First-person shooters have been getting perspective wrong all along

erek

erek

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"A new piece of 'natural rendering' software could fix what ails them."

"They were tested in a range of formats and a varying field of view, and had to answer in multiple choice each time over 72 different images.

The research showed that people have an issue with overestimation with the standard linear perspective, whereas the natural perspective did make it slightly easier to determine the distance, especially when it came to wider field of view.

Pepperell's research has come to a head with startup company, FovoTec(opens in new tab). The front page claims the software can deliver "a far greater field of view and a more accurate sense of depth, space, and movement."

So if you've been trying to use a wider field of view in games with your super curvy wide angle monitor, and have been having trouble with the perspective, then Pepperell may just have found one impressive solution. It should also make for a more realistic, immersive take on the first-person gaming perspective, too.

The research correlates with Chiara Saracini's work(opens in new tab) at the Catholic University of Maule, which says computer models have been totally messing up our perception of distance. Though she has her reservations that this is the definitive answer to our FOV woes, since there was still a fair deal of overestimation happening. Still, things can only get better from here."

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Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/first-person-shooters-have-been-getting-perspective-wrong-all-along/
 
I'm all for.improvement here.

Games have been messing up perspective for ages in a wide variety of ways.

Counter-Strike for instance has you view port coming out of your gun at hip shooting height at your waist, if I am not mistaken.

They try to make up for it by juts scaling up the models so they look natural on screen, but that has a lot of issues when it comes to perspective and cover, which no doubt has had people yelling "bullshit" at their computers for decades now.
 
Should be a boon for Driving and Flying simulators, too, where a sense of depth AND sense of speed/momentum/velocity all come into play into how a game controls and 'feels'.........
 
I think Quake was the last good first person shooter because it was raw blocky and clunky and had multiplayer. Everything today is way too refined or retro spinoffs. Duke Nukem Forever was good along with Tiny Tina's Wonderland.
 
The ideological me insists on the more correct linear perspective. However the wiser me knows that most people (including me) dont have a correct setup for linear projection anyways, so the article is probably correct. Linear perspective, to be accurate, actually needs to align the FOV of the screen with the actual FOV the screen takes up in your eye space. You need to sit pretty close to a big monitor to really have that setup correctly. 75-90 degrees FOV actually takes up a good chunk of your visual field. I'm sure there's a higher percentage here at hardforum that probably have it setup correct.

Plus with curved screens all of that goes out the window.
 
Comixbooks said:
I think Quake was the last good first person shooter because it was raw blocky and clunky and had multiplayer. Everything today is way too refined or retro spinoffs. Duke Nukem Forever was good along with Tiny Tina's Wonderland.
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I think I have the absolute opposite perspective.

Modern shooters have developed storylines and RPG elements (at least single player ones, I haven't played competitive in a long time) that make old school shooters seem kind of dumb and unintersting by comparison.

While I loved them back in the 90's, by modern standards, I find the Doom/Quake style of shooters (and others based on the, like Hard Reset) to be damn near unplayably boring.

Half-life came out in 1998 and then FPS titles were never the same again. Deus Ex in 2000 added RPG elements and doubled down on storytelling and cemented it. And the Half Life Mod, Counter-Strike made multiplayer more than just a dumb gibfest, and forever changed multiplayer FPS.

Then a whole new generation of titles came out that made these games feel silly by comparison. To me, Red Orchestra made Counter-Strike forever marginally playable, and feeling silly by comparison. And any number of good story-telling single player FPS titles picked up where Half-Life and the original Deus-Ex (including the Deus Ex reboot) picked up and improved upon them, making them feel shallow by comparison.

We've had compounding returns in gaming that have made those old school FPS run and gun gibfest titles feel hopelessly dated and uninteresting. At least to me.

To me there is no going back.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I think I have the absolute opposite perspective.

Modern shooters have developed storylines and RPG elements (at least single player ones, I haven't played competitive in a long time) that make old school shooters seem kind of dumb and unintersting by comparison.

While I loved them back in the 90's, by modern standards, I find the Doom/Quake style of shooters (and others based on the, like Hard Reset) to be damn near unplayably boring.

Half-life came out in 1998 and then FPS titles were never the same again. Deus Ex in 2000 added RPG elements and doubled down on storytelling and cemented it. And the Half Life Mod, Counter-Strike made multiplayer more than just a dumb gibfest, and forever changed multiplayer FPS.

Then a whole new generation of titles came out that made these games feel silly by comparison. To me, Red Orchestra made Counter-Strike forever marginally playable, and feeling silly by comparison. And any number of good story-telling single player FPS titles picked up where Half-Life and the original Deus-Ex (including the Deus Ex reboot) picked up and improved upon them, making them feel shallow by comparison.

We've had compounding returns in gaming that have made those old school FPS run and gun gibfest titles feel hopelessly dated and uninteresting. At least to me.

To me there is no going back.
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Half-Life and Deus Ex are hardly modern. If those are your best examples, you guys might as well be arguing a similar point. Tbh I think FPS games have regressed since the late 90's and early 00's. Everything feels copy-pasted, filled with microtransactions, etc.

Epic giving up on UT for Fortnite basically says everything. Gaming industry has been dumbed to dirt to appeal to your average (third world) consumer.
 
I just hope they spend more time trying to make a game fun to play than fixing it's perspective.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I'm all for.improvement here.

Games have been messing up perspective for ages in a wide variety of ways.

Counter-Strike for instance has you view port coming out of your gun at hip shooting height at your waist, if I am not mistaken.

They try to make up for it by juts scaling up the models so they look natural on screen, but that has a lot of issues when it comes to perspective and cover, which no doubt has had people yelling "bullshit" at their computers for decades now.
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Well, that and it’s Counter-Strike, so cover was rendered useless anyway by your wall hacking opponent.
 
I'm willing to bet that early fps engines were more concerned with rendering overhead and general efficiency.
Am I tickled pink when I play something with Full body awareness? Absolutely. But I can kind of see my own nose when I look forward. Until this technology has slightly blurry nose rendering, I'll continue to interpret FOV and perspective as a largely artificial construct.
 
Tactlesss said:
I'm willing to bet that early fps engines were more concerned with rendering overhead and general efficiency.
Am I tickled pink when I play something with Full body awareness? Absolutely. But I can kind of see my own nose when I look forward. Until this technology has slightly blurry nose rendering, I'll continue to interpret FOV and perspective as a largely artificial construct.
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DARPA banned the supposed first ever FPS game (video game or not to be debatable)

https://www.military.com/off-duty/g...rst-ever-first-person-shooter-video-game.html
 
I just wish that running at high resolutions and details was an advantage instead of the opposite.
 
What I miss if holding firearms in the left hand. Back in the 1.5 and 1.6 days, someone suggested it. And I did awesome with it. Which is weird because I'm right handed.
 
FOV's always been tricky to get right with a flat monitor that can be viewed at all sorts of distances, because that determines how much of your actual FOV the in-game view is actually taking. If it's too different, it looks quite unnatural, especially toward the periphery.

Ever wonder why VR HMDs deliver such a convincing sense of scale? It's not so much the stereo 3D aspect as it is each HMD having a mostly consistent FOV for each wearer - every in-game object thus appears to be consistently big or small, with additional cues provided by the head-tracking and the parallax perceived as a result.

Ever since I switched from a 23.5" 1080p monitor to a 27" 4K monitor, both sitting roughly two feet from my face and still encompassing a lot of my natural FOV, I've noted that a lot of games feel a little off now, because I haven't adjusted the FOV to match that change. I'll have to run some calculations.

This article touches on what I'm trying to explain; note the first image comparing screen heights and distances for a given FOV.
https://sim-lab.eu/blog/our-blog-1/post/field-of-view-fov-5

Aside from that, some games just plain cheat with perspective relative to your actual character, as Zarathustra noted above. That certainly doesn't help matters, and I've noted a few times when my viewpoint feels chest-height rather than head-height.

Happens a lot in older FPSs from the raycasting era (basically everything from Hovertank 3D/Catacomb 3D up through the Build engine titles), come to think of it - might be how the doors are proportioned in those games.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I'm all for.improvement here.

Games have been messing up perspective for ages in a wide variety of ways.

Counter-Strike for instance has you view port coming out of your gun at hip shooting height at your waist, if I am not mistaken.

They try to make up for it by juts scaling up the models so they look natural on screen, but that has a lot of issues when it comes to perspective and cover, which no doubt has had people yelling "bullshit" at their computers for decades now.
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I mean this it's literally by design. It's absolutely working as intended, nothing to do with perspective in this case.

Nobody in CS wants their shot to clip anything. It's just a straight trace from dead center of camera. AKA shots come out of your face. Where your model holds the gun in third person is irrelevant.
 
socK said:
I mean this it's literally by design. It's absolutely working as intended, nothing to do with perspective in this case.

Nobody in CS wants their shot to clip anything. It's just a straight trace from dead center of camera. Where your model holds the gun in third person is irrelevant.
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It makes me fell like that guy from "From Dusk til Dawn" with the dick revolver.

 
The picture in the top makes the mistake of increasing both horizontal and vertical FOV in the linear example, which gives the effect of zooming a camera out from the scene. In fact, all the examples on the FovoTec website make the same mistake.

I haven't read the links yet, but I've postulated for quite awhile that the the caps on the viewing frustum should be rounded regardless of the curve on the viewing device. The biggest mistake always made in 3D rendering is the model of recreating the output of a video camera rather than the output from our eyes. Would be an interesting experiment to get back into programming. Do they explain the math behind their tech or are they not sharing it?
 
Armenius said:
The biggest mistake always made in 3D rendering is the model of recreating the output of a video camera rather than the output from our eyes. Would be an interesting experiment to get back into programming. Do they explain the math behind their tech or are they not sharing it?
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Yeah, always wondered why I would want lens reflections in a game I am trying to make look as realistic as possible...
 
Armenius said:
The picture in the top makes the mistake of increasing both horizontal and vertical FOV in the linear example, which gives the effect of zooming a camera out from the scene. In fact, all the examples on the FovoTec website make the same mistake.

I haven't read the links yet, but I've postulated for quite awhile that the the caps on the viewing frustum should be rounded regardless of the curve on the viewing device. The biggest mistake always made in 3D rendering is the model of recreating the output of a video camera rather than the output from our eyes. Would be an interesting experiment to get back into programming. Do they explain the math behind their tech or are they not sharing it?
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It looks a bit like a panini projection

Also I'm not entirely sure non linear projections like this can be expressed in a projection matrix. It may require a shader.
 
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socK said:
It looks a bit like a panini projection

Also I'm not entirely sure non linear projections like this can be expressed in a projection matrix. It may require a shader.
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Yeah at first I thought it was a spherical projection, but then I noticed the ball in the middle does not seem to get any smaller with FOV increase. It's like the exact opposite of linear projection maybe? (with linear projection things in center get very small very fast as fov increases, with spherical everything on the screen gets smaller at same rate as fov increase)
 
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