PrincessFrosty
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- May 6, 2009
- Messages
- 5,905
An image that is stretched 11 inches vertically will look differently than an image stretched 13 inches vertically on a screen placed same distance from viewer. The screen dimensions and it's distance from the viewer determines the ideal FOV. The fact you don't know this is why you are saying ignorant things about FOV.
Sure, your position to the screen and the physical screen size does matter, we all sit at different distances from our screens and we all have different sized screens, so the problem is basically impossible to completely solve in any kind of reasonable way.
The next best thing is to approximate a fixed FOV in the game which is a good average for the platform you're on, with consoles thats smaller because people sit way back from the screen and with PCs it should be much higher because you sit right next to your screen.
If you assume what I've just said to be true then what Phide says does make a lot of sense, while you want to fix a FOV for the user you also want that FOV to change dynamically as the aspect ratio changes to make sure that you're not cropping (this ensures the whole screen is used) and you also want to provide a relatively wider FOV for those people with wider aspect ratios.
The easiest way to do that for the user is simply fix the vFOV and have the hFOV change with the same ratio as the aspect ratio, this means it doesnt matter what flavour of widescreen you're using it's going to auto correct to the right hFOV, this behaviour we typically call Horz+
But you're 100% right the problem is more complex than that.