This isn't a bug report, it's a plea for some clarity on setting up perspectives correctly.
The wiki has a good explanation but unfortunately it's written by someone far too familiar with the technical aspects of the app and worded with many assumptions that aren't spelled out. This leads to a million questions at each step of the way and no way to resolve them. Trial and error becomes extremely long and drawn out, and little changes can make huge differences that don't help 'tune in' the settings.
My biggest problem is that I can't translate the real world of where my monitors are positioned into settings.
I have 4 monitors, 0, 1, 2, 3 (from left to right). The monitor I face is monitor 1. That means that monitor 0 is to the left of 1, and of course monitors 2 and 3 are to the right of it.
Monitor 1, the one I face directly at, is at 90 degrees to me. That is, the line from my nose to the screen is a 90 degree angle to the screen. Like it is for 100% of every person using a computer anywhere. In other words, it's right in front of me. About 800mm away.
Monitor 0, the one to the left, is butted up next to it, but it's angled slightly to still face me. I used a compass and found that it's 30 degrees swivelled.
In fact, all my monitors face me. I think that's going to be normal for most people. So they are all angled towards me. And since they're all touching each other, they describe a bit of a semi-circle.
So there's nothing complicated or special about any of this.
Again, using a compass, I can measure that they are all about 30 degrees twisted from each other. So I guess with 4 monitors, that means the 4 screens fill up about 120 degrees of my field of view.
So that's got to be totally typical. 4 identical screens, with their edges touching each other, all facing me.
But trying to enter that simple information into the perspectives fields is a nightmare. From reading the instructions a million times, I believe I should have:
central display: 1
viewer offset from central display: dist: 800. (I don't know what "horizontal" or "vertical" means. If I'm a bit tall and looking slightly down at the screens, does that mean the horizontal value should be positive? Or negative? Or should I be using the 'vertical' setting because it's a vertical distance? A simple drawing in the setup guide would be extremely useful for this.
Display 0: Swivel axis: I've set that to "right" after reading the wiki, but that's totally counter-intuitive. in fact, it's nonsensical. Everhy monitor can be swiveled clockwise or counter-clockwise. The axis is in the middle. Sure, some mounting hardware lets you swivel from the edge, but that's the exception. So this should simply let me specify "left, centre, or right" to indicate if >this< monitor is being rotated around it's central axis (like every monitor sold ON EARTH), or swivelled from it's left or right edge.
Display 0: Swivel angle: This should be a simple "counter-clockwise" or "clockwise", "looking down from above". The whole "using your right hand and thumb" thing is unnecessarily complex and confusing. In my case, as I said, my left monitor is about rotated about 30 degrees counter-clockwise. So I'm guessing I enter "30.0" and not "-30.0".
Likewise, for monitor 1 and 2 (the two screens to the right of my central display that are both about 30 degrees rotated clockwise relative to their immedlate neighbour to their left), do I enter "30" and "60", or "30" and "30"? Or should the values be "-30" and "-60", or "-30" and "-30", respectively?
Display 0: Sw. ax. lat. off. (Swivel axis lateral offset). Sorry, you've lost me in geometry terminology. Users really shouldn't be required to understand the technical system used to create the app. They should be able to tell the app something simple. The best I can work out what "sw. ax. lat. off." means is, "How far away is >this< monitor's swivel, relative to the central display's left or right edge of the screen". At least, that's what I think it means. It might mean "How far away is this monitor's swivel relative to the next monitor next to it". With 4 monitors, I don't know what this value means. Is it relative to the central display? Or to the display next to it? There's no way to know. Strangely, the app already knows the distance between monitors. It accurately guessed it in the main setup and correctly displayed each monitor as being 31" wide. So it should already be able to know how where the central pivot is (it's in the middle. In EVERY monitor sold with a stand.) And if it knows bezel sizes and gaps, it should be able to determine all other distances.
I've tried playing around with "Sw. ax dep. off", "Tilt angle", "Ti. ax. ver. off", and "Ti. ax. dep. off." but they just confuse things. I'm leaving them blank to keep things simpler.
I don't know why I find this so insanely complicated to configure. As I said, my setup has got to be one of the most common setups for anyone with multiple monitors. There should be some simple instructions and pictures for this typical setup - with 2 or 3 identical monitors all facing the user, all the same distance away, all at the same angle relative to each other. Otherwise, most people either give up trying to use the Perspective abilities, or spend hours trying. Personally, I have revisited this app 5 or 6 times over the past 3 or 4 years, and spend 3 or 4 hours each time, trying to get this all working. But fail every time and there's no user help, no active reddit or discord user support, and a wiki that just confuses things further with ambiguous and highly complex explanations - written by a highly technical person and to an expected highly technical user, instead of written so that non-technical people can use it.
Sorry I had to write all this as a bug report but there doesn't appear to be any way to ask for assistance. All together, an extremely frustrating waste of several night's work.
This isn't a bug report, it's a plea for some clarity on setting up perspectives correctly. The wiki has a good explanation but unfortunately it's written by someone far too familiar with the technical aspects of the app and worded with many assumptions that aren't spelled out. This leads to a million questions at each step of the way and no way to resolve them. Trial and error becomes extremely long and drawn out, and little changes can make huge differences that don't help 'tune in' the settings. My biggest problem is that I can't translate the real world of where my monitors are positioned into settings.
I have 4 monitors, 0, 1, 2, 3 (from left to right). The monitor I face is monitor 1. That means that monitor 0 is to the left of 1, and of course monitors 2 and 3 are to the right of it. Monitor 1, the one I face directly at, is at 90 degrees to me. That is, the line from my nose to the screen is a 90 degree angle to the screen. Like it is for 100% of every person using a computer anywhere. In other words, it's right in front of me. About 800mm away. Monitor 0, the one to the left, is butted up next to it, but it's angled slightly to still face me. I used a compass and found that it's 30 degrees swivelled.
In fact, all my monitors face me. I think that's going to be normal for most people. So they are all angled towards me. And since they're all touching each other, they describe a bit of a semi-circle. So there's nothing complicated or special about any of this.
Again, using a compass, I can measure that they are all about 30 degrees twisted from each other. So I guess with 4 monitors, that means the 4 screens fill up about 120 degrees of my field of view. So that's got to be totally typical. 4 identical screens, with their edges touching each other, all facing me.
But trying to enter that simple information into the perspectives fields is a nightmare. From reading the instructions a million times, I believe I should have:
I've tried playing around with "Sw. ax dep. off", "Tilt angle", "Ti. ax. ver. off", and "Ti. ax. dep. off." but they just confuse things. I'm leaving them blank to keep things simpler.
I don't know why I find this so insanely complicated to configure. As I said, my setup has got to be one of the most common setups for anyone with multiple monitors. There should be some simple instructions and pictures for this typical setup - with 2 or 3 identical monitors all facing the user, all the same distance away, all at the same angle relative to each other. Otherwise, most people either give up trying to use the Perspective abilities, or spend hours trying. Personally, I have revisited this app 5 or 6 times over the past 3 or 4 years, and spend 3 or 4 hours each time, trying to get this all working. But fail every time and there's no user help, no active reddit or discord user support, and a wiki that just confuses things further with ambiguous and highly complex explanations - written by a highly technical person and to an expected highly technical user, instead of written so that non-technical people can use it.
Sorry I had to write all this as a bug report but there doesn't appear to be any way to ask for assistance. All together, an extremely frustrating waste of several night's work.