pc split screen

[shayne787]

Does any one know of a effective way to do split screen on a pc? there are some cheesy implementations of this such as in heavy fire Afghanistan where everyone shares one picture and has a different cursor to shoot with kind of like old arcades but i want true split screen where every player has a controller and their own instance of the game.

the other idea is two instances of a game on two different monitors with a different controller for each instance all running off one pc. this would be really nice at a lan party where you may not have enough space to be able to set up two computers but you could still have two players each with their own screen.

[tengarp]

not that I know of, no, I dont think there is

[pwner5889]

Only game I can think of is the Left 4 Dead series. Valve left splitscreen in the coding and didn't take it out.

[SubTract]

Lego Games e.g. Lego Batman, Lego Harry Potter... Split screen works very well on PC :D

[Night]

Do you mean if the game doesnt have it built in? If so the only way I could really think of would be some sort of virtualization and then like lan the two virtual machines together.

[tidu]

There are some rare cases of PC games including a split screen mode, and honestly I can't see this happening without build-in support from the game developers as without it you would have to either 1) modify the game to support split screen multiplayer 2) somehow run multiple instances of the game on one PC. Unfortunately both of these have so many downsides (low performance, hard to achieve..) that you're better of playing a game that supports split screen to begin with.

PS: This thread should be moved to the PC Gaming subforum instead of being in general discussion...

[shayne787]

Well if I have a beast PC then shouldn't I be able to run two instances of a older game? Then after doing this you would need to pair a mouse and key board to each game but for some reason this seems to be unavailable which would make the PC much more competitive against the console. The problem seems that developers think that PC gamers don't get out much and we have no friends so we don't need to be able to play multiplayer or that we are all rich enough to purchase our own personal LAN which is not the case for me I don't know about you.

[mvitkun]

Well if I have a beast PC then shouldn't I be able to run two instances of a older game? Then after doing this you would need to pair a mouse and key board to each game.

there lies the issue.I was thinking exactly that same thing until I realized this.

on a pc you need to have the window your using selected,and only one window can be selected at a time.

it'd be like if you had your browser open,taking up half the screen,and clicked on the desktop,then afterwards tried to type into the search bar.it wouldn't work because the browser is now de-selected and the desktop is the selected window.

this is what would happen with the second instance of the game.you cant have both selected so one player would just be pressing keys and nothing would be happening since the VM is de-selected,or if the VM is selected then the main instance of the game is de-selected.

along with that unless it's a really light game it would be difficult to run from a VM as a second instance even if you have a genuinely beastly pc,something along the lines of an i7,16GB ram,HDD with fast read speeds or SSD.

[J_Terror]

I've always wanted the ability to have 2 players... but each have their own MONITOR... NOW THAT would be amazing... we have more than enough graphical horsepower to accomplish this.

I'm sure its a matter of GPU driver code and game code implementing it.

[shayne787]

Well if I have a beast PC then shouldn't I be able to run two instances of a older game? Then after doing this you would need to pair a mouse and key board to each game.

there lies the issue.I was thinking exactly that same thing until I realized this.

on a pc you need to have the window your using selected,and only one window can be selected at a time.

it'd be like if you had your browser open,taking up half the screen,and clicked on the desktop,then afterwards tried to type into the search bar.it wouldn't work because the browser is now de-selected and the desktop is the selected window.

this is what would happen with the second instance of the game.you cant have both selected so one player would just be pressing keys and nothing would be happening since the VM is de-selected,or if the VM is selected then the main instance of the game is de-selected.

along with that unless it's a really light game it would be difficult to run from a VM as a second instance even if you have a genuinely beastly pc,something along the lines of an i7,16GB ram,HDD with fast read speeds or SSD.

well why not? with enough hard work you could program a pc to do any thing. the thought is that you have one window that has two programs running inside it similar to a VM. then i pair a mouse and a controller to the first game and those have no effect on the second window which is controlled by a wired xbox controller. this making you able to run two players off the same computer.

Just think Battlefield Vietnam on 5 way eyefinity with 5 different people playing on it.

[Lexlazootin]

Lego Games e.g. Lego Batman, Lego Harry Potter... Split screen works very well on PC :D

LOL. it's true + awesome.

[Silverhand7]

There are a few PC games that have splitscreen, but for most games, no. You should convince your friends to get gaming PCs and just bring them over for a LAN :D