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Specify which monitor to use for AppWall


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It seems Unigine always takes the top-left window when creating an AppWall layout. In some of our usecases we need this to be a different monitor, as we run third-party software on the first screen which is hardcoded to use the first monitor. When going over the documentation however I do not see any parameters for this. AppWall allows selecting height and width only, and main Unigine arguments only allow selecting which GPU to use but in this case all screens are on the same GPU. Is there some way we can instruct Unigine on which screen to position itself?

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Bemined

Unfortunately, there is no option to set the exact monitor as a starting one. All the connected displays are automatically used.

Could you please give us more details about your typical wall setups? Maybe there is an option to somehow extend the AppWall functionality for that use-case.

Thanks!

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Our setups can be heavily customised to the situation. For large productions we typically try to use dedicated hardware for the image generators, but to save on hardware costs we do try to minimise the number of computers in each setup. Since generating a smooth 30fps or even 60fps image is mostly GPU intense while the CPU has power to spare we often use computers with two GPUs and run two instances of Unigine, using the video adapter parameter to ensure each uses it's own GPU. In that case there can be for example two walls, one on GPU 0 using screens 0 and 1, and one on GPU 1 using screens 2 and 3. Any additional (third party) software runs on a separate pc typically in these setups.

For desktop simulators as well as for the instructor we typically do not have dedicated hardware for Unigine but it runs on the same computer as the other (third party) software. Layouts here can change depending on the situation, sometimes third party software has to be run on the first screen and Unigine has to go to the middle screen. Typically we do not use a wall here though but the default app.

IGSetup.png

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So in a perfect world the amount of parameters that needed to set the AppWall rendering is:

  • wall width (for example 4)
  • wall height (for example 1)
  • display whitelist (per GPU?)
    • for example, if we have 5 screens connected and whitelist is set to: 0 1 3 4 display with id 2 will be skipped
  • gpu adapter number

Is there anything that can be improved?

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I think a whitelist should work indeed. When using multiple GPUs our experience is that best performance is when displays are connected to the same GPU that is used for rendering, but our engineers can ensure that is correct when they configure the simulator on site, this does not need to be enforced by Unigine.

Our current solution is a bit hacky, using some custom changes in the source code as well as a custom launcher we specify the index of the top-left screen and start from there. It's not ideal though, we can't skip screens halfway a wall and what is worse is that the indices of screens does not always seem to be consistent, once in a while after a screen was turned off for whatever reason the order of screens seems to have changed in Windows and Unigine doesn't appear on the right screen anymore.

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Proper screen detection can be difficult task. We will think how we can change this behavior, but I would not expect that it would be fast.

If you can at least move your code out of the engine to the AppWall plugin side - it would be it would be (at least) easier to maintain and extend until the our implementation will land.

Thanks!

How to submit a good bug report
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