I think it's about technical issues and scaling first and foremost. It's not that we get an unrealistic advantage, in fact a lot of people who fly sims and transition to real flying say that a lot of things are actually easier to do in the real aircraft, thanks to peripheral vision and sense of motion that we lack in sims.
I was curious about how much difference it makes, so i asked an old school buddy about it and he said the same. He's an airline pilot that finished his training a couple of years ago, but he also used civilian flight sims to practice IFR procedures at home before taking his checkrides and he still says that the main advantage of flight sims is the refly button, as for the rest it's easier to judge how the aircraft flies in real flight.
So, back on the topic of monitors, i think what people mean by FOV restrictions is not that it's impossible to code, but that there's a physics limit on how much FOV you can get for a given monitor size and resolution without it looking like a fish-eye lens photo to the human eye. I'm not surprised the explanation was given by an astrophysicist on the Ubi forums either. I'm almost at the point of dropping out of uni in favor of more technical oriented education in computers, but i've been in a physics facculty for a few years and my chosen field was astronomy. There is in fact a correlation between distance of objects on a projection surface (like the globe of the night sky or a PC monitor), real distance of said objects in units of length and the distance between observer and projection surface.
In simple terms, what it means is that we can't get the real distances between two parts of the cockpit on a PC monitor without zooming in so much that it destroys our situational awareness and yet, we can't zoom out far enough to keep perfect SA without distorting the picture either. It's sort of a balancing act.
On the other hand, increased realism needs more money and not everyone can afford TrackIR or multiple monitors. Which means that after a certain point in flight sim development, balancing for users with different peripherals has to take precedence in order to make sure there's nobody flying at a disadvantage.
In that sense i don't mind wider FOV settings, as long as there are people that will use them and the coding time doesn't get spent for nothing. As i always like to say, extra options are always good
09-18-2010, 03:23 PM
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