zooming/cockpit zoom

[Sath 10]

I find it kind of difficult to react in time to sudden threats on ground because of the necessity to zoom in and click another key to bring your sights up.

1. I think the unzoomed mode represents your "normal" field of view, covering what you would normally see in front of you. The zoomed mode represents the "true" size of objects relative to their distance.

I've experimented with many key combinations to be as quickly as possible to no satisfying avail as of yet. Using the default combe (right-click brings up the sights, holding right mouse button zoomes) doesn't please me. It either starts zooming when i want the sights or vice versa. My current setting is using the right mouse button hold function to bring up sights and the enter key to zoom if wanted (I'm using the numpad keys to control my character because the keyboard is too far to my left, joysticks are centered in front of me). We should get an option to automatically zoom in when hitting the "sights" key to get objects to their real size (ArmA's so called concentration mode).

2. In some cockpits (especially AV-8, A-10 and Su-25 Frogfoot) the cockpit zoom doesn't seem to be 1x.

If we want to actually see something on the HUD we need to zoom in, which is kind of difficult for many players because they don't have a Saitek Stick f.e with enough spare sliders to adjust the zoom step by step.

Zooming in is not realistic at all but we don't have monitors to check our targets visually. My suggestion would be a repositing of the eye-point much closer to the HUD until we can read things on it without zooming the entire world. Field of view is not that necessary in a plane especially with trackIR.

So please devs let us "smaller" players adjust our seats a bit closer to the highly important little screen in front of us. :bounce3:

[Bravo0246 0]

This is why i love my G5, mouse 4 button(thumb button).

Quick way of seeing through the optics.:)

[Alex72 1]

My friends report ARMA2 supports all buttons on their mouses. :) So they got 2 buttons by the thumb where look around is placed and whatever else you need. ArmA1 supported 1 extra button on my mouse but now i know ARMA2 will support them all right out of the box wich is awesome.

On the matter of ZOOM i have to tell you that it actually is realistic. And the reason is that in real life you have a lot of peripheral vision. You can see things far left and right up and down, but on a monitor your view is very limited. So the state you play in is the unrealistic state (FOV) it is zoomed out so that you can have some peripheral vision. The real view (from the units eyes) is when you zoom in. That gives the real FOV as if you were there.

All games have to do this due to that monitors just cant give us the peripheral vision we have in real life. Thanks to bigger and bigger monitors and projectors though we get closer and closer to the real FOV. You actually feel it in ArmA when zooming in - it feels better there. More real.

So there you have it. It needs to be zoomed out so we have a chance to see more - like in real life. However its not realistic to be able to zoom ofcourse, but with zoomed to "real" FOV you also lose a lot of peripheral vision. So its not always a good thing to zoom. :)

I presume that you also can move the ZOOM button anywhere you like on the keyb or mouse. About step by step zoom like in flight sims (big fan myself) im not sure if that excists in ARMA2? Would be good for aircrafts.

Alex

Edited June 23, 2009 by Alex72

[frederf 0]

My suggestion is to overhaul the rather poor keymap that comes with the game. Right click should zoom and only zoom. Move hold breath and Optics to other keys. I move hold breath to space bar (moving commanding mode to RAlt) and Optics to V (moving Step Over to 2xC).

Aircraft operators should definately have a joystick button bound to Zoom In and another to Zoom out. These keys are more important to have close at hand than Switch Weapon for example. I have a Saitek X-45 so I can put Zoom In / Zoom Out (Continuous) Onto a rotary axis but that's just luxury.

[Ddawguga 10]

If u have an xbox 360 controller layin around, that is what i generally do on games if i can. And it works quite well with Arma 2. It also has a nice custom menu to bind certain keys to other keys- for multi functionality. Mapped my zoom to one of the shoulder buttons and its perfect for lookin out the side real fast.

[galzohar 31]

The problem with the zoom system is a bit different than what you're describing:

Zoom out mode gives you a bigger FOV. Still less than the RL FOV, but reasonably high. However, due to screen resolution (even if you use a 50"), stuff you would've been able to see IRL become invisible due to being pixelated. Anti-Aliasing helps a little here but isn't nearly enough because IRL you simply could've spotted things that are ~1-2 pixel big in game!

So to "fix" this they let you zoom. In this "zoom mode" you have a SMALLER FOV (not bigger!!), and thus see more details. That 1-2 pixel target is now 2-4. With the zoom mode you can see things that are further away, but still not as far as you can IRL.

Both modes are needed for your character to function anywhere near realistically, even though neither mode is realistic. However, you're not going to have both a realistic FOV and a realistic vision range unless you have at least a reasolution of 5000:2000 or so (and even that is probably not really enough), monitor size aside (smaller monitors only mean you need to be closer, not that you don't see as well - to a point of course).

The current zoom system is lacking a few things:

Hotkey system is bad. I play with IJKL for movement (left hand on mouse), and use H for zoom in and G for zoom out (pretty much never find myself using G is the normal zoom is zoomed out more than enough most of the time). The problem is that with certain weapons and when driving, this doesn't work - only holding right mouse button does. It should work all the time.

Non-continuous... Original Ghost Recon handled this by having mouse wheel handle zoom in a more continuous fashion.

Not enough zoom - At max zoom I still can't see things at distances I should be able to see IRL. Of course with the "binary" zoom we have now having more zoom would cut down FOV too much, but with continuous zoom this problem is solved.

Scope/NV zoom - wtf? Those scopes have useless mildots. When you zoom the mildot size remains the same, which practically makes them not be mildots. Besides standard issue NV or scopes for sniper rifles rarely have varialbe zoom. I don't mind being able to zoom them, it is a good thing to have to be able to see targets at realistic distances, but the zoom should be zooming in on the view, making the circle "bigger" and get cut at the edges of the screen, keeping proportions and the FOV of the circle the same as it would be IRL, and make the mildots functional (that is, distnace between 2 dot centers = 1 meter wide at a distance of 1000 meters, and 1 dot width = 0.2 meter at 1000m).

No zoom animation! IRL we don't have any delay when we want to see something that is far away. Game shouldn't have any delay either. Zooming should be instant. Of course this would work even better with mousewheel (or an axis) for zooming - you could zoom slowly or quickly, as you wish.

[frederf 0]

Instant zooming would be very disorienting. The gradual FOV change allows the player to follow the process.

[galzohar 31]

That's why I said you should also be able to have gradual zoom, so you don't HAVE to zoom all at once, but you can if you want to. Currently zooming takes way too long and is a serious hinderance in combat.