As the new owner of my very first non-4:3 widescreen monitor,
Did you never have a 1280 x 1024 LCD or two? They’re actually “Narrow Screen” - 5:4 aspect - something that’s often ignored…
- Roddy
Almost all 3D games can support changing the FOV, the only real question is whether or not the developers allow access to the users to change it. I’ve personally run wider FOV values on almost every FPS game I’ve played since Quake came out, on 4x3 monitors, so it would only be natural to me to increase it even more on a widescreen monitor.
As for the questions of cheating, it seems largely dependent on the community of the game itself. In many cases people don’t care much at all, as everyone’s more or less comfortable with their own fov settings. In other cases, especially when real cheating is rampant and/or a game has been out for a long time (and the core group of players is dwindling), it becomes a big issue for a small number of vocal opponents that overblow the benefits. My personal opinion is that a wider fov makes the games feel more open (after all, we don’t have a 90 degree fov in real life), and reduces the visibility of targets in the distance (the negative side).
Most people that have issues with fov changes (and the reason they’re disabled in many multiplayer games), have issues with reducing the fov, since you can zoom in on your target this way, and many games restrict zooming to specific weapons or classes to deal with certain types of balance issues (i.e. not allowing zooming on rapid-fire weapons). Furthermore, some developers have taken the time to implement a minimum fov feature to prevent users from zooming while still allowing them to use wider fov values.
I don’t want to derail the conversation much further, but I will clarify that my comment about increasing internet speeds was in relation to the fact that most of the benefits of Steam are best with a good internet connection. Aside from a huge blunder they made with HL2 you can buy boxed sets and play them in offline mode (which has become a lot better) with no trouble. It rightly doesn’t alienate those with slow or even (for the most part) non-existant connections.
Personally I would prefer letterboxing, especially as widescreens are becoming more common (especially among the gaming community).
I think I saw some Vertigo candy bars in the store here today.
Yes! 
We’ve actually special ordered some of those Vertigo bars. They’re more like chocolate lollipops, actually.
Proof that Bioshock’s FOV was no … artistic decision … as 2K have reported … http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11775
Jeff,
This discussion seems to have devolved into a discussion about anti-copying techniques (Steam, SecuROM, Safedisk). It would be interesting if you were to do an article about how such systems work and their effectiveness. Obviously the companies make money and are still in business. However their effectiveness at curbing piracy is in question given all the content on PirateBay and other bittorrent sites that was supposedly “protected” by these systems.
This FOV discussion is soon to be forgotten because of the evolution of the 16:10 format. Soon only a minority will have 4:3 monitors and all games will support 16:10. Superior standard replaces inferior standard.
However the discussion here was far more interesting about anti-copying techniques so I agree with Brendan Dowling and second his call for an article about the best anti-copying technique in your opinion.
Not to beat a dead horse about 5:4 monitors, but here’s another example about how ignorance of 5:4 causes issues. Older versions (around 2005) of the ATI MMC drivers used to preserve the 4:3 broadcast ratio for TV-input (on All-In-Wonder cards), so that you’d see thin black bars on the top and bottom of the picture in fullscreen mode (which is correct, IMO). Newer versions seem to just stretch (not crop) the display, so again, the picture is vertical stretched from 4:3 to 5:4, resulting in distortion. Of course, there is an option in the control panel for widescreen monitors, but not 5:4.
I’m lucky enough to have a card (ATI 800XT AIW) which is supported by the old ATI drivers, but I guess anyone with a newer card that requires a newer driver is SOL. (If they even care, which I highly doubt). Even if they are cropping and not stretching, I still think this is the wrong solution. It should at least be user-configurable.
Funny thing is ATI used to do things the right way; I’m sure someone complained about the “funny black bars” at the top and bottom of their TV picture, so ATI decided to “fix” the problem by wrecking the picture for 5:4 users. Sorta like all of these HDTVs in the big department store showrooms are always running 4:3 SDTV stretched out on 16:9 widescreen TVs for their demos, because we’d all rather see grossly deformed actors’ faces on our HDTVs, rather than suffering with black (or grey) bars on the sides of the picture.
I think Starforce is still the #1 anti-piracy solution. At least it’s the most difficult/annoying to bypass as far as I know, also from personal experiences. Of course, in online games checking your cdkey against the master server is unbreakable. At least I’ve never heard of anyone managing to hack those in any relatively new game.
Steam as an antipiracy solution is no good. It has already been cracked several times and there has been cracked steam installs available which have everything unlocked and playable. Also, some Steam-only games have been available as “stand-alone” downloads (illegal, obviously).
As a content-delivery platform it’s one of the best, though. Has had its issues that still give it some bad reputation, but it has matured a lot.
As I understand it, the developers deliberately extended the FOV to give the 4:3 user a better experience. The downside is that you have this problem with 16:9. But as I’ve read here in the comments, the problem is fixable. So people should really stop bitching about it.
Focus on the good points of Bioshock, I watched my brother play the demo and its pretty impressive and this is a minor hiccup at most.
Roddy mentioned 1280x1024 LCDs, which actually have an aspect ratio of 5:4 as opposed to the traditional 4:3 ratio. I agree this is often ignored, and leads to the following problems:
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A lot of non-widescreen wallpaper is 4:3, so even if you’re running at native resolution, Windows’ “stretch” option will distort the picture by vertically elongating. This is also a problem with digital photos. The only solution is to use an app that will preserve the aspect ratio as it sets the wallpaper (resulting in thin black bars at the top and bottom). Even Windows Vista doesn’t get this right - there’s no “preserve aspect ratio” option when you choose wallpaper, unless you install DreamScene for Vista Ultimate. OTOH, I believe if you right-click on a picture and select “Set as Background”, then Windows will automatically crop your picture so that it fits your desktop, the aspect ratio is preserved, and there are no black bars. Talk about inconsistency.
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If you run the monitor at any resolution lower than native (say 1024x768), not only do you get the typical blurriness from LCD scaling, you also get the vertical elongation that comes with stretching 4:3 to 5:4. If you are running nVidia drivers under Windows, this isn’t a problem, since there’s the option to set fixed aspect ratio scaling in the driver, but ATI users are out of luck. You’d be surprised how many non-techie people run their LCDs at less than native resolution; maybe because the fonts are too hard to read at native (think 17" LCD@1280x1024) or because their favourite bridge game only looks good at 1024x768 (this is a real-life example).
To me, this is actually a pretty serious and annoying problem, especially since 1280x1024 is the most popular resolution for 19" and under LCDs. And it all stems from this stupid idea of “avoiding black bars at all costs”. I’ll never understand why people would rather see a distorted picture instead of black bars.
Does anyone know why VESA standardized on 1280x1024 (5:4) instead of 1280x960 (4:3)?
Great idea. I have a similar article in the archives:
Is There An Optimal Piracy Rate?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000489.html
Whatever happened to Virtual Reality? Hasn’t the technology caught up with all the VR hype of the late '90s?
It occurs to me that all of these aspect ratio discussions would be rendered moot (no pun intended) if games actually generated a real-time stereoscopic FOV instead of showing a “movie”.
I have to agree with Will. Anything to do with video is dumbed down to the worst common denominator.
Go to any bar, and they have a wide-screen tv, with a 4:3 image stretched to 16:9. Ignorant people think the distorted, blocky images look expensive. They’d probably throw an expensive sony trinitron in the trash.
Jeff, don’t you realize that anything but an FOV of 90… doesn’t look correct? Higher FOVs fisheye the image, and lower FOVs flatten the image. A good player should be able to tell if the FOV is greater or less than 90 just by moving the mouse.
Think of movies like “the matrix”, which do the trick of moving the camera away from the subject, but zooming in the camera so that the subject remains the same size. Why would jeff want to run around in a FPS “wearing zoomed lenses”
Jeff, you didn’t read the encyclopedia article that you linked to. If you had, you would have noticed that you were changing Bioshock’s ANGULAR FOV in order to effect a difference in LINEAR FOV.
Since your angular FOV is too low, you would have to apply a fisheye effect to make the image look correct.
Moodock said:
“The problem here is the traditional notion that widescreen means you get more; that you have an advantage over fullscreen. In this case fullscreen got more, so people with a widescreen monitor feel they got less”
All I want is whatever content is there to always display in the correct aspect ratio. For something dynamically that may “letterboxed” on the sides , I’m fine with that, just don’t distort or crop the image. It’s like watching movies on a standard def TV. I’ll take the letterboxed version over “fullscreen”.
For those of us who hate cropping and distortion of video, Roger Ebert feels the same way about movies:
http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/movies/feature/2001/09/11/ebert_widescreen/index.html
Hey, have you seen this:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/25/1835256from=rss
It’s called “Content aware image resizing” and it’s amazing. Might be the answer you’re looking for
“In multiplayer circles, a wider FOV is considered cheating.”
It depends on the game. For deathmatch games like Quake or Unreal Tournament, it doesn’t matter (although a wide fov is uncommon in UT). For a pseudo-realistic game like Counter-Strike, anything other than default fov is considered cheating.
I really enjoyed reading all the comments on this page and it helped me understand a lot about FOV, aspect ratios and resolutions because I was finding it all really confusing!
I played Bioshock before the patch where you could change the FOV, but I just had to stop playing it, because I wasn’t enjoying the experience and it made me feel sick and gave me headaches. I felt like a horse wearing blinkers playing it because I could only see a fraction of what was going on to the side. I should add I have a 22" widescreen 16:10 aspect ration, 1680x1050 resolution monitor.
Once I discovered the patch I thought I would give it a try and see if it made that much difference and OMG!! It’s like a new game!! Today I can’t stop playing it and I love it. The perfect settings I have found for me are width .743 and height .733 although I am still adjusting here and there to tweak it.
I read loads of forums and people go on about it not being a big deal and they’ve only added a bit at the top and bottom for people with 4:3 screens, but they just don’t get it at all. The way it was “out of the box” was just unnatural…you don’t see the world like that at all and that what confuses your brain and makes you feel sick and gives you headaches cos it just ain’t right.
Sorry for my rambling, but 2K got it wrong and this patch makes it right and how it should have been in the first place.
Best wishes to everyone,
Mark
This is a never ending problem. Lets look at the possible solutions:
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- If you design the game camera as a 4:3:
a) You can shrink the vertical FOV for widescreens. (most users say NO!!!)
b) You can widen the horizontal FOV for widescreens (most users say WEEE!!!)
- If you design the game camera as a 4:3:
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- If you design the game camera as a 16:9:
a) You can shrink the horizontal FOV for 4:3. (most users say NO!!!)
b) You can widen the vertical FOV for 4:3 (most users say WHAT???)
- If you design the game camera as a 16:9:
If you look at this thing, you could think (by symmetry) that in situation 2.b the users would say WEE!!! as it’s the same thing as for 1.b (widening is better than shrinking). But, strangely, that’s not the case.
I think the real problem comes from the myth that having a wider screen means to see more things. But that’s not true. The real sentence should be: Wider screen means to see more things horizontally THAN vertically.
As long as the aspect ratio is ok, I am not the “i’ve got a widescreen so I must always see more than 4:3” kind of person.
my 2 cents