options.
So even if I did bind menu actions to //FLOW and/or peripheral buttons, Alt + Enter is still required to be able to see all the opened menu/options fields.

Having played around with the new arrangement for the past day or so, it is working out OK. Just a few things to get used to… … for example making sure I click on the front window before hitting Alt+Enter… otherwise whatever other window or menu is active is sent into full screen.

And I needed to slightly re adjust the left and right environment views so that they joined correctly - and this could not be done with the front window in full screen… so it was a bit of a trial and error method to eventually get the parameters right.

Anyway… if Asobo never come to the party and make a separate configuration window for menus and options so that all three game windows can be adjusted in real time, what I have done now will be livable… …even though the three adjustments we have do not result in precise alignment of the environment from top to bottom of the screen… … eg. we have no keystone parameter - and no “horizontal rotation” in addition to the Lateral, Vertical and Roll offsets.

The other problem is not being able to adjust the cockpit view independently in each window - which results in not being able to perfectly match the joins between the front and side views of the plane.
Like… you can match them using the experimental window adjustments, but then the environment gets moved out of alignment. ie. you cannot adjust the plane without shifting the environment. So you have to make some compromise by getting the environment aligned as a priority and then moving the cockpit camera view to disguise the anomalies.

Anyway, happy flying and lets hope for what we dream.

[PHSepp796]

Have you checked your controlpanel on scale settings

[FearlessSwan217]

Of course. (please read through this topic).

[PHSepp796]

Must have over read,

The thing i noticed sometime is when playing on single screen it looks like it is out of screen boundaries and seemed overscanned, and it looks like i only get a 1/4 of a page,
So that why i think related to desktop settings, and not so much of sim settings.
For me alt enter works fine if pressed 2 times to fill the screen as normal but for you
It is a hazard, unfortunatly i can not be off assistance in this matter, but i hope you get it fixed.

Regards

[FearlessSwan217]

Thanks Sebastiaan. Do not worry. There is nothing to fix. My Sim works fine with my 6 screens.

This discussion is only about getting the developers of MSFS to include some more advance controls for multi-screen cockpit set ups. If they did that the Simulator would become suitable for full cockpit builders as well as just for X Box games on a single screen or two.

MSFS is a great flight SIM but as is often the case, if a developer becomes too complacent thinking that no one is going to beat them, and so do not bother to progress with making it better than what it is, someone WILL come up with something better and take half their market share.

If X Plane linked up with Google earth to provide even better global graphics, Xplane would beat MSFS by a mile… unfortunately even though X Plane’s simulator is better, they somehow missed the boat with graphics.

[FearlessSwan217]

Different Request related to this topic

Ability to shift the RENDERED PLANE of environment and aircraft independently (separate frustums) for dual seat cockpits

This WISH topic is quite different to other topics related to cockpit seat position This post has been updated due to subsequent discussion below and better understanding See Contributions on 1 June 2023 by @BeardyBrun @PHSepp796 @azpilot61 @FlyerOneZero @bTdWolf This WISH is for an ability to offset an aircraft orientation independently to the world or environment. This wish is for the ability to laterally shift/offset the entire rendered world (including any set camera view) without chang…

[DrDave9011]

Just came accross your post. Great sim and have seen it on other medium. To get 8 monitors, 2 main windows 11 & MSFS, 5 for msfs windows (2 popout and 3 render windows), I went to 2 PCs with WidevieW.

How did you get 6 monitors on one PC? 2 GPUs? Can’t find how to do that. My Ryzon 9 cpu motherboard has only 1pcie x16 and 1 pcie x1 slots.

Can you help?

However, my setup seems to work great at 60-80 fps on both machines.

[FearlessSwan217]

Hi Dave,
I could not figure out from your explanation where you have 8 screens set up in the cockpit.

Anyway, to answer your question, my Graphics card does 4 screens. RTX 3080 Ti
Three 55 inch TVs for front, left and right views plus one 15 inch touch screen for pilot instrument panel.

Then I connected the co pilot 15 inch touch screen instrument panel to the HDMI out from the on-board graphics (motherboard)… (which is activated in the bios).

That makes 5 displays from the computer.

Then I installed “spacedesk” on the computer and the “spacedesk app” on my 8 inch Android Tablet. The Tablet connects to the computer as monitor 6 via WiFi.

I have a separtate WiFi router connected to my home network in the the Flight Sim shed. The computer is connected to the Router via CAT cable and the Tablet is connected to “spacedesk” via WiFi - thus they are “on the same network”.

So 6 monitors show up in the “Display Settings” on Windows.
I arrange the windows in the correct order and orientation so that the mouse cursor follows in the correct direction from screen to screen.

The three instrument panels display AirManager panels so they do not eat any measurable FPS

I run my three TV monitors at 4K and I get about 40 FPS.
My Graphics settings in MSFS are mostly high (not ULTRA) but I have a few settings on medium because high makes no difference. A few settings are turned off because frankly they just eat FPS for no visible benefit.

Strangly, I was getting 70-90 FPS when I was running Windows 11.
I went back to Windows 10 for several reasons… the main one being that Windows 11 did not allow the task bar to go on the top of the screen.
There were a few other bugs with Windows 11 that I could not solve and eventually I had a computer crash and could not recover from System Restore.

Fortunately I had done a full Backup of Windows 10 so I installed another 1TB SSD and restored Windows 10 to that… then used that as the boot Disk.

When I reinstalled Windows 10, it took me back a couple of MSFS updates, so I had to re download the updates. That was no problem but I noticed that my GPU was running at 100%. I found that DX12 was the issue there so I selected DX11 in the MSFS Graphics options.

Having 40 FPS is not a problem because at 4K I still get a pretty smooth performance.
My CPU runs at less than 10% load.
But I am still puzzled why I was getting 70-90 FPS on Windows 11 (sometimes 100+)
I will have to look carefully to see if there is some other setting that I have different to the way it was with Windows 11.

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Anyway, now I have three 1TB SSD on my computer. One is the Windows System with MSFS, one is resreved exclusively for System back up, and the other I use for addons, rolling Cache and other data hungry periphrals that do not need to go on the main system disk.

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I have wandered off topic a bit. So back to your set up.
I originally considered 2 computers but decided that it might create more problems than it solved that way. I was concerned about network latency, cost, and power consumption.
Also at the time I was going to go with X-Plane but they wanted two licences.
When MSFS finally offered the multi-screen function I already had my single computer set up.

That is about all from me.
Sorry about the long text without illustrations.
I can always go back and add a picture if needed.
cheers
Alan

[DrDave9011]

Wow, thanks so much for such a detailed explanation.

My setup is a bit of a cluge. Server an $800 Ryzon 7, GTX 1660 and 16 g ram. Client is an old ThinkPad I7, GTX 1660, 16 g ram. Both with 1 x16 and 1 x1 pcie slots. Neither is a “gaming” pc.

So I had to be creative to run MSFS and its FPS. But so far sll is well.

I’m about to start building a sim similar to yours. My instrument panel is the Real Sim Gear G1000 suite. Does very well with C510 Mustang.

[DrDave9011]

PS Alan,

I really like your enclosure. How did you build your side panels. Terrific interior.