Why does the whole picture zoom when aiming?

[MadsHilde 10]

In a game as realistic as this this, I don't get why they haven't made it so that when you raise the scope of your gun, that only the picture in the scope zooms, not the whole world around you, too.

I think it would be so much cooler and would give a much more realistic feel.

I'm kinda new to this game, but I actually had hoped to see that feature since every kiddy shooter around zooms the whole picture when aiming down scopes.

---------- Post added at 03:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:37 PM ----------

Ah, sorry. Nevermind. I didn't remember correctly. When zooming with snipers the whole picture becomes the scope and when aiming down red dot sight, there ain't no zoom in red dots, I guess, so it must just be some kinda "focus" feature to be able to zoom with red dots.

[metalcraze 290]

"It's not focus. As Suma (the lead programmer) once explained - viewing the game world through the monitor screen is like putting same sized box over your head with the front side being cut out.

So when you are zoomed out - it's the real (or close to real) area of vision you have IRL... However when you zoom in - it's what you would've seen if you would be looking through a 23" window (or whatever " your monitor is) in front of your eyes.

It's an unfortunate limitation of viewing a game world through a monitor. It's not as important in other shooters since enemies are pretty close there, but in ArmA they can be hundreds of meters away so it's the compromise that had to be done."

[maturin 12]

It's focus too, though. When you focus on a single point, your effect field of view narrows. They call it tunnel vision for a reason.

[pvt_ryan 10]

I believe I've heard arguments that this also represents the dramatically increased acuity of the center of our visual field, and those tend to be my favorite. Because (this may actually be a surprise to some) the farther you move away from the center of visual attention, things get progressively blurrier. It's only the constant movement of our eyes (saccades) from one point to another that give the illusion of an equally blurry field of vision. I guess ideally you would have a gradual zoom ability as opposed to "zoomed in" and "zoomed out", but at any rate ARMA is probably ahead of the curve enough to have anything like this really.

This may be what the poster above me was meaning to say; I'm not quite sure.