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What is your screen resolution and window layouts?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by GTHell, Jul 27, 2016.

  1. GTHell

    GTHell

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    I'm started to get uncomfortable now when using Unity 3D because everything is either stretching or will be minimize into a tab because there's a lot of thing that can't be shown in one monitor.

    I thinking about setting up a second monitor to display all the tab I wanted. Please share your current layout and setup. I'm doubtful person so don't get mad at me for asking you too much of a question.

    Hey:: I'm not a professional developer; just doing development for fun and now I'm hitting the point where I see a lot of negative thing about the engine and especially the bug that never get fix even got complain by the community. English is not my first language! Pardon me.
     
  2. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    This is my screen layout.
    screen layout.png

    I probably need to get two more fullhd screens at some point.
     
  3. MV10

    MV10

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    13" laptop at 3200 x 1800 and at home my second monitor is a 27" at 2560 x 1440. At the office I have a pair of 22" monitors at 1920 x 1080 chained over DisplayPort. I plan to add another monitor to each location rotated to portrait mode, which I find much more useful for reading and certain programming tasks.

    For Windows I highly recommend DisplayFusion Pro for retaining your sanity switching between different monitor configurations, keeping your desktop icons in the right place (if you use them, I run Start10 so I never have to see that god-awful Metro system), managing wallpaper, window layouts, etc.
     
    ramand likes this.
  4. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Or one of those ultra-wide monitors. Shame they're so much more expensive. I'd love to have one.
     
  5. Cepheid

    Cepheid

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    My setup is a bit overkill on the Unity department as my home office is mainly made as a studio in mind with it doubling as a games development center of sorts. With that in mind, my current setup consists of:

    Two 22" monitors 1920x1080 resolutions.

    The left monitor is used to display the full scene view and 2 orthographic angles.
    Whereas the right monitor is used to display the Asset tab, inspector, heirarchy, animator and console. As well as various miscellaneous tabs as they become necessary.

    One 19" monitor 1920x1080 resolution.
    This is rotated into portrait mode on the far left for web browsing and coding.

    One 27" monitor 2560x1440 resolution.
    This mounted above both of the 22"'s which is used solely for the game view and various web stuff.

    This is a bit of finicky setup, but as I said. My home office is practically designed for studio work more than games development. So this is how I got it to work for me. I do feel bad for having so many monitors and yet not being as skilled as some of the many other brilliant people on these forums.

    I completely agree with MV10 on the DisplayFusion Pro though. It's saved me so much frustration.
     
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  6. MV10

    MV10

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    Shoot, it doesn't matter if you do nothing but run Excel and a browser, lots of monitors are always better.
     
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  7. SteveJ

    SteveJ

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    1024x768, like a boss.
     
  8. MV10

    MV10

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    "640x480 ought to be enough pixels for anybody."
    -- Not Bill Gates
     
  9. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    Nah. I'd like to have one BIG fullhd monitor in the middle, and two smaller fullhds turned sideways on the sides plus one extra screen elsewhere. I don't really need resolution above 1920x1080.
     
    Martin_H likes this.
  10. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    That's not too far away from where I'm going to end up with my next upgrade. Only I want a 4K for the middle.
     
    Martin_H likes this.
  11. Martin_H

    Martin_H

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    Why not 1920 x 1200? Gives you a few more visible lines of codes vertically.
     
  12. KnightsHouseGames

    KnightsHouseGames

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    I actually use triple monitors in a non standard configuration

    I have 2 720p monitors stacked on top of each other inside my corner desk's hutch area, with the top one on a monitor arm that is actually mounted upside down so that the top monitor stays on top. Then my third monitor is my laptop's 1080p display. The laptop drives one of the 720p displays, my linux machine drives the top one.

    Since I've been a member of Broke Phi Broke since birth, all this stuff was bought on the cheap, like the top display was $40 at a pawn shop because it was scratched. You just gotta be clever.

    I'm thinking soon I'm gonna upgrade the linux machine and drive both of the 720p displays off of that, then hook my TV up to my laptop so I can have 4 displays.

    I'd have like 8 monitors if it was possible, I'm just a monitor fiend. Go 4k with like, 4 1080 displays surrounding it so it looks like I'm Batman or somethin.
     
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  13. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Unusual resolutions tend to be far more expensive. A 1920 by 1200 monitor costs the same as a 2560 by 1440.
     
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  14. Martin_H

    Martin_H

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    When I bought my first 1920x1200 screens, the other resolution you mentioned either didn't really exist for consumer grade monitors or was way out of my price range. Since I always had to choose monitors with decent color specs and viewing angles for graphics work, I always had to look outside of the most mainstream categories anyway, so it might well be that the screens were a fair bit more expensive than a bog standard 1080p TN panel screen, but within that "artist friendly" mid tier market segment of screens I think the 16:10 resolutions were a bit more common and the price difference wasn't that crazy. It always felt worth it for me to pay a few bugs extra for them.

    But if you don't need that kind of screen you're probably right and better off just buying more or bigger ones.
     
  15. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    At one point other resolutions were more common and affordable but then 1080p became a very popular resolution.
     
  16. Player7

    Player7

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    my general base layout http://i.imgur.com/bQMbuUw.png

    I don't even run unity fullscreen (well maybe I would if there was more reason too), I do run things like maya/ps in fullscreen, but unity works well without needing to hog an entire screen same with running visual studio also similar window size as Unity.. maybe 4grid scene view in Unity would force me to switch to fullscreen, but then its not like it has any such level design tools that really make that worthwhile. So I don't run most stuff fullscreen, too much window switching for me, that works better when I can still see other applications in view behind other windows to quickly click on to bring to front.

    Anyway Unity really should make it so that detached panels can be toggled from being always ontop over the main Unity window interface.. its soo annoying. ie You detach the Game panel, resize to something larger, then switch back to the main Unity window, but no Game panel will stay over the top of everything. Then you're messing about moving things all the time.

    Also dumb sh/it like the "Maximise on Play" button that, another half baked button. ie it only does its sht when you press play, if you want to toggle the button during play to see the rest of the panels.. nooo can't have that working, that would make far to much sense. "Maximise Toggle" is what it should be called and work like.
     
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2016
    MV10 likes this.
  17. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    I think DPI of a 4k display would be too high for my liking unless you're talking about a display with 50 inch diagonal. So, I don't see much point in getting 4k resolution.
     
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  18. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

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    I use a laptop. 1366 * 768. Or something akin to that.

    On this set up screen space is at a premium. I generally use the tall layout. I find it offers the most efficient use of space.

    Inspector as narrow as possible taking up the full height on the far right of the screen. The next panel has the hierarchy at the top and the project window in the bottom, again set as narrow as possible. The rest of the screen is taken up with the scene view, with the game view in another tab.

    The game view is normally set to maximise on play. If I need to see the game and the scene at the same time I'll dock one below the other.

    Its not perfect. But it works well enough for my purposes. I'm not sure being constrained to a desk for development would be worth the extra screen real estate. I tend to code on the couch with the kids running around and the wife engaged in her latest creative projects. A desk would likely move me out of that family environment.
     
    GTHell likes this.
  19. SteveJ

    SteveJ

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    I have a 28" 4K but have to run it at 1440p as Unity is unreadable at 4K on such a "small" monitor. It kinda sucks.
     
  20. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    If you're using both an OS and applications that support nice scaling then the higher resolution results in smoother looking stuff, rather than smaller stuff. It's pretty nice.
     
  21. Martin_H

    Martin_H

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    What I'd want to be easily able to do with such a screen is run it at 1080p for gaming, with "point filtered" upscaling, so that the pixels stay nice and crisp. Am I guessing correctly that they still blindly assume you always want upscaled resolutions filtered somehow, which makes them "blurry"? This always bugged me when I wanted to run retro stuff that didn't support crisp pixel-perfect software upscaling, on my 1920x1200 screen.
     
  22. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    I don't think "smoother looking stuff" is a good enough reason to waste money on 4k display.

    Higher resolution makes sense with more screen estate. If you get monitor of roughly same size, with 4x pixels and you will have to display things on using 4x zoom all the time, there's almost no advantage compared to original monitor.

    Also, murphy's law says that most applications won't be properly supporting scaling.
     
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  23. MV10

    MV10

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    Oh I didn't realize Unity layouts were the point. In my case the Unity layout almost doesn't matter. 99% of the time I only use it to compile and run the game, or to add Hierarchy junk if I need a container for start-up, or to create a new blank file in the project. In fact I kind of wish they'd just make a Visual Studio extension that let me do those things from the IDE. The Unity editor is nice for quick-and-dirty planning or prototyping, or if you need a custom editor (my game map involves several hundred x,y coords for labels and markers and such, so it was pretty easy to write a custom editor to spit all that out), but I'm finding when you're really deep into a good sized codebase the Unity editor itself is mostly a waste of RAM most of the time.

    Big screens are great for IDEs. My project has five shared libraries, the client-side code, and server-side code and I often want to be in all those solutions more or less at once -- plus database views, the object inspector view, a couple debug outputs, project notes, etc. ... really great to just sprawl useful windows like that across several screens so you're never hunting for your windows.

    For awhile I was using a product that let me set up my app windows how I liked, then sort of "snapshot" it and save it to restore later on, but it wasn't being actively updated and it wasn't reliable with high-DPI for some reason. (The dude who wrote it runs something like sixteen 48" screens). DisplayFusion Pro has some window positioning features but not save/restore like that, though I've requested it.
     
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  24. GTHell

    GTHell

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    Thank everyone for helping me out. Big screen is great but I think two monitor will overkill that. What I really want is not to Alt+tab and not maximize tab at all. Two monitor with 2x1920 will be able to show everything without alt+tab. I don't know if it going to work because I never tried multiple monitor at all.
     
  25. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    Unfortunately there's good reason for that filtering, which is that unless your actual resolution can evenly divide into your desired resolution then the pixels are going to be of uneven sizes. It's the downsize to TFT monitors - they quality really takes a dive at non-native resolutions.
    Which is why I haven't done so. Still, on my laptop, which came with a high-DPI display whether I wanted it or not... it's awesome.

    For programming it's a bit of a luxury. Crisper looking text sure is nice, and there might be a little advantage in that I can reduce the font size a smidgen and still have it easily readable (useful on a 12" monitor), but I can't say it's a life changer there. For artists, graphic designers, or other people where fine details actually make a difference, though, I imagine that a good quality*, high-res display would be awesome.

    I have been pleasantly surprised so far. Funnily, especially considering what I just wrote about usefulness to graphical folk, Photoshop is one of the applications that doesn't play nicely. (It mostly works, but isn't quite where it should be.)

    * Which, yes, means "even more expensive" in most cases.
     
  26. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    With two monitors you can keep an application maximized on each. On windows 7 and above you can also move windows between monitors quickly, using Windows+Cursor keys.

    He wants point filter for situations when monitor resolution would allow even pixel sizes. For example, displaying FullHD picture on 4k display (4k = 1920*2 x 1080*2). Afaik, monitor will apply blur filter even in thsi case.

    It is possible to have somewhat better scaling using GPU scaling on Nvidia cards. Would be great if it was possible to apply a shader to it too - in this case it would be possible to create proper approximation of the picture, instead of just blurring everything with bilinear filter.

    I'm on windows 7, so I'd expect every application to fail to work properly on higher resolution. Meaning that I won't be buying 4k display, unless it is also has sane dpi for some magical reason.
     
  27. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    Yeah, that rules it out. It's actually one of my favourite features of Win 10 that it adjusts nicely depending on the size monitor it's viewed on, not just the number of pixels. I've got my machine hooked up so that there's a switch to send the second monitor signal to either my second desk monitor or to my TV in the lounge room, and it was a nice surprise when everything all became couch comfortable by default.
     
  28. Martin_H

    Martin_H

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    I'm well aware of the interpolation issues (I'd be a S***ty digital artist if I wasn't ^^). Often I'd strongly prefer another form of compromise over interpolation, like just not using the full screen area and having an even upscale factor. E.g. on a 1920 x 1200 screen:
    800 x 600 - upscaled by factor of 2 with black bars left and right
    1600 x 1080 - no scaling, just black bars on all sides
    640 x 480 - if there's nothing important on the screen at the top and bottom, I'd try upscaling by factor of 3 and cropping to fit, otherwise 1280 x 960 with a lot of wasted space around that probably still looks better to me than interpolating it to fullscreen.

    I've played quite a lot of older 2D Windows games like Jagged Alliance 2, and it really bothered me how some of them look like a total mess when upscaled to an uneven factor and often also a different aspect ratio. Afair Dosbox gives you options like 2x / 3x upscaling in windowed mode, which can accomodate most screen setups without interpolation issues. But e.g. for Mech Commander I haven't found a solution yet. If you have an idea, please let me know!


    Gave me a good laugh! :D
     
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