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asked by (15 points)
Hello,

For one of our research project, we updated our system from Xplane 10 to Xplane 11 especially to get multi-screens support. However, we are running on Linux (Fedora) and it seems that the multi-screen support is ONLY working for Windows which is very unfortunate.

Thus I do have two questions:

1) Is is true that muli-screen is only available for Windows OS?

2) Is there any plan to intergrate Linux support for this feature in the updates of Xplane 11?

Many thanks,

Best regards,

Jb Ch

1 Answer

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answered by (449 points)
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Best answer

Multimonitor support on Linux exists, but it's nothing resembling user friendly—getting it working will require a deep dive into the internals of your window manager.

You have a few options, in order of increasing difficulty:

  1. Configure your OS to treat all 3 monitors as a single, gigantic monitor. This is relatively easy, but obviously quite limiting.
  2. Use command line arguments to force X-Plane to allow you to configure three monitors. (Instructions on this below.) This may still require you to fiddle with your window manager (possibly extensively!) in order to get the actual window positioning right. (The OS doesn't provide a way for us to position windows such that the window manager won't move them... so it has to be done manually.)
  3. Figure out the exact, perfect xrandr configuration that allows X-Plane to configure the three monitors directly. This is possible—I'm told some people have figured it out—but I can't offer much guidance. The discussion here may help.

As you may have guessed, I think #2 is your best option (assuming configuring the displays as a single, triple-wide display won't suffice). By launching X-Plane with the command line argument --monitor_bounds, you can specify the size and position of each monitor manually, like this:

--monitor_bounds=<left>,<top>,<width>,<height>[<left>,<top>,<width>,<height>, . . .]

So, for two 1080p monitors side-by-side, you'd do this:

--monitor_bounds=0,0,1920,1080,1920,0,1920,1080

For three monitors, you'd obviously add another set of 4.

For a bit more discussion on how we came to this state, see the comments from Ben Supnik (X-Plane Desktop's product manager) here.

commented by (10 points)
I'm evaluating XPlane 11 for Linux to see whether it can handle four asymmetric viewing frustums on one Linux system, where each frustum is a different video port. The requirement is for human factors research, so the views have to be exact. Has anyone done this on a Linux system?
commented by (449 points)

@khentiamentiu, if you can get multimonitor support working on your system at all, each display can set independent FOV and visual offsets. (This is true for Mac, Windows, and Linux.) Again, though, because of differences in the OS configurations, we do not provide official support for this on Linux.

commented by (10 points)
FlightGear allows this easily on a single workstation, and this works across multiple OS configurations. I was looking into XPlane because you have better visual rendering, but I don't see anything in the XRandR documentation that would allow me to define multiple asymmetric frustums in 3D, where the pilot view is centered on display 2 of the four. Can you point me to a forum where achieving four or more asymmetric frustums in XPlane on one workstation is described, or to a user who has achieved this? Thanks!
commented by (449 points)

If you're talking about programmatically defining the views, we do not currently support that on multiple monitors. You would have to use the user interface (via Settings > Graphics) to set up the views... again, assuming you first got multiple monitors working on Linux.

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