Finally a possible way to enjoy first person shooter games

[Battousai01]

Hi guys! I would just like to share something about fps to those who don't like it due mainly to having no peripheral vision. I came across this blog entry and this perfectly describe what I feel about FPS:

http://www.protozoic.com/2004/12/01/i-hate-first-person-shooters/

Just the image of the character with a box around its head is already an excellent representation of my frustration about FPS.

Now I finally found a possible way to enjoy playing this type of game. Use three monitors, I just watched several videos on YouTube and now I am looking forward to trying this out, however, it might take some time as I need to save up for this. I also realized that a triple monitor set up would also be a superb experience for racing games even though I already love racing games.

check these videos out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9i2KFeSal0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj9WdScTj4Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIk_D5mMPVs

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Welcome to 5 years ago.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

It's worth noting that the box on head feeling (I actually tend to refer to this as having toilet roll tubes pressed against your eyes) of FPS games is often not just caused by the limited screen size of your monitor, but rather the field of view that the viewpoint in the game has (the angle of your viewport). Sadly over the last 5-6 years we've seen a trend of increasingly smaller FOVs in FPS games due to consoles, however many games let you increase the FOV either in the settings or config files.

With a widescreen monitor you can push the FOV up quite high, it distorts when you go past a certain point but you can get as high as about 110 degrees before serious fisheye starts to creep in, generally speaking it's far superiour to the 85 degrees or less that most games offer by default these days.

With triple monitor gaming you can push it higher without too much distortion to get a much greater feeling of peripheral vision but more often than not simply cranking up the FOV on single screen can relieve headaches, eyestrain, dizzyness/disorientation and give a much more open and freer feel your gaming experience, without having to change hardware at all.

 

[BrightCandle]

You can actually do a bit of trigonometry if you like to work out your own ideal FOV angle based on the width of your screen and how far you sit back from it. That would basically convert it into a Window into the world.

Measure the width of the viewable part of your monitor in cm's. Measure the distance from your eyes to the centre of the screen.

O = Width / 2
A = distance from eyes to screen in cm's
FOV = 2* ArcTan( 0 / A)

Gives you a rough idea of what sort of FOV the monitor represents in your view and hence something that will match the physical world- ie turns it into something that is a Window into another world that matches the physical one.

 

[DigDog]

fisheye quake

 

[CPX7700]

I still use a 4:3 1024x768 monitor with 90 FOV on most games and I never even thought about it.

 

[Battousai01]

I never thought that you could adjust the field of view since I don't play FPS games. Now I was thinking what if you could put the entire view of the three screens into one screen and skew the two sides a bit just like what it would really look like in a three monitor set up, I think it would help a bit with the lack of peripheral view.

 

[lupi]

Now that's a lurker.