In game Field of View is wrong and no one seems to care...

[George_Smiley 11]

A bold statement, yes?

 

Let me explain:

 

IN REAL LIFE FOV :

 

In real life when you look at an object directly in front of you  and then slowly look away from it

the object gets slightly smaller untill it is out of your FOV.

 

Or try this:

 

Look directly at an object and then try to observe a near object at the edge of your FOV.

Then look directly at it. It gets larger ish.  ( not, much much smaller ...)

 

IN GAME FOV :

 

If you do the above the game engine smears the object over the "flat"  frustum ( is that it ? ) 

and things on the edge of your FOV are HUGE. 

If you look at a small object in the middle of your screen then rotate  so it is at the edge

of your screen it now appears massive. 

 

An obvious argument for this weird visual aberation is that it reduces the complexity

of the users FOV : the edges are magnified so you  have less objects to draw.

Or the engineer who was making the vision system just didn't really know what they were

doing and went with the first thing that worked, and here we are now...

 

I use a 1920 by 1080 screen.  The ratio ( 1.9 to 1 ) is fine. The pixle density could be higher. For sure.

But the screen shape is good for me. 

When I jack the game FoV up the "edge smear" is wild. Especially with head tracking.

and the centre of the FOV is so CONCAVE it's not funny. 

 

And none of this is news either !

 

A QUESTION:

 

But I wonder. Will there be any advancement in this area?

 

From my little experience in game development ( almost none )  I have noted that

a few older game are based on DIrectX .  Arma and Rise Of Flight,  RC Desk Pilot etc

and they all "look the same".  They have the same DirectX hallmarks. 

Is Direct X the problem?

 

Also this:  Who signed off on the way we see the world through the ArmA lense?

( yes someone did OK it and they got paid to OK it, this is how it works...)

 

A POSSIBLE WORK AROUND/SOLUTION:

 

A possible solution to this issue is a SHADER that can be tweaked to produce a

"corrected" FOV.  If the game was to run with a large FOV and then the shader

tweaked the edges down so that when you look around the objects stayed mostly

the same size across most of the FOV...  

It's not like we don't have the CPU and GPU  power to do this now...

 

OK I am done.

 

Cheers!

 

George.

 

PS:

 

Another problem with the current FOV system is that objects very close to the "camera"

appear very large. In real life hold a pencil vertically in front of your eye, at say , 100mm

you can see past it. In game if you did this it would block your entire view. 

( which makes gunsights etc really really dumb... not like in the real world. ! )  :- )

In the "pencil test" use ONE EYE.  OK.  AND ... the back of the eyeball where the

light "sensors" are is curved. This is important to understand and does give us much

better FOV with less distortion... and our brain can work out the picture. Cool ay.

 

[George_Smiley 11]

See I told you no one cares ! 

[Janez 523]

I suppose for gunsights, rear post and furniture around it could have some degree of transparency to it, perhaps. Might look even weirder tho.

[George_Smiley 11]

On 10/3/2024 at 9:20 AM, Janez said:

I suppose for gunsights, rear post and furniture around it could have some degree of transparency to it, perhaps. Might look even weirder tho.

 

At the moment the way gunsights looks in A2OA is pretty whack, it's passable but...

 

The rifle ( lets say the m16 ) would look slightly tapered towards the edge of the screen

What it is right now is quite flared. 

 

Also the fricking "auto zoom" when  you right mouse click is terrible. Which is to get

around the concave distortion problem. 

With objects being of equal size from the centre of the screen to the edge of the screen

object size recognition would be enhanced.

Example: if you look at an object at your "edge of screen" and then look at it directly it

should not "change size"...

 

I use head tracking and I can just see down the red dot sight ( but it's right up against the edge of the screen)

and it looks fine.  With a decent corrected view and no "auto zoom"  things might look way better, especially on a

bigger screen.

 

With a much bigger FOV the way things grow at the edges is quite sickeneing... especially with head tracking.

I used to use 1 by 1.9 but wow does that want to make me chunder...

 

Does Reforger zoom in the picture a bit when looking down the sights? I can't remember...

 

George.

 

PS I would post screen shots to show you what I mean but... 

 

So this discussion  forked now: 1) The concave fish eye FOV and  2)  the weird zoom in when using the sights. ( I always hated that... )

 

I blame Microsoft for this. I am sure BI did not design the opitcals behind the game. That I think it DirectX... ( I could be wrong there...)

 

[Janez 523]

5 hours ago, George_Smiley said:

At the moment the way gunsights looks in A2OA is pretty whack, it's passable but...

I imagine it's mostly the same in Arma 3? I haven't played in a while.

[George_Smiley 11]

7 hours ago, Janez said:

I imagine it's mostly the same in Arma 3? I haven't played in a while.

 

I should say so. Why change now ? Must take another look.

 

I did some testing yesterday and took screen shots in A2OA. I will do the same in Arma and Reforger to see if anything has changed. 

 

For what it is worth A2OA could be really good if it was fixed up.

The random LoD distances for objects etc. ( the worst offenders are things that you can see a looong way off ...)

The weird zoom in when you look through a sight...

Loads of things that add up to a bit of a mess really. But they are sooooo fixable. 

The LoD distance of grass, when flying low in a heli, could be increased, so it is not "growing" as you fly along.

 

Attention to detail is a biggie. 

 

After all is said and done I do like the Chernarus map.  Though I would like a built up area map too. Taviana is pretty good.

The city is pretty cool and the mountains... Must get that map soon.

 

Have a nice day !

 

George.