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how come no external full 360 zoom in the personal edition?


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11 minutes ago, wildbillkelsoe said:

I read somewhere here that its for military contracts. If this is true then I dont like that an important and realistic feature like this be limited only to servicemen. Especially that Arma has full 360 zoom. Nils?

I'm not sure what you mean but in terms of 3D person zoom you can only do that in the Mission Editor in either the Military version or the Consumer version.

 

Perhaps you mis-read the information?

 

I also wouldn't say it was realistic - but again I'm not certain I understand what you are referring to.

 

Perhaps you can explain it more fully or link us to the article?

 

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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If you're referring to the ability to zoom while in the external observer view, that's controlled by the realism option in Steel Beasts. When set to Low or Medium you can zoom while in the observer view with any vehicle. When set to High realism it's disabled in crewable vehicles because it's not particularly realistic. If you want to look around with zoom, switch the commander and either use whatever optics it may have for the commander to use, or stick your head out of the hatch and use binoculars.

Edited by Rotareneg
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Well I misread a thread as my complaint. My complaint is the tank commander unbuttoned position. without a binocular. eye view.

 

why cant I zoom all around the turret with my eye only? If I have trackir which I do, I have to touch my physical monitor with my real head to zoom in without binoculars. Then from this kiss the monitor position, if I turn my head right or left the zoom level goes away as if I am back to the seat.

 

A more pressing issue is, why is there no key command to this eye only in commander position in unbuttoned view from the top of turret zoom function?

 

 

so two things guys: 

 

1- from turret unbutton commander view why is my zoom limited to forward arc and not a 360° zoom with eye?

2- why no key command for this eye view zoom?

 

I will post a video explaining.

 

Rotareneg, you fly DCS. So when you zoom in cockpit with numpad * you can yaw your head with trackir to identify say a bandit far away to your back. the whole view is zoomed and you are not for example zoomed to the nose of your aircraft and when you want to view the wings or your tail or the ground, the zoom goes away.

Edited by wildbillkelsoe
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Well our military don't use Track IR with SB and have never asked for it.

 

Secondly the "realistic" way to achieve this is to use your binoculars, like the real world.

 

There is no "zoom in" in the real world. We want realistic options, like binoculars, not a fudge that makes it easier than real life.

 

I think there are other threads about Track IR, but please don't assume its a military requirement.

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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33 minutes ago, wildbillkelsoe said:

here is a video of the problem

Okay, you won't like the answer, but the problem is that this "TrackIR Zoom" actually exists. I didn't know that, and it's not supposed to be there in the first place (however, I may tolerate it if this can't be disabled without much hoopla from the developers). But we have no intention to make this a supported general feature. In real life, the world doesn't zoom if you move your head forward (or at least only very, very little unless you're in a confined space, like a tank's turret). What you do is to grab the binoculars. Per your video "you don't want that", but we want realism, so that's what you get. Sorry.

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3 hours ago, Ssnake said:

Okay, you won't like the answer, but the problem is that this "TrackIR Zoom" actually exists. I didn't know that, and it's not supposed to be there in the first place (however, I may tolerate it if this can't be disabled without much hoopla from the developers). But we have no intention to make this a supported general feature. In real life, the world doesn't zoom if you move your head forward (or at least only very, very little unless you're in a confined space, like a tank's turret). What you do is to grab the binoculars. Per your video "you don't want that", but we want realism, so that's what you get. Sorry.

You are right, I don't like it. But also, realistically speaking, your eye can not see units on a computer screen from afar. Its clearly stated in the manual. Is it processing power involved to get a uniform zoom across the turret? 

 

You also mention trackir, so I could disable the  zooming on trackir checkbox, but will that give me the needed function? Hang on you mean this was not supposed to be in your software? the zooming? I am surprised by this.

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I use TrackIR, but an older version (without 6DOF activated) so I don't have this "zoom" feature. While I knew it was a capability of the newer versions of TrackIR, I'm surprised to see it works in SB outside of the turret, where the sim, rightly, does not offer or intend that sort of a view feature.

 

This guy has latched onto an exploit and for some reason assumes it's a "needed function".

 

My concern at this point is that this individual player's obsession and repeated harping about this superability has the potential to ruin access to TrackIR for the rest of us. 

 

Hopefully it won't be an all-or-nothing solution. ( I do note that Ssnake says he could tolerate the exploit's existance). Best case scenario would be that NaturalPoint can disable it in the integration. (We know eSim has no time to devote to such a fix).

Otherwise, since militaries apparently don't use the TrackIR software, it's a non-issue for them. It's also a non-issue in single player: If you want to cheat yourself, go ahead -- cheat yourself. For head-to-head multiplayer, it comes down to whether players are OK with the honor system -- or don't feel the exploit imparts a significant advantage.

 

Edited by Splash
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1 hour ago, Splash said:

I use TrackIR, but an older version (without 6DOF activated) so I don't have this "zoom" feature. While I knew it was a capability of the newer versions of TrackIR, I'm surprised to see it works in SB outside of the turret, where the sim, rightly, does not offer or intend that sort of a view feature.

 

This guy has latched onto an exploit and for some reason assumes it's a "needed function".

 

My concern at this point is that this individual player's obsession and repeated harping about this superability has the potential to ruin access to TrackIR for the rest of us. 

 

Hopefully it won't be an all-or-nothing solution. ( I do note that Ssnake says he could tolerate the exploit's existance). Best case scenario would be that NaturalPoint can disable it in the integration. (We know eSim has no time to devote to such a fix).

Otherwise, since militaries apparently don't use the TrackIR software, it's a non-issue for them. It's also a non-issue in single player: If you want to cheat yourself, go ahead -- cheat yourself. For head-to-head multiplayer, it comes down to whether players are OK with the honor system -- or don't feel the exploit imparts a significant advantage.

 

I only wanted to know if its normal or an aberration. I am not into using exploits. And I dont believe it is one, simply because you dont want it modelled doesnt mean its unrealistic. Rightly the manual states that you should spot a column of tanks from 15 km but your monitor needs the brains to put it out so you can see it. In all other games that I played, there are people complaining about inability to spot units. Arma, DCS, etc... How is it unrealistic that you can zoom in and see units in plain sight but farther away. How can you make out their type? equipment? Is it not real in normal plainsight? Or you mean because the binoculars function should be the only way to spot and make out things as originally intended? like for example a guy flying over tanks and using gyrostabilised binos or targeting pods to spot features to confirm identity of said vehicles. In plain sight he sees them as blobs, without binoculars. Is that it?

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44 minutes ago, wildbillkelsoe said:

How is it unrealistic that you can zoom in and see units in plain sight but farther away. How can you make out their type? equipment? Is it not real in normal plainsight?

How is it unrealistic? What sort of alien superpowers have your creators given you?

 

Try this: Pick an object at arm's length. Lean toward it. Can you see its detail more clearly? Yeah, probably so. So it makes sense you'd be able to lean toward an object nearby in the turret.
Now go outside and pick an object 50-100 meters (or more) away. Lean toward it. Can you see its detail more clearly? No. You need optics to augment your vision for additional detail.

 

And I don't buy the bs offered by many flight sim enthusiasts that such "zoom" features for distant objects simulate some kind of intense focus available in normal life but not on a computer monitor. Besides, this is not a flight sim. Or a game.


 

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Simulator VS Real-Life visibility is always going to be an issue. A person using a 40" 8K display is likely going to have a rather significant advantage spotting enemies compared to someone using a 16" 720p laptop display. Different simulators over the years have tried different techniques to try to compensate for this, like Falcon 4 (and its descendants) smart scaling feature which enlarges objects where needed to keep them from shrinking down a single flickering pixel when they should still be within real eyesight visibility range.

 

The "lead forward to zoom" function you get when using TrackIR I suppose does simulate really staring intently at something, which I don't find too unreasonable, but then for non-TrackIR users you'd need to have another zoom/unzoom key combo besides the current one that activates binos when you could just as easily use the binos anyway which instantly give you a magnified view of whatever you're looking at (something that is probably a tiny bit unrealistic in itself compared to fiddling around with binos in a moving tank.)

Edited by Rotareneg
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3 hours ago, wildbillkelsoe said:

How is it unrealistic that you can zoom in and see units in plain sight but farther away. How can you make out their type? equipment? Is it not real in normal plainsight?

Because unless you have some sort of cyborg implant, your real eyes can't do this.

 

If your doctor has given you the ability to "zoom" with your eyes, then you are in a very small minority (You + Steve Austin maybe).

 

Edited by Gibsonm
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So, here's the basics. I think the human eye can resolve about 30 arcseconds, and offers a (horizontal) field of view of 140°. At the same time it's stereoscopic. This is pretty awesome if you tried to create a display at arm's length that matches exactly these capabilities. It's about 140° x 60 arcmin/° x 60 arcsec/arcmin : 30 arcsec/pixel = 16,800 pixel horizontally, x2 (because, stereoscopic), and 9,450 pixels vertically at 16:9 aspect ratio, so in total 159 megapixels resolution (anything beyond that would make no appreciable difference for the vast majority of humans, even with perfect eyesight).

 

[Okay, the human eye doesn't have uniform resolution; the 30 arcsec is the maximum near the center of the retina; towards the periphery the resolution goes noticeably down, but of course a human player won't look with a fixed view at exactly the center of the monitor, so either the entire image must be at max res, or we need eye tracking and somehow adjust the rendering to show the scene at variable resolution, depending on where the player looks.]

 

So, for the forseeable future we will neither have the monitors nor the graphics cards nor sufficiently performant game engines to render a 159 Mpx scene at stable 120 Hz. I therefore simply accept the fact that a rendered scene that approximates the natural field of view of a human observer will by necessity be somewhat shortsighted, as distant objects shrink below pixel size.

In real life vehicle commanders usually have binoculars as simple means to augment their ability to identify distant objects. Therefore we implemented a binocular view, "N", and that's the officially supported option to deal with the hardware limitations of our times. My recommendation therefore is, even when using TrackIR, to use the N shortcut to toggle between the two view modes rather than relying on the TrackIR scene zoom. In any case, the latter is not an officially supported feature. It may or may not work for now and for a while, but don't be surprised if one day we prevent this option. I am entirely without pity that you have to "kiss the monitor" for this because it's not an intended feature in the first place. ;)

 

Of course, we could debate if this feature doesn't somehow compensate for the deficiency in screen resolution (at the cost of field of view) - but so does the binocular view. The advantage of the bino view is that it offers the same quality to all players and as such creates a level playing field/comparable experience. What we have in SB Pro represents the best possible compromise for which we, the software designers, settled. Pretty much all our decisions are based on serious considerations of the advantages and disadvantages of the various alternatives. I cannot possible explain every single design decision that we ever made. And sure as hell I'm not going to put them up for public vote. We're trying to create a product that is largely consistent with real life, withing the constraints of what a PC/desktop environment allows us to do, with contemporary hardware. In a perfect world everybody would have a Star Trek Holodeck where you could configure your tank turrent and synthetic environment with, well, magic. But we're engineers, not wizards. Muggles. We simply try to play the best game from the hand that life has dealt us.

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