Spanning Cyrodiil Over Two Screens

I recently bought a second monitor for study and work purposes but found that my wallpaper of ‘oil on canvas’ Tragedy at Sea was getting a tad bit too repetitive, so it desperately needed a change.

I figured, which of my favorite media could go amazingly as a new computer background? Quite literally the first thought that came to my mind: OBLIVION!

I’ve always been quite an admiring photographer in my overly long gameplay (for a single run) of Oblivion. It’s grown to pretty much be my own comfort game, somewhere I could run away and stay in the beautiful palaces and chateaus of Cyrodiil and the peace of its green-green forests.

^{yes, exactly six seven hours at the moment of writing this blogpost}

And so I searched, and searched, and searched. I did find some wallpaper-worthy screenshots out on the web, but nothing that really caught my eye. Until I stumbled upon pretty WIDE screenshots of the Imperial City:

THIS IS PERFECT!

I now have had these wallpapers for quite a while, and they look just so nice. However, I remembered that I’ve taken quite a bit of screenshots myself, albeit not so wide but just as perfect for wallpaper purposes:

^{pictured: White-Gold Tower at night time, Imperial City; Chapel of Dibella in the early morning, Anvil}

So a question arose: how do *I* create such wallpapers myself?

With a bit of searching, I found that something by the name of Eyefinity exists for AMD graphics cards. In a nutshell, it’s premise is pretty much combining the multiple connected monitors into a single (ultra-wide) one registered by the system, instead of multiple virtual separate monitors. However, to my utter disappointment I found out that the manufacturer of my particular graphics chipset (OEM) has restricted Eyefinity support! >:(

The Solution!

After a bit of tinkering and trying to set up such a configuration, I come up with a solution:

We edit the configuration for oblivion: Oblivion.ini (Usually located in $user\Documents\My Games\Oblivion)

Now the combined width of both of my connected monitors is 3840 (1920*2), so we place that in the width param and leave height as is:

It is also necessary to change the fullscreen parameter to 0 so it actually spans across two screens instead of being attached to one:

HOWEVER! If you have screens that are configured to be on virtually different levels, you may have to tweak them to be the same level if you do not want to see a sudden jump in your screenshots or gameplay:

In Display Settings:

^{(also, if this wasn’t already evident enough, the secondary screen has to be in extend mode)</sup}

CRUCIAL FIX! (For right-sided primary monitors)

In my monitor setup, my primary monitor is on my right, whereas my secondary is on the left, if this is the same case for you, I HIGHLY recommend you do this fix or you’ll see a very stretched out Oblivion game screen on your primary right monitor.

For your non-primary second monitor on the left check this box in Display Settings:

Now, when you launch Oblivion, the window should be attached to the left monitor and extend into the right!

Don't forget to remove tracking ids in your links!

In 2023, Youtube implemented tracking ids in their url whenever the video is shared. It’s a unique ‘sharing id’ that lets Youtube track whoever created the link and to who it had been shared to. However, if you’ve ever noticed, this is done without the user’s consent. it’s very sneakily but also avoidable if you want to have just that little bit more of privacy from the hungry data consoomers that are over at the Google HQ.

As demonstrated: Here we’ve got a dirty link, you see that “?si=AghVOcGOyPzDv0Gn” part? Exactly, that is the share id that gives Youtube unnecessary info about you and your friends whenever you share this link.

Let’s sanitize it!

It’s just that easy.

But this was only the share id. There exist more than one types of components of links that track certain information. Such as:

Yikes! All of those “?utm_source=newsletter”, “?utm_x=y”, etc. are trashing your link with tracking components! Their names are pretty self explanatory to what they track:

?utm_source=newsletter -> This link was opened through a newsletter ?utm_medium=email -> This link was opened through an email medium ?utm_campaign=sale -> This link was opened through a campaign (presumably coming to the aforementioned email)

Anyhow, I always recommend ‘sanitizing’ even that part of your links, they look are unpleasant to look at in general when shared and give your privacy a light slap on the wrist.

I recommend using browser extensions for this, they do the ‘sanitizing’ work for you ^{_{ironically the link above was ‘https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=featured’. Don’t worry though, I already sanitized it for you :)}}

Hello World!

No fucking I finally set this shitty Jekyll blogposting up… I’m at a loss for words. Exteremely WIP right now, I’ll be trying to make this a part of the website now. <3