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Field of View (FOV) Fix for Flight Simulator X (FSX)

Incredibly old news hehe. If you have a wide screen monitor, then yes, you have to turn that On in the cfg file.
 
Indeed, that's one of the very first things I change in the FSX.cfg each time I generate a new FSX.cfg or when I reinstall the sim.
 
The picture aspect ratio is the item that tells you if it's wide-screen or not.

16:10 or 16:9 are both wide-screen (the first is a computer monitor standard, the second is a wide-screen TV standard)

4:3 is the old 'square' type monitor.
 
I do have a question about all of this. I am only using one monitor, so is this setting even applicable to me? Pete
 
Yes it is.
I am using just one monitor, a 22" with 16/10 aspect ratio, and setting the WideViewAspect to True is absolutely mandatory for me.
 
MarkH said:
Can you zoom out as far as you need to? If so, you don't need it.
Click to expand...

That's not really true.
Zooming out has some terrible consequences on the surrounding scenery rendering: the perspectives are altered.

Here's an example: let's say you're flying a warbird.
On a widescreen monitor, with the default zoom and default forward view in the VC, there's not much we can see from the dashboard.
One needs, as said above, to zoom out to get at least a part of the dashoboard visible on the screen. Else he would see only the reticle and the upper part of the panel, right ?

Unfortunately, when you zoom out, you also induce a "fish-eye" effect produced by the increasing wide angle of view. The consequence of this is the same than a wide angle lens on a camera: things that are near appear to be much more distant that what they really are. The whole perception of distance is destroyed. All proportions are wrong: big mountains just a few miles away appear like small hills. Also, when flying a close formation, the other plane seems to be at a reasonable distance... despite the fact that its wing is already going through the canopy glass :D

The default zoom 0.70 offers a slightly better (but far from perfect) balance between angle of view and proportions.
When setting the WideViewAspect to True, with that same default zoom, you will get a better view and a greater visibility of your panel.

The main difference between True and False for that parameter is the way the simulator picture is stretched on the screen.
Let's say you are in windowed mode (not full screen). Try to resize your picture: reduce the height and increase the width. See what happens with True or False. You'll understand what's going on :)

WideViewAspect=True will allow wide screen monitor users to get a greater panel visibility without having to decrease the zoom, which means they keep better proportions and better perception of distance in the sim.
 
Well, I'm sorry but yes, it will.
When WideViewAspect is set to True, then the sim maintains always the same vertical field of view, while allowing the horizontal field of view to be extended.
That's what happens when you resize your window, by reducing its vertical size. You would expect to see less of the cockpit, but in fact the "amount" of cockpit shown is still the same, you just see more on the sides. Your lateral field of view gets extended.

When WideViewAspect is set to False, the sim doesn't extend the picture in the same way. On a widescreen monitor, the lateral part of the field of view is always the same, and as a consequence, the amount of cockpit you see is smaller. Take a 4/3 ratio monitor and another monitor with 16/10 ratio. Both with the same width. Take the picture of the 3/4 monitor and paste it on the 16/10 one: your picture is too big, you have to cut it at the bottom. And that's precisely what the sim does: it cuts the picture vertically. Thus, you see less of your cockpit.

I made a few comparison shots in the past, but I can't find them anymore. The shots were showing the difference between True and False with the same amount of zoom. On a wide screen monitor, with False, you see much less of your cockpit. You must zoom out so much that the fish-eye effect becomes critical.
 
Mark, I'm currently watching the videos you made on that topic.
Obviously you know exactely what you're talking about.
I saw only the first video for the moment, and I agree with most of the explanations you made.
However, from what I remember of my tests, the proportions of the outside world rendering were not the same depending on the wideviewaspect value and corresponding zoom setting.
In other words, from what I remember (I'd like to insist on this), when you set wideviewaspect to false and zoom out to match what you get with True, the perception of distance is not the same.
Of course, I'm not claiming I'm absolutely right, and I'm fully open to explanations prooving me wrong. That will at least remove a long-term error in my vision.
 
Daube said:
from what I remember (I'd like to insist on this), when you set wideviewaspect to false and zoom out to match what you get with True, the perception of distance is not the same
Click to expand...

Of course my argument relies on the observation that they are the same, and my experiments suggest that it is so. Although I found they didn't quite match up when calculating the equivalent WVA=T zoom, it's very close. (See below for possible reasons.)

Nerd appendix

Originally I dismissed the discrepancy as due to arithmetic rounding or some such, but recently I have realised there is a more fundamental problem. In my comparisons I have always used a resolution of 1280x1024 on the 4:3 monitor and 3840x1024 on the wide monitor (actually 4066x1024 to account for the bezels). The problem with this is that 1280x1024 is not a 4:3 ratio, it is 5:4! I think this means I should be using the physical dimensions (width and height) of the monitors in my calculations, not the pixel dimensions. Alternatively, I should redo my experiments using a true 4:3 resolution on the monitors (so 1024x768 and 3072x768 would be okay), in which case the ratios of the pixel dimensions should be exactly the same as the ratios of the physical dimensions. And in that case I would hope to see a perfect match...
 
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