Widescreen Gaming Forum

This was the point of the thread you tried to hijack for your own justification of Bioshocks bad FOV ... and ... my point was Bioshock as you say has distortion too at the edges of the screen not the amount of distortion.

For me, it is not distorted at all, because I am playing at a distance that corresponds to the FOV. The point of that thread was that the image is not distorted--it is correct perspective for the right viewing distance. The perception of distortion arises because of a mismatch between the FOV and typical viewing distance. With a wide FOV, the distortion-free viewing distance is uncomfortably close for most people.

Nonsense ... it is the way the game engine works ... they just couldn't be bothered until so many people complained about how bad the FOV was.

No, that's not the way the game engine works. With any 3D game engine, it is trivial to set any FOV the developer wants. I'm not at all surprised, however, that more and more games are choosing to take a vert+ approach to supporting 4:3 displays now that developing for widescreen has become the standard. When a game is developed and the FOV optimized for widescreen, the developer is likely to worry that if they cut off the sides for 4:3 that the game might become excessively difficult. On the other hand, if they keep the same FOV and expand the game vertically, they don't have to go through a whole additional cycle of play testing for 4:3. 2K has stated that they went through dozens of different widescreen FOVs before deciding on the one to use, but Levine has acknowledged that he was not directly involved in deciding how to handle 4:3--he just approved the final product.

The sidescreens are for your peripheral vision ... to add to the immersion.
The action is in on the center screen and that is where you should be looking.
The distortion works fine if you bear that in mind.

Yes, I suppose a distorted view is not too bad if you don't look at it too closely, and I imagine that a lot of people who have invested that much in a fancy triple screen are so thrilled to be getting some kind of image on those side screens that they don't mind that it doesn't really look right. But there is no reason why the side screens need to be distorted. The method for using multiple angled screens to produce a wide angle view in perfect perspective with no distortion at all is relatively simple. It is used, for example, in the CAVE virtual reality environment.

Few games ... ?
There are well over 200 games that can be played in TripleHead without any FOV hacks.

When you have tried TripleHead instead of just looking at screenshots you will know what I'm talking about and not post such misinformation.

When I said that few games support it, I meant support it correctly as I described above, without distortion. Again, you may well be reasonably satisfied with a distorted image, but I wouldn't consider that to be correct support when it is possible to provide an image without distortion and mangled perspective.

I no longer believe you believe the FOV in Bioshock is a good one ... I bet your using the FOV hack just like everyone else ... :P

No. I'm not interested in playing the game with an expanded FOV at the moment, for the same reason why I wouldn't watch a colorized Citizen Kane before watching the original black and white version. I'll play around with the patched version once I'm done with the director's cut version. But frankly, I don't expect to like it as well. I've played FPS games with a wider FOV, so I do know what that is like. But Bioshock is at this point my favorite FPS game--and a large part of that is because of exceptional realism and lack of perspective distortion.

hey Trrll heres a game that gets it right imo
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/node/8124

not that its hor+ for widescreen AND vert+ for 5:4

i bet if you could setup nine monitors in a grid you would get vert and hor+ gamin


this is how it should be done

edit actuly Paddy can you do 3 monitors in "tallscreen" mode on your triplehead?

edit actuly Paddy can you do 3 monitors in "tallscreen" mode on your triplehead?

Yep ...

[quote]edit actuly Paddy can you do 3 monitors in "tallscreen" mode on your triplehead?

Yep ...



As natural as trill-o-vision.

[quote]edit actuly Paddy can you do 3 monitors in "tallscreen" mode on your triplehead?

Yep ...


i was thinking [][][] like that and try it with quake wars since it seems to do both Hor+ and vert+

The more he posts, the more I'm convinced he works for them.

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6627&page=78

If not, I wonder why he puts so much effort into arguing about this...?

Yes, I posted a detailed discussion of how a game could best handle triplehead, but I think it vanished when the thread got deleted.

Basically, spreading out a horizontal field of view over 3 monitors arranged in a line doesn't really work very well in terms of perspective, as distortion at the edges tends to be extreme

I gather that people sometimes set the screens at an angle so that they wrap around them, but this actually exaggerates the distortion (because the projection calculated by the game assumes that the screen is flat, not bent), and does not really solve the problem.

The best way for a game to support triplehead would be to produce a distinct view for each monitor, based on how you have them arranged. For example, you could set up the screens as 3 sides of a box. The game would generate 3 views: one straight ahead, one 90 degrees right, and one 90 degrees left. Each view would have a FOV of 90 degrees. If you were to sit in the middle of the box, you would see a full 270 degree vista in absolutely perfect perspective. This is the configuration used for the CAVE VR environment.

Alternatively, you could set the screens up with a 120 degree angle between each pair. The game would generate one view straight ahead, one 60 degrees left, and one 60 degrees right, each with a 60 degree FOV. Seated along the line connecting the outer edges of the two end screens, this would give you a perspective perfect 180 degree vista.

Of course, generating a separate view for each monitor is a lot of trouble for a developer to go to for a configuration that is currently under 1% of the market, but if triplehead catches on, more developers may be motivated to provide proper support (as opposed to the rather unsatisfactory kluge of allowing you to spread a single planar projection across 3 screens)

Paddy showed you this one before I got time to answer. :) Take a note about his explaination about peripheral vision...

No, the angle I refer to is the angle occupied by the screen in your visual field. There is not much understanding to be gained by considering the visual field of each eye separately, because the distance between the two eyes is small compared to the distance to the screen, and the display is flat, so parallax doesn't come into play. Our brain figures out distances by perspective cues.

May I interpete this that you are reluctant to give a spesific angle and which part of the eyesight you base this upon?
If you talk about the angle occupied by the screen in your visual field and speak of our stereo vision, we are talking about a 180 degrees angle when the screen covers the whole visual field. Now, I ask you again, what angle do you refer to?

Your should read this before you answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception

If your brain actually made such an assumption, you would find it terribly disorienting to look out a window. You would be expecting to see more to the sides when looking out a window two feet wide and two feet high than you see when looking out a window two feet wide and one foot high. Since perspective doesn't actually work that way, looking out windows of different shapes would be horribly confusing. But your brain understands perspective. It knows that looking through a two foot wide window from one foot away will show you the same horizontal FOV no matter what the window's aspect ratio is.

Our brains makes such assumption. So does widescreen users. We EXPECT to see more horizontal (hor+).

When the perspective is correct on a first person game, your brain interprets the screen as a window, and bases its expectation of what it should see on how much of the visual field the screen occupies, just as it does with a real window.

When the perspective is correct in a first person game, you're brain and your wishes are to interpete the 3d world as if you are a part of it, not looking at it through a window. This is also one of the good parts with tripplehead, since it adds to the peripheral vision so to increase that effect. Increasing the horizontal FOV does just that. It makes it easier for the gamer to feel a part of the 3d world.

The more he posts, the more I'm convinced he works for them.

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6627&page=78

If not, I wonder why he puts so much effort into arguing about this...?

Not to mention:
http://kotaku.com/commenter/trrll/

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/08/why-jack-thomps.html

http://digg.com/pc_games/Bioshock_has_a_HUGE_widescreen_display_bug_on_both_Xbox_and_PC?t=8662902

and probably more places too...

The more he posts, the more I'm convinced he works for them.

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6627&page=78

If not, I wonder why he puts so much effort into arguing about this...?

I could imagine that he probably more so works for EPIC. EPIC saw the uproar that happened with BioShock, 2K consulted EPIC, EPIC realised that 2K didn't get in early enought to remove it as it had penetrated the net to far, so they potentially sent one of thier devs over to try and put some flames for thier client where ever the issue arose.

Now EPIC have had time to react and thus decided to take the "remove all resistance" stance to this topic just like EPIC is doing so that it does not penetrate the net again and get out of hand.

I know, I know, consipracy theory, so perhaps not, but whatever is going on here is suspect.

EDIT: Made my theory clearer to understand.

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They saw the uproar that happened, and 2K didn't have time to remove it, so they potentially sent one of thier devs over to try and put some flames out.

Lets see someone justify this as covered under advanced royalties. :D