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9.3. CONFIGURING A MULTI-MONITOR SIMULATOR 109
lens” effect. If a 135 ◦ field of view is described in a flat plane or in an arc of monitors that describe
less than 135 ◦ of arc, fisheye distortion will result, apparent as a horizon that seems to bend and
distort between monitors.
9.3.2.1 Lining Up the Horizon (Without Vertical Offsets)
Now, sometimes people sit on the ground and see the horizon does not line up, so they enter vertical
offsets on some of the display machines only in order to get the horizons to line up. They quickly
become confused when everything breaks down as they pitch and especially roll. If vertical offsets
are used, they must be used on all networked machines in your simulator, unless you have one
monitor physically above another. If some but not all of your computers have vertical offsets, things
start getting messed up. What often happens is that a user will fly with a cockpit in the center
screen, which shifts the center of that screen as far as scenery is concerned to be around 75%
of the way up the monitor; this is done in order to leave room for the instruments. The external
visuals, on the other hand, have screen centers in the center of the monitor, since they do not have
to reserve space for the instrument panel. In this case, you need to do the following:
1. Open Plane Maker from the X-Plane installation directory.
2. Click on the File menu, then click Open Aircraft.
3. Navigate to the aircraft you wish to fly and open it.
4. Click on the Standard menu, then click Viewpoint.
5. In the Viewpoint dialog box, go to the View tab.
6. Set the view center Y, panel view (i.e., the y coordinate of the center of the screen when
in the panel view) to be one-half the height of your monitor in pixels (assuming you run
X-Plane in full screen mode). For instance, if your monitor has a resolution of 1920 x 1080
pixels, you would enter 540 here (1080/2).
7. Close the Viewpoint dialog box, either by pressing Enter or by clicking an X in the corner of
the window.
8. Open the File menu and click Save As (not Save, since you do not want to overwrite the
original file).
9. Type in a name for this copy of the aircraft file (for instance, “Triple Monitor [aircraft name]”)
and press Save.
10. Close Plane Maker.
Now, when you load the new copy of the aircraft up in X-Plane, the screen center will be just
where you like it.
9.3.2.2 Correcting for Monitor Bezels
Let’s imagine that you have three networked computers for additional visuals to form a wraparound
cockpit. Each computer might have a 45 ◦ lateral field of view (as set in the Rendering
Options). You would enter a lateral offset for networked scenery of −45 ◦ for the left visual,
0 ◦ for the front visual, and 45 ◦ for the right visual, as discussed above. If each display has a field