DescentBB

JRock wrote:the most natural field of view to play a game at is around 95-105 degrees because humans have peripheral vision that leaves a 75-90degree FOV feeling like looking down a tube and extremely frustrating to those of us who desire proper situational awareness.

I disagree. Sure the eye has a large FOV. But you sit in front of a screen, you _don't_ live in the game.
The angle of your vision which is covered by the screen (surely depending on distance and size) is about 60 degrees, so it is quite natual if the game has his FOV in the same order.

I just want to have Descent (or core decision maybe) display correctly on whatever monitor setup I'm using. More and more monitors these days have a 16:9 aspect ratio; a game that is locked into 4:3 just looks stupid and out of date. People want to maximize the use of their gaming hardware, a game that doesn't do that is going to have a big strike against it.

Surely there must be a way to do this fairly though. It seems to me a way to do it would be to have the AREA that the user can see be constant. So as you increase the width of the FOV, the height would decrease. You could even make a 360 degree view, but you'd only being seeing something that was 1/5 the height of a normal view (360/72), making you an easy target for anyone above or below you. Not to mention the wierd warped view you'd have. I'd gladly give up a little vertical to gain that same area back in the left and right areas margins of my screen, which are now dark.

Sligar wrote:I just want to have Descent (or core decision maybe) display correctly on whatever monitor setup I'm using. More and more monitors these days have a 16:9 aspect ratio; a game that is locked into 4:3 just looks stupid and out of date.

Uhm.

Descent 3 Readme.txt wrote: -width <width>

Sets the screen resolution to the specified width, if possible.

-height <height>

Sets the screen resolution to the specified height, if possible.

-aspect <value>

Specifies the screen aspect ratio for non-standard displays, such as wide-screen TVs. The aspect value is the width of the screen divided by the height, so if you want to play Descent 3 on a 16:9 wide-screen TV, use "-aspect 1.78".

Just FYI, most \"widescreen\" computer monitors have a 16:10 aspect not 16:9, keep that in mind when custom setting your resolutions in games.

Hmm... maybe I should clarify. I'd like to fill up that 16:9 screen of mine, but without cutting off vertical FOV. This is what happens when you change the aspect in Descent, right? The vertical angle gets cut off, and you don't get any more horizontal angle to compensate for it. I'd rather not give up any multiplayer advantage just to have it look right on the screen.

I was under the impression that changing the aspect ratio to 16:10 does give you a bit more horizontal FoV to compensate for the loss of vertical FoV.

Can someone confirm/disconfirm this?

THREAD REVIVAL! You don't lose vertical FOV when you make the screen wider using the -aspect option. I recently tried D3 on two screens for the hell of it and sustained no loss of visibility. It's just a shame it's so hard to play with that kind of setup. Widescreen D3 is definitely doable.