Compute shader and migrating to Monstro

Due to the problems mentioned in the previous post with Unity and the lack of support for GL_POINTS, we were desperate to find another solution to keep pushing the project forward. We had earlier thought of compute shaders which we tried out on Niclas laptop and they seemed amazing. Sadly, the Z1 server which is the home for our project has an older GPU which only supports up to DirectX 10.1 and thus not compute shaders.

There is another server available in the studio, Monstro, which has a GTX 780 Ti and therefore has support for DirectX 11 and thus compute shaders. Up until now we wanted to stay away from this server because its desktop is configured by multiple lower resolution desktops and thus leading to problems with fullscreen applications, like the .exe we intend to build.

We decided to give Monstro a shot and halt development on the Z1 server. We also considered moving the project over to WebGL (which we know supports GL_Points as Erik has created a particle system in WebGL before), but this idea died rather quickly since we did not want to implement the Tuio API again for a web based application when we already had it up and running in Unity.

As predicted, Monstro’s 4x desktop configuration does not allow the standalone .exe to run in fullscreen. We tried several different approaches in order to make it fullscreen, but without finding an appropriate solution. Our first idea was to force the application to run in 4096 x 2400 resolution by telling it to do so in the scripted launched on startup. This made it fullscreen, however only on one desktop, leaving the majority of the screen empty.

In our second attempt we tried to configure a multi camera setup in the Unity scene and thus force the application to run two different fullscreen modes where the cameras render one half each, synchronized. Again, we got close to finding a solution but not quite. The two views were misaligned no matter how we tried changing clipping planes and positions for the two cameras. This solutions seems too technical and hard to get working. Probably we will not explore this method further

By the end of the day, we managed to have the application up and running in 4096 x 2400 resolution, however in windowed mode. If we align the window properly, it looks sort of alright but it is not a solution we want to keep by the time we finish the project.

The solution we believe will work in the end is somehow forcing the application to run in 4096x2400px in a borderless window mode, which spawns at 0,0 in the leftmost desktop. That should mean it spawns over desktop 1 and 2, faking a “fullscreen app”.

However, we believe what we had at this point was good enough for the time being as it accomplished the goal. We decided to keep working on the compute shaders instead in order to have a particle system working with multitouch which is what the project is really about - not setting up a fullscreen app on Monstro...