by Daube » Fri Jul 05, 2013 4:33 am
It's not only about how much of the cockpit you can see. It's also about how the external world appears.
=> The zoom is the main problem.
If you sit in the cockpit with zoom 1.0x, there is almost no distortion of the outside world perspective, contrary to smaller values of zoom which produces more and more fish-eye effect. If you set the zoom to 0.40x, then you will get a lot of distortion. Just like with a wideview video camera, when you aim at somebody that stands just 5 meters away from you, that person looks like he's sitting 10 or 15m away when you watch the video on the TV. That happened to me frequently when I was recording my skydive jumps with a friend. We were falling quite close to each other, trying some acrobatic moves. My friend was like 5 meters from me and I was filming him with an helmet camera, with wideview lens. I thought the resulting movie would look great. But when we finally landed and took a look to the recording, it was a major dissappointment: my friend was so small on the picture, it looked like we were 20 meters away from each other. But in reality, we were quite close...
The same thing happens in our sim. I used to fly with 0.50x zoom in the cockpit, because I liked the nice visibility of the panel and instruments that such a zoom could offer. However, I got frustrated because the perception of distance in the sim was wrong. The majestic mountains on the PNW area (OrbX) around me were all looking so small. And when I was appraoching a runway or an aircraft carrier, I was always suffering from the fact that everything looked so distant, until the very last moment when everything suddenly jumps at my face !
So I started to try to pilot with bigger zoom value. At first, I was afraid to loose too much cockpit visibility... but after a short period of test, I found out that the cockpit was still visible enough, and the proportions of the outside world were much more pleasant to the eye. The whole perception of distance, as well as the perception of my own plane's movements, the way the surrounding terrain was looking... all was much better. So I finally adopted the default 0.70 zoom, and occasionnaly I use 0.80x. These values are not perfect, of course, but they do offer a much better balance between visibility and perception.
Now, when it comes to the WideViewAspect value, the screenshots above say it all: values like 0.80x are almost unusable when using the value "False" on a widescreen. To maintain the same visibility of the cockpit, I have to decrease the zoom much more than with the "True" value. And this smaller zoom value brings it more distortion in my surrounding scenery. Furthermore, the problem is not so bad on my screenshots because I use a small plane with a small cockpit. But if I would sit in the cockpit of a larger plane, the cockpit visbility problems would become even more critical. And the absolute-worst situation would be when using three screens side-by-side, because in that case the cockpit would not be visible at all !
So in the end, the conclusion of my tests were that, when using a (some) wide screen(s), the WideViewAspect set to "True" allows the user to fly with an higher zoom value, which means less distortion of the vision, while keeping a better visibility of the cockpit.
To keep the same cockpit visibility with WideViewAspect set to "False" would force the user to decrease the zoom to very low values, leading to huge distortion.
