[jsheard]

An underrated aspect of the SupCom engine was that it natively supported multiple monitors, with independently controllable cameras on each one so you could keep an eye on any two parts of the map, or just zoom the second one all the way out to get a giant minimap. That's something you never see today even though it would be easier to pull off with modern graphics APIs (IIRC SupCom actually runs two copies of the game simultaneously, driving one monitor each, to get around DirectX limitations of the time).

[YurgenJurgensen]

Slightly less impressive was the minimap, which was also an entire second(third) copy of the game's graphics process. (Although really you weren't 'supposed' to use the minimap, since strategic zoom took its place.)

[m463]

I find these kinds of bend-over-backward-things amazing. It is probably not a good ROI to get it that correct, but it admirable and makes the game lots of fun.

In a similar vein, I think fallout4 lets you use an ipad as a pip-boy to do maps and other management things.

[yayitswei]

if it makes the game lots fun then there's a good case for the feature!

[reactordev]

It's trivial to render to a texture (framebuffer) using a separate camera matrix and shader pipeline to make a minimap. It was in 2015 as well. Rendering to two separate windows is also trivial if you're rendering to textures first instead of directly to the backbuffer. Making use of those two windows is not trivial.

All in all, SupCom had issues with the number of units on screen (or in general) and would slow down considerably under heavy troop battles. Still, it was awesome.

Ever since 2006 or so it's been standard practice to break up the rendering pipeline and render to textures that you would combine in various ways in post (deferred shading came about around this time). So it's not an entire graphics engine process. It's just simply a render target.

[RGamma]

And our LAN games became soo slooow over time..

[gwervc]

As someone who had two monitors at the time (that was more a geeky thing by then than now), it was my favorite feature of the game. Also in-game shields.

[deaddodo]

Yup, strategic zoom on monitor 2, micro control on monitor 1.

If you never played SupCom, you would imagine that being terrible since most RTSes of the day were so fast paced, but SupCom followed much more of the SiNS/Stellaris/etc flow of gameplay. High level strategy with microcontrol.

Watching your waves of tanks (in strategic view) slowly push back their line of artillery because you simply strategized better as your air force slowly picked off economic resources was so satisfying.

[jsheard]

I played it on two big CRTs. You needed a strong desk to run multiple monitors back then.

[pdntspa]

I loved this feature but the game crashes if you use it with >2 monitors :(

[Cthulhu_]

It was also one of the first games to make use of multicore CPUs, although it was far from ideal and ultimately you ran into a cap on one core's CPU usage regardless since one thread still had to do more than anything that could be deferred to others.

[jl6]

Are you listening, Factorio devs?!