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Spanning Multiple Monitors

GMC supports running multiple MPFDisplay parents across multiple monitors, with a little extra setup in Godot. This guide will help you setup your project to span across multiple screens so you can direct slides to a specific screen.

Work in Progress

Every operating system is different and we don't have the resources to test every scenerio on every system. If you are working with multiple screens, your help and feedback will be greatly appreciated to aid us in ironing out kinks and ensuring that this guide works for all cases!

Click to expand guide images

The images in this guide can be expanded to full size by clicking on them.

Set your Project Settings

Open the Project Settings menu and go to Display > Window, and in the upper right corner toggle on Advanced Settings to see additional configuration options.

  • Viewport Width / Height: Set these to be the maximum bounding box to contain all of your displays.
  • Initial Position Type: Absolute
  • Resizable: Off
  • Borderless: On
  • Window Width / Height Override: The same as the viewport width and height
  • Embed Subwindows: Off

In the example images, we will configure the project for two 1600x900 displays, so 3200x900 overall.

image

Create a custom Window scene

GMC uses a scene with an MPFWindow root node as the entry point for all displays and slides. There is a default window.tscn included in GMC that works for single-screen projects, but for a multi-screen project you'll need to create your own.

In your project root /slides folder create a new scene with MPFWindow as the root node and save the scene (probably as window.tscn but you may choose something else).

The MPFWindow node will automatically size itself to the Viewport Width / Height defined in your Project Settings.

Duplicating the built-in window

Instead of hand-creating the initial MPFWindow and main MPFDisplay node, you can find the built-in window.tscn file at res://addons/mpf-gmc/slides/window.tscn and right-click it to "Duplicate" the file, giving the duplicate a new name.

Make sure you move the new file into your own project's "slides" folder, it should NOT be kept within the addons/mpf-gmc/ area of your project, as that is the location for the GMC default assets.

Right-click on your new scene in the FileSystem window and select Set as Main Scene. This can be confirmed in the project settings.

In the example images, we use the name "window_override", stored in our <gmc project root>/slides/overrides/.

image

Create Main Display

The first display will be run on the main screen, and doesn't require extra setup. In your scene tree add a new node of type MPFDisplay and give it a name (this name will be how it's targeted in MPF slide_player ex: 'primary').

In the Inspector panel set is_default to true and select an initial slide. For most use cases, the default GMC initial slide will work (/addons/mpf-gmc/slides/startup.tscn). Expand the Layout > Transform section and set the size to be the dimensions of the main monitor.

In the example image, we are setting up the first of two displays, "a_display" and "b_display".

image

Create a Window Container

The second display will run on a separate monitor, so Godot must be configured to generate a new application window on that monitor.

Under your main Window root node, create a new node of type Window (just the default Godot Window, not the custom GMC MPFWindow).

In the Inspector panel, set the following:

  • Initial Position: Absolute
  • Position: The coordinates from the top-left of the main monitor
  • Size: The dimensions of the screen

Under the Flags dropdown, set the following:

  • Transient: On
  • Unresizable: On
  • Borderless: On

image

Now create a new MPFDisplay child node of this Window. Set the same Initial Slide as the other, and under Layout > Transform > Size set the dimensions of the second monitor. Give this node a name that you will reference in MPF to target it (ex: 'mini-display').

image

In the Editor scene view, you should now see two copies of the MPF logo, one for each display.

You may need to change the layout positions of either of the display nodes a few times to get everything placed properly, and if you are programming and testing on one computer, you may need to make layout and sizing changes when you switch to the computer and display hardware actually mounted in your machine.

Configure Slides in MPF

In your MPF config files, you can now target a specific display using the name of the MPFDisplay nodes. Whichever node is tagged as default does not need a target, but you can provide one for clarity. If your main display node is named "primary" and your other node is named "mini-display" then you could setup your attract mode like this:

slide_player:
    mode_attract_started:
        attract_main_slide:
            target: primary
        attract_mini_slide:
            target: mini-display

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