Multi Monitor Support planned?

[Apocrypha]

Multi-monitor would make game mastering a whole lot easier.
Please make happen!

Connecting a second player session and then displaying it on a horizontal TV on the table is what I do. Works fine. What I really wish for is that FG wasn't a monolithic container that had to hold all the many separate windows. Would be great if they were free floating like Gimp.

[pollux]

Would be great if they were free floating like Gimp.

While this would be cool, it's the flavor of multi-monitor support that is least likely to happen. Unity has no support for this model, and it's not a common model in video games in general. I'm less certain of this, but I think there may also be technical drawbacks to having multiple 3d accelerated windows running simultaneously (map fx and LoS are 3d accelerated systems and FGU supports opening many of those types of items). People do widely recognize that this is a cool model, it just has really big technical tradeoffs that make it not really viable unless Unity delivers it as a platform feature... and that's unlikely if there are 3d tradeoffs associated with the approach and also because few video-games benefit from this type of approach so outside of FGU there isn't a big market of game developers asking Unity to build the feature.

What Unity itself has support for, and which is more likely but still a significant amount of work for the dev team to adapt for FGU... is to get a menu that lets you select several displays to dedicate to an FGU instance... then when you go full-screen FGU goes full screen on all of those displays and you can create FGU "windows" (which are not windows from the perspective of the operating system) on each display.

[The High Druid]

Multi-monitor would make game mastering a whole lot easier.
Please make happen!

My (seemingly distant) dream as a GM is to be able to have the map fully occupy one screen and all the extra stuff (Chat, combat tracker, story entries etc. etc. on the other). Unfortunately screen stretching doesn't achieve this (especially when your monitors are different sizes and/or resolutions), and a second FG instance doesn't give you a GM's privileges for the map or the other stuff. It's a huge shame the number one item on the wishlist wasn't implemented.

In fairness to Smiteworks, I'm not sure any other VTT has a good solution for this either

I have been looking at Foundry recently (I don't want to switch, in no small part because of the investment in FG and I otherwise love the program) which might offer a partial solution because you can give another connected user GM privileges, so if you can have two instances you could have one GM-enabled instance per screen.

[Trenloe]

There have been a few issues reported by the devs as to why this wasn't done. Some have already been posted in this thread. I believe that another major issue was no standard way of doing this across all platforms - FG Unity has to support at least Window, Mac and Linux.

[Noonien]

Hmm I am using 2 monitors without any problem. One of them is even an ultrawide monitor.
I have the map and player info on one monitor, and everythinbg else like combat tracker, party window, story, chat and so on on the other monitor.
No problems detected with this setup so far.

[Trenloe]

Hmm I am using 2 monitors without any problem. One of them is even an ultrawide monitor.
I have the map and player info on one monitor, and everythinbg else like combat tracker, party window, story, chat and so on on the other monitor.
No problems detected with this setup so far.

People want multiple separate windows outside of the main FG desktop - so that they can distribute individual FG window entities across different monitors.

Stretching the single FG application across multiple monitors has always been the way to do it.

[Noonien]

Ah ok sorry, understood now

[The High Druid]

Stretching the single FG application across multiple monitors has always been the way to do it.

This is an awkward and ugly fudge though.

- Half(ish) your hotbuttons are on each screen making them a pain to use (especially with a mouse)
- If you fill the left side with the map you cover up your players, if you fill the right side you cover up the menu buttons.
(No, you don't *have* to fill the screen, but then you loose even more space - see below)
- If your screens are different sizes you either a) loose a chunk of the larger screen (in my case the top 1/3 of the larger monitor) or b) loose a chunk of the FG window on the smaller screen (and thus loose the players again, or some of the menu buttons)

So, yeah, as a "way to do it" it has some major flaws.

[Trenloe]

Yes, we all know the limitations of stretching across more than one screen.

The devs have given their view and why they can't do single window undocking outside of the FG main application. Technologically that might change in the future and we might get it. I'd like it, but it's not a deal breaker for me.

I think this "discussion" has ran it's course. We're not going to change the situation or the devs minds.