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  • Multimonitor loving

    published on 7/19/2006 7:49 PM

    I have added the multimonitor support for OpenGL so now I have started to use the screensaver as my default screensaver both at home and at work. For dual head cards the opengl renderer will be a lot faster because as it is now I join the renderer's so they share the data across all monitors. In other words all textures and meshes will only have to be uploaded once. Not once per monitor as it is with my current D3D implementation. The one thing it still lacks is support for picking the screen resolution but I'll add that later. Anyway it's always preferred to keep your desktop resolution because it's a resolution that works, the screensaver will start up faster (Switching resolutions does take some time) and there isn't any chance that desktop icons, windows and such gets moved during the resolution change.

    The next thing to do before the first release is a scene picker window. So you can, at the very least, disable the scenes you don't want to see. I'll see if I can't throw in a preview window in there to so you don't have to actually start the screensaver to see the scene in question.

    Furthermore it looks like I have to implement a launcher also to get this to work as I want to. Currently I use the cg dll files from NVidia and there doesn't seem to be any way to link with them dynamically. Furthermore I don't want to copy them into the system32 dir and in the process possibly break other applications. The solution will be a small launcher app that starts the screensaver from it's application dir where the cg dll files are place next to the exe.

    Even my new XBox seems to think I keep using it too much. Last night it froze on me just as the previous one did. Most seems to think it has to do with heat but my xbox is placed very open so the next thing to do would be to put and actual fan on it. Like the thing isn't loud as it is. I just hope Sony does a better job with their PS3 in the noise and stability areas than Microsoft has.

    Happy coding people!