Last EVE related post in a while, I promise! If you had enough of me and EVE, you should stop reading now… otherwise read on to see my latest trickery and hack.
So. On this year’s keynote of CCP held in Iceland (Fanfest), they had shown quite a cool feature: the game on multiple screens. This kinda inspired me, I thought it has to be possible to do this already. And what followed was yet another odyssey into technology and the question: can it be done?
The inspiration for me was one photograph… this one:
New Eden extended by 3
Obviously you have to be able to connect three screens. Now you see the problem is, that most graphic cards, even expensive ones (apart from things like ATI’s EyeFinity) only let you connect a maximum of two screens at any one time. However for EVE, with your ship always in center view, having the ship in one piece is quite important to the experience of the game, so you need either 1 or 3 screens.
Here’s where the first problem comes in. Most mainboards only allow you to connect ONE PCI-Express graphic card. With 16x speed that is for immense bandwidth and thus graphical processing. How do you fit it a second PCI-Express card when your board only takes one? Well. You see it is technically possible to connect a second 16x speed card onto a slot with only 1x speed. Problem is there is a physical blockage. So I went and by hand removed the block on the right side, allowing another card to fit in. Obviously you only get 1x speed instead of 16. This isn’t pretty and voided my warranty – but it works!
A bit crammed, but… well:
Don’t worry, the cooling is perfectly fine. They are not touching – even if it looks like that. Besides the cheap one is a passive cooler – so everything’s… cool. With those two finally placed in, I could in theory attach a maximum of 6 screens… Whoa!
Fancy a TV wall? Six screens, maybe? For now, let’s just use three.
Everything is working. Drivers installed, and the screen is in fact detected and Windows says it now has a new display adapter. The screen is showing its wallpaper. I am impressed about myself how far I have gotten already.
Next problem is that Vista does not allow for horizontal spanning (like you have 3 monitors on your desk, but Windows thinks it is one). This was removed in Vista and is not coming back in Windows 7. Windows XP however did this. With the so-called Windows Display Driver Model, or WDDM, which Vista and W7 uses, spanning is not possible. So full-screen on 3 screens is a no-go. But my journey didn’t end here.
There is this little nifty hack called SoftTH (Software Triple Head). This effectively forces any DirectX based game to use all screens. How does it work?
The image is rendered on your expensive beloved graphic card. This tool then takes care of the rest and divides the image by three, and sends the parts onto its respective screens. Left to left, center to center, and right to right. This involved a bit of configuration and I can provide you with my config file if you need it.
And that was it. EVE is now forced to use all screens! Thus, my command bridge is now complete. Bask in the presence of the most immersive gaming experience. EVE To The Power Of Three.
Threesome: Main view in the middle, communication and information on the left, sensors on the right
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7 comments
Jim Luc says:
June 10, 2010 at 1:19 am (UTC 0)
Can you please post your settings file for softth? I’ve got 3 graphics cards, 2 are running SLI mode, and can’t seem to get softth to work. Thanks!
SystemError51 says:
June 10, 2010 at 8:19 am (UTC 0)
; SoftTH Config For Emperor’s Screen
; Will not crash on alt-tab
; To be used with SoftTH 1.09 RC1
[config]
deviceIDLeft=1
deviceIDright=2
secondaryWidth=1920
secondaryHeight=1080
secondaryRefresh=60
secondaryFormat=RGB16D
uploadMethod=d3d
forceAffinity=0
borderSize=0
sideExtraWidth=0
noHotkeys=0
noOSD=0
[Direct3D]
lensCorrection=1
lensCorrectionEdge=0
hideNondefaultDevices=0
forceHorizontalFOV=0
forceResolutionWidth=5760
forceResolutionHeight=1080
force16bitDepth=1
sleepBeforeRead=2
useMultihead=0
delayedPresent=1
autoSquash=1
altResetBehaviour=0
d3d8dll=auto
[hooks]
doHooking=1
doScaleMouseCoordinates=0
doScaleFromLeftScreen=0
doScaleWindowRects=1
doScaleClientRects=1
mouseXoffset=auto
[modes]
auto
Jim Luc says:
June 10, 2010 at 2:17 pm (UTC 0)
Thanks!
A couple things though – I don’t see 1.09 RC available for download on their site, just beta 1.08.
Also, perhaps mine isn’t hooking properly, I’ve created a shortcut like this:
target: “C:\Program Files (x86)\CCP\EVE – Copy\bin\ExeFile.exe”
Start in: “C:\Program Files (x86)\CCP\EVE – Copy\SoftTH”
Still no difference, the game starts up like normal. I also tried putting the “start in” folder set to a SoftTH folder in my user directory. Because Eve is a bit different than other games, there’s a workaround, right?
SystemError51 says:
June 10, 2010 at 2:26 pm (UTC 0)
1.09 RC1 is here:
http://www.kegetys.net/dl.php/SoftTH109b_rc1.zip
The shortcut is correct. In the SoftTH folder there have to be the files from the hack.
Also, it is important that you place the SoftTH.cfg in the root of your user folder, for example C:\Users\[yourUserName]\SoftTH.cfg
Jim Luc says:
June 11, 2010 at 2:10 am (UTC 0)
Hmm, it still isn’t hooking
I’ve put SoftTH.cfg in my user folder and in “C:\Program Files (x86)\CCP\EVE – Copy\SoftTH”.
I’m running in SLI mode, with a 3rd graphics card running my 3rd (right) monitor, does this make a difference?
Perhaps if I knew more of what this does exactly, I’m still quite puzzled how it actually “hooks”, and why and how the files get executed. Thanks so much for all your help
SystemError51 says:
June 11, 2010 at 10:14 am (UTC 0)
One SoftTH.cfg file is enough – it will only load one, and the first place it looks, apparently according to config, is the root of your user folder.
SoftTH might not work with 3 or more graphic cards, the author explicitly mentioned two GPUs. I assume other uses might still work but might not be supported. Also, I do not use SLI mode, as my second GPU is not made for it.
In essence the hack hooks up to DirectX and overrides some of the normal settings, and forces higher graphic resolutions. Image gets rendered and sent to its correct monitors.
As said before, it is important that the IDs for the monitors is correct in the config file. If it still however does not hook, check for output in the SoftTH.log file which gets generated each time you run EVE on SoftTH mode.
Jim Luc says:
June 14, 2010 at 3:23 pm (UTC 0)
That makes sense actually. I have 3 cards, with one card running each monitor, even though 2 of them are in SLI.
I did try running it in Compatibility mode, but it didn’t hook either. I guess I’ll wait till I pick up a couple 400 series cards