FOV

I was wondering, is further you are away = lower FOV? And the closer you are to a screen = higher FOV?

While we're here, let's discuss FOV.

Is it cheating to have a high FOV since you can see a lot more?

geo said:

I was wondering, is further you are away = lower FOV? And the closer you are to a screen = higher FOV?

Yes.

geo said:

Is it cheating to have a high FOV since you can see a lot more?

Depends. If a game generally allows you to freely look about, then probably no, but if the gameplay is specifically designed around NOT being able to see things outside of a certain range, then yes, because it breaks the designer's intention. It's a form of metagaming, I suppose, since you're not changing the mechanics, but you're peeking where you're not supposed to.

Whew I had it backward and now I want to vomit. PC on a TV screen for the past hour. I haven't wanted to throw up from a FPS in a decade.

FOV in games is generally the horizontal angle of the world you which you can view. Humans have a FOV of almost 180 degrees, though it's much less precise at the extremities. An "ideal" game FOV should match the amount of space the monitor takes up in your vision; usually a little more is OK since it lets you see more of the game world. But if it's too high you'll feel weird.

Here's an extremely detailed drawing I made to illustrate this:

You can see as the viewer (blue dot) is further from the screen (green box), the angle that the screen occupies decreases, so the game FOV should also decrease.

As for cheating: higher FOV is always an advantage, I don't know whether it's cheating or not. In a multiplayer game I'd say that if the game allows you to do it, it isn't cheating, so for example in Quake DM I think it's OK. For things like Doom it's sort of a grey area: HUDs and freelook are also arguably cheating, because the original game didn't offer them and they give the player more information. But they also enhance the playing experience without really breaking anything.

For Doom anyhow I can't play at anything but 90, it looks too weird to me. Watching demos at 70 is kind of cool sometimes though, it changes the feel quite a bit.

PC gaming requires higher FOV yeah, on a wide screen stick between 90-110.

plums said:

FOV in games is generally the horizontal angle of the world you which you can view. Humans have a FOV of almost 180 degrees, though it's much less precise at the extremities. An "ideal" game FOV should match the amount of space the monitor takes up in your vision; usually a little more is OK since it lets you see more of the game world. But if it's too high you'll feel weird.

As for cheating: higher FOV is always an advantage, I don't know whether it's cheating or not. In a multiplayer game I'd say that if the game allows you to do it, it isn't cheating, so for example in Quake DM I think it's OK. For things like Doom it's sort of a grey area: HUDs and freelook are also arguably cheating, because the original game didn't offer them and they give the player more information. But they also enhance the playing experience without really breaking anything.

For Doom anyhow I can't play at anything but 90, it looks too weird to me. Watching demos at 70 is kind of cool sometimes though, it changes the feel quite a bit.

You made me want to get a ruler and compass to check out my view. I have a feeling with how far vs how big my screen is that 35 degree FOV might be what I need. I do know when I play TF2 with 90 or so FOV on a TV, it doesn't seem to bother me even when I play for hours. One thing that does get to me is my spine playing with a mouse and keyboard on a coffee table. That's a different issue though.

geo said:

You made me want to get a ruler and compass to check out my view. I have a feeling with how far vs how big my screen is that 35 degree FOV might be what I need. I do know when I play TF2 with 90 or so FOV on a TV, it doesn't seem to bother me even when I play for hours. One thing that does get to me is my spine playing with a mouse and keyboard on a coffee table. That's a different issue though.

Well like I said, it doesn't have to be exact. As a very rough estimate my monitor right now occupies 60 degrees of horizontal vision but playing games with a FOV of 90 is just fine for me. 35 is probably unusably narrow, but I know people will play with 60 sometimes, especially on a TV.

It's never cheating, but morally gets in the way.
Almost all FPS games have an FOV slider or similar - and if not, a console command to change it. I play UT and Quake at FOV 110.
You do get to see more, but it comes at the cost of distortion at higher levels. 75-110 is generally accepted as fair, and higher is like looking through a vaccumed world. You also get to see a lot more, but that distortion balances it (in my eyes).

Some people say that playing a game on a monitor in regards to FoV is like putting a box over your head with a cut out rectangle - that's your 'correct' FoV.

I strongly disagree with this. Monitor FoV, just like every other thing in the game, is not a proper representation of reality and shouldn't be treated as such. You're supposed to play a game and feel like you're there, not like you're watching it through a small window of a size of the monitor.

Most games use the 'correct' FoV of 60 or something and it's not natural for me. It needs to be higher, usually 90-100, depending on the game. Of course if you go too high, you get the fisheye effect which is also bad, but if you go too low to the 'real' value, it feels bad.

I've been playing RAGE with its default FoV for a long time. Some time ago I've found an easy way to increase it so I gave it additional 20 degrees. It's THE WORLD of a difference, it feels a hundred times better and I never want to see the default setting again.

Touchdown said:

Most games use the 'correct' FoV of 60 or something

There's no such thing as a correct FoV due to the large number of viewing setups you can have: screen size, distance... 60 is simply a convenient number since it's also a narrow enough that there's fairly little stuff needed to be drawn on the screen at any given time. This allows consoles to spend more horsepower on drawing better looking but smaller scenes rather than less good looking but bigger scenes.