Widescreen Gaming Forum

Read this section in the UDN for the UDK

Widescreen

We design our games for one FOV (16:9) so it's going to look differently on the other (4:3). Having fixed horizontal FOV seems like a good choice for games that don't have a lot of vertical, so 4:3 is still playable and you don't get tunnel vision. It means that at 4:3 you will see more compared to widescreen, but we haven't seen that as an issue if the game is designed for 16:9.

If you design your game for 16:9 locked vertical FOV, you don't get a wider FOV for 16:9 but a narrower for 4:3. Properly balanced this means you get tunnel vision on 4:3. If you don't want that, having a wider than normal FOV with 16:9 means that you not only render more pixels, but also most likely more triangles/ geometry for mostly horizontal levels, causing perf to take an extra hit. From our design standpoint, locked vertical FOV is not a good approach if your main focus is 16:9.

We've shipped with locked vertical FOV for past PC games as most folks had 4:3 screens and it also made first person weapons easier, but focusing on 16:9 means fixed horizontal is preferable, which is what we are using nowadays.

I officially hate Epic right now :x

Edit: Honestly, this method makes sense and works perfectly fine if Eyefinity/TH2G/Nvidia Surround goes Hor+ and the 16:9 FOV is not extremely zoomed in to begin with, however most ports have super zoomed in FOV's to begin with on 4:3, making 16:9 even worse. What's stupid is that (as far as I could find while using the UDK) theres no easy option to go Hor+, forcing you to hack it in via UnrealScript. Theres going to be many that wont agree with Epic though, so I think they should just put an option like BioShock. Play they way the dev's want (Vert-) or play the way you want. (Hor+)

Also, the UDK is possibly the only reason I don't actually completely hate Epic right now.

[We design our games for one FOV (16:9) so it's going to look differently on the other (4:3).]

Remember fov and aspect ratio are the same.


[Having fixed horizontal FOV seems like a good choice for games that don't have a lot of vertical, so 4:3 is still playable and you don't get tunnel vision. It means that at 4:3 you will see more compared to widescreen, but we haven't seen that as an issue if the game is designed for 16:9.]

Keep your fov low and you have less work to do. You can also focus on one aspect ratio and ignore the rest.


[If you design your game for 16:9 locked vertical FOV, you don't get a wider FOV for 16:9 but a narrower for 4:3. Properly balanced this means you get tunnel vision on 4:3.]

Or you could use a fov that is playable in 4:3. Or you could letterbox if you truly have a game that needs a 16:9 aspect ratio. Or you could give users a fov range to select from. But this requires a marginal amount of work.


[If you don't want that, having a wider than normal FOV with 16:9 means that you not only render more pixels, but also most likely more triangles/ geometry for mostly horizontal levels, causing perf to take an extra hit. From our design standpoint, locked vertical FOV is not a good approach if your main focus is 16:9.]

Because performance is best achieved by using easy to implement design decisions that are only detrimental to minor number of users.


[We've shipped with locked vertical FOV for past PC games as most folks had 4:3 screens and it also made first person weapons easier, but focusing on 16:9 means fixed horizontal is preferable, which is what we are using nowadays.]

Because once again it is easier and less performance intensive than actually doing it right.

For TVs, I think this approach is the preferable one, because letterboxing on a 4:3 screen can be really annoying some times (NFS: Hot Pursuit, Bulletstorm,) however, Hor+ is much better on PC due to the general annoyance. If they really want people to "play it there way" they should really offer a choice in the options.

This is bad news for games in the future because the UDK is so prevalent in the industry as the go-to licensed engine. Thankfully the engine can be modified to the developer's liking, but probably at a higher cost. Even then it is exceptionally difficult to find an Unreal engine game that have proper aspect correction.

If you design your game to use a 65-70 degree FOV in 16:9, then of course you're going to have tunnel vision in narrower aspect ratios. At that viewing angle the FOV will be 50-55 degrees in 4:3. This is why screens are scaled horizontally, typically with 4:3 as the base and a FOV in the range of 75-90 degrees.

I'd like to know what they have to say about Eyefinity and Surround displays. Are they just going to ignore the more mainstream viability of surround gaming? Or do they feel that situations like Alpha Protocol are the engine working as designed?

Thankfully the only Unreal Engine game I buy nowadays is Mass Effect, and even then it is the Xbox 360 version. Going back to my first paragraph, it really isn't Bioware's fault for the game lacking proper aspect correction. I guess Epic is the second publisher/developer to go onto my boycott list next to Activision. It's not like they have put out anything good in the last seven years anyway.

We design our games for one FOV (16:9) so it's going to look differently on the other (4:3).

Read: look wrong.

I still often game on a 4:3 display unfortunately and I much prefer Hor+ even on there.

Design your games for all FOV's (read: Aspect Ratio....) please.

What they are really saying is that they don't care about PC gamers who don't like console FOVs on their screen which isn't across the room, but only a few feet from their eyes.

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EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 3.5GB | 3 X LG Flatron 24EA53VQ in Nvidia Surround | Optoma HD20

Just a quick question for anyone else using the UDK, is there any easy way to set your game to Hor+ without using any stupid UnrealScript hacks, like a setting in the level editor or somthing. Also, I think they dont do Hor+ because they just dont care about Eyefinity/TH2G/Nivida Surround and are only focused on cheap console ports at this point. Even though I play a lot of games on PC and PS3, I do think that the rampart consoleitis is pretty sad for PC gaming.

Well even if they don't care about surround screen setups, their implementation of aspect correction is wrong. They're saying they lock the horizontal FOV instead of the vertical FOV, which is what I was taught and believe is right and I hope other gaming degrees out there teach. Plus the fact that it's called WIDEscreen, not shortscreen.

This isn't a design decision. This is rationalization after the fact. Unreal Engine has defaulted to vert - since Unreal 1.

The engine isn't default vert - because the designers thought that was ideal behavior for widescreen. It's default vert - because they didn't feel like changing it.

We've shipped with locked vertical FOV for past PC games

Which past PC games? Not one game in the Unreal series ever had locked V-FOV. What else has Epic done that they could be referring to? One Must Fall 2097?

Man, the bile in my gut is just rising with Epic's behavior right now. It's even worse because not only was it objectively wrong, now they're claiming it was allegedly on purpose instead of laziness. And frankly their 16:9 design already gives me tunnel vision even when playing on a single screen.

It seems like professional developers would want to plan ahead for the future by going Hor+ with locked vert FOV... but they're deliberately setting back the entire industry with this. No one is going to want to revist "classic" games when they're impossible to mod into displaying correctly on whatever crazy Minority Report monitors we have 20 years from now.

This isn't a design decision. This is rationalization after the fact. Unreal Engine has defaulted to vert - since Unreal 1.

The engine isn't default vert - because the designers thought that was ideal behavior for widescreen. It's default vert - because they didn't feel like changing it.

We've shipped with locked vertical FOV for past PC games

Which past PC games? Not one game in the Unreal series ever had locked V-FOV. What else has Epic done that they could be referring to? One Must Fall 2097?

Seeing as how Diversions Entertainment developed OMF 2097, not Epic in any part (Epic only published), your point is quite correct.