HeavyHemi
Well yeah scaling issues. You cannot invent horizontal pixels that are not there to begin with...so you stretch the image...yuck.
It's a video game--of
course you can invent horizontal pixels, or vertical pixels. That's what a computer
does--it creates pixels out of thin air. You
do understand that we're not talking about a movie, in which the pixels are created once during production, and can't be changed afterward? In which there is a fixed aspect ratio chosen by the director at the time of filming?
A video game creates each frame in real time using a virtual camera. In other words, the
player is the director, and can choose what resolution to "film" at, which Aspect Ratio he desires, which Field of View to utilize, and where to point the camera at any given time.
....That is, unless one or more of those parameters are locked down by the developer for no legitimate reason. All of the parameters I listed are not "features", but
inherent aspects of all camera-based 3D games. They aren't
added to a game, they exist by default. A developer has to purposely prevent the player from accessing one or more of them.
A 3D camera-based game should
never be designed for a fixed aspect ratio (or FOV) like a movie. A movie is literally a series of photographs that you look at. A video game is an
interactive experience. It's a
real-time simulation.
On a movie set, there is only one part of the set that the director wants to be seen by the camera at any given time. The aspect ratio and FOV are chosen accordingly, and the camera is pointed only in one particular direction for the shot.
In a video game, the player is able to freely move the camera to look around, and thus
it makes absolutely no sense to limit the aspect ratio or FOV in any way, shape, or form. The only thing that limiting these parameters does is limit what you can see
at one time.
A 3D camera-based game should be designed with the assumption that the player may be using
any aspect ratio,
any FOV, and
any resolution. And in fact, most PC games from 20 years ago allow more freedom to adjust these parameters than the console ports of today. This is important because not only does it limit the kinds of setups that can be used to play games, and limit the number of people who can play them, but it needlessly stifles innovation.
Most people only think in terms of the display sizes, shapes, and configurations that they use
today, and don't consider what else is possible today, to say nothing of 5 or 20 years down the road. But the point is that innovation in gaming setups can't occur if these parameters are artificially locked down.
1. To take advantage of a really high-res display, you need the ability to set a really high output resolution.
2. To take advantage of a really high
hardware FOV (i.e. being very close to a very large display), you need the ability to set a really high
software FOV (Because distortion is not caused by high FOVs, it's caused by a mismatch between software and hardware FOV).
3. To take advantage of a non-standard display aspect ratio, you need the ability to set a non-standard aspect ratio in-game.
In 2018 I switched from a 22" 4:3 CRT @ 1920x1440 to a 55" 16:9 OLED @ 3840x2160. And the reason I got a display with both a high resolution,
and a large screen size is that I wanted to be able to sit really close so that the screen took up much more of my eyes' field of view than the smaller screen. In other words, I wanted to put all the extra screen space to good use, filling up my vision as much as possible.
If I had done what most people do: "Hmm...I have a much larger display...that means I need to sit much farther away!"...the FOV wouldn't have increased near as much--or at all if I sat far enough away. You can draw a triangle and show how a small screen close up can have the same FOV as a large screen far away.
For anyone who is into immersion as much as I am, I can assure you that playing at a hardware FOV of ~120°
is a game-changing experience. If you've ever been to one of the
true IMAX films with huge high-resolution displays that wrap around your field of vision, you might have some idea what I'm talking about. It's a lot less like looking through a window, and a lot more like being
in the game world.
But the important point is that your in-game (SW) FOV has to roughly match your HW FOV in order to avoid distortion (SW FOV too high) or "Telescope View" (SW FOV too low). If a game's FOV can not be adjusted to the necessary level, then there's no High FOV Gaming.
Sometimes there's a situation in which one thing can't proceed until a second thing arrives, but the second thing has little reason to arrive until the first thing proceeds. In this case, no such problem exists. Because devs don't have to add anything to games, or go out of their way to accomodate innovation--all they have to do is NOT lock down these parameters for no reason, and NOT short-sightedly design games around a limited range of aspect ratios or FOVs.
post edited by Flonkam - 2020/10/04 07:45:11