Aim-Down-Sight is unnecessary for realism

[sketch_zeppelin]

Iron sighting is just an intresting game play mechanic. its not there to nessecarliy make the game more realistic. its there to change how you play an FPS. it makes it harder to aim at the hip so running and gunning is toned down in favor of using cover and persion aiming and it offers you a quick zoom option to help you out, thus offering an incetive to switching your play style.

 

[Treblaine]

But if you don't like it...then don't use it.

But I like to think that I would actually aim a gun before firing it not run around like Clint Eastwood. Do you think real guns have sights just for decoration?

It's better to shoot with both eyes open, I thought that was common knowledge.

What is all this about "you don't have to use the sights"? Are we so attached to the idea of the COD style ADS mechanic that we can't consider using weapons sights any other way!?!?

You read the original post didn't you?

The reticule comes from using the gun. It is a game REPRESENTATION of your right eye using the sights while your left eye is open.

That's the explicit part, the whole post with pictures and diagrams explains the Parallax of AIMING USING THE SIGHTS, yet without obstructing your view like COD-style ADS with most of the weapon shoved up in your face, eg:

Because at the same time the left eye would be a few inches off to the left looking around but - get this - still looking down the sights at the same time.

 

[Lev The Red]

for realism? yes, they are.

anyone who has spent more than a few minutes firing a weapon knows that you cannot hope to hit anything with any consistency without the use of sights of some kind.

Why??

Why is every second post on this thread like this?

Don't you understand, THEY ARE LOOKING DOWN THE SIGHTS... and at the same time, looking out the left eye unobstructed. The right eye reticule over target is projected onto the centre of the screen.

Do you understand what I was saying about Parallax? About "Both eyes open" shooting?

we keep saying it because it is true. unlike video games, when you drop your gun to your hip (or anywhere below your shoulder) it isn't locked in place. i am, right now, holding my rifle at a rest position. from this position, i can shoot down range, but i cannot predict where the bullet will go. this is because the "down" position is a relaxed position. your arms are loose. with looseness comes movement. movement sacrifices accuracy. i can shoot in the general direction of my target, to be sure, but if i am even the slightest degree off to the left or to the right, i will miss my target. you CAN NOT accurately judge left-to-right aiming from the hip. you NEED to line your sights up with your target with your eyes focused behind them to shoot accurately. if this weren't true, the average military wouldn't miss 10,000 shots for every 1 hit.

 

[Treblaine]

FOV ain't the problem, FOV won't solve how there is a huge pillar of the gun running half way up the middle of your view, yet your right eye WOULD see right around it.

Ideally you want 90-degrees FOV, and counterstrike style crosshairs for aiming.

I'm thinking more and more that maybe you probably haven't ever fired a gun before, so I put together this information brochure for you:

So we just need to implement that into the games, right?

Have you ever fired a gun with both eyes open and TRAINED to fire with both eyes open effectively?

That's what you're not addressing and the WHOLE POINT of this thread, how that would be represented.

In fact this seems to doggedly stick to the idea of the left eye being firmly closed when aiming down sights with right eye, with your "fixed" picture cutting off as much of the left field as possible.

 

[Salad Is Murder]

I'm just imagining that this is the thing that breaks game immersion for people after they've been shot dozens of times by high velocity ammunition.

It is HIGH-larious.

captcha: happy trails

Happy trials indeed.

 

[Salad Is Murder]

FOV ain't the problem, FOV won't solve how there is a huge pillar of the gun running half way up the middle of your view, yet your right eye WOULD see right around it.

Ideally you want 90-degrees FOV, and counterstrike style crosshairs for aiming.

I'm thinking more and more that maybe you probably haven't ever fired a gun before, so I put together this information brochure for you:

So we just need to implement that into the games, right?

Have you ever fired a gun with both eyes open and TRAINED to fire with both eyes open effectively?

That's what you're not addressing and the WHOLE POINT of this thread, how that would be represented.

In fact this seems to doggedly stick to the idea of the left eye being firmly closed when aiming down sights with right eye, with your "fixed" picture cutting off as much of the left field as possible.

I don't have a left eye anymore actually, when the IED went off under the transport ahead of us in the convoy it detonated late and the shrapnel tore open the front side of our vehicle.

captcha: runny nose...THEN YOU'D BETTER CATCH IT!

 

[Lev The Red]

snip

snip

what you're saying is technically true. that does not change the fact that EVERY ARMY ON THE PLANET trains their soldiers to aim down their sights and fire from the shoulder for accuracy and fire from the hip to suppress and/or return fire while moving. when games are trying to be "realistic" (regardless of whether or not they succeed), they will imitate this behavior by making aiming down the sights more accurate than firing from the hip.

a real soldier is trained to ADS for accuracy, so a "realistic" video game soldier will do the same for the same reasons.

 

[Treblaine]

I'm amazed at how complex this conversation has gotten...

Yeah, it did.

for realism? yes, they are.

anyone who has spent more than a few minutes firing a weapon knows that you cannot hope to hit anything with any consistency without the use of sights of some kind.

Why??

Why is every second post on this thread like this?

Don't you understand, THEY ARE LOOKING DOWN THE SIGHTS... and at the same time, looking out the left eye unobstructed. The right eye reticule over target is projected onto the centre of the screen.

Do you understand what I was saying about Parallax? About "Both eyes open" shooting?

we keep saying it because it is true. unlike video games, when you drop your gun to your hip (or anywhere below your shoulder) it isn't locked in place. i am, right now, holding my rifle at a rest position. from this position, i can shoot down range, but i cannot predict where the bullet will go. this is because the "down" position is a relaxed position. your arms are loose. with looseness comes movement. movement sacrifices accuracy. i can shoot in the general direction of my target, to be sure, but if i am even the slightest degree off to the left or to the right, i will miss my target. you CAN NOT accurately judge left-to-right aiming from the hip. you NEED to line your sights up with your target with your eyes focused behind them to shoot accurately. if this weren't true, the average military wouldn't miss 10,000 shots for every 1 hit.

I don't think in any FPS games I've played (FEAR, COD, Left 4 Dead) from the perspective of the first person view model is the stock ever dropped below the shoulder.

"you NEED to line your sights up with your target with your eyes focused behind them to shoot accurately."

Are we getting crossed feeds or something because I'm sure I said this? especially the:

Don't you understand, THEY ARE LOOKING DOWN THE SIGHTS

part.


You need to get OUT of the two dimensional thinking and get into the extra dimension of how the characters in game are depicted as having two eyes where the left eye can see what the right eye is blocked from seeing (by the gun).

 

[Salad Is Murder]

Hold on, I'm confused now...should we eject the warp core to fix FPS ADS?

 

[Treblaine]

snip

Don't you understand, THEY ARE LOOKING DOWN THE SIGHTS... and at the same time, looking out the left eye

what you're saying is technically true. that does not change the fact that EVERY ARMY ON THE PLANET trains their soldiers to aim down their sights and fire from the shoulder for accuracy and fire from the hip to suppress and/or return fire while moving. when games are trying to be "realistic" (regardless of whether or not they succeed), they will imitate this behavior by making aiming down the sights more accurate than firing from the hip.

a real soldier is trained to ADS for accuracy, so a "realistic" video game soldier will do the same for the same reasons.

OK, then we are in agreement and agree that we never disagreed about aiming down the sights.

The radical thing that I don't think you are getting is just because you don't see this:

Doesn't mean that an eye isn't being used to aim down the sights as well as out of the left eye... of the in game character.

PS: even for "un-aimed" suppressive fire, soldiers fire with the weapons shouldered if not for the sights but for how recoil is always significant and the shoulder has to press down the length of the weapon via the shoulder stock.

 

[Aprilgold]

Now your adding complication to this. Imagine its a white void at that person is charging at you with a knife. Would you rather try and stick the butt of the gun all the way up, gently lean your head then aim or just start firing off rounds and hope he goes down?

"Gently"? Lawl, as if!

Anyway, you are in fact making your point come across. But no scenario is a vacuum - I'm not adding complication. Okay, if for some reason you're in the US military and you're sporting a M16A4 and supposed to kick down doors and enter buildings, you'll probably do some kind of "point shooting". Why? Because of the length of the rifle making it harder to wield and aim in enclosed spaces. Not because of the sights (although the zero on the sights is a little bit offset from the bore).

5 feet? If by that point I don't have the shotgun shouldered (or rifle, but I know shotguns better) then I fail. When I put my cheek on the butt-stock I can also look trough the sights with my right eye.

But we are talking 5 feet. Enough to miss, but also enough to shove a 20 inch barrel into someone's face. 5 feet is enough to reach with a well thrown punch or kick.

Unless you have a pretty big knife, at 5 feet your teeth will be politely greeted by steel.

EDIT: or just push the barrel into the target's running chest and let it rip.

My point is that you wouldn't want to get into this situation in the first place. Unless, you know, you do then I guess you got your own plan set up.

Finally, five feet is not a long distance sprint, if anything he would be up in your face in about a second. If you can pull up the gun to get ironsights in that amount of time and squeeze off a good shot then thats good on you, but I doubt it. Also, you have a fucking shotgun, I don't think accuracy matters as long as the barrel is pointing forward.

Also, not everyone is completely moronic and run face first into your barrel, in a sense, they are not standing up right gliding like some robot slowly towards you where you can easily just put a barrel in their mouth, I don't think anyone would be that stupid.

 

[Treblaine]

Also, you have a fucking shotgun, I don't think accuracy matters as long as the barrel is pointing forward.

Well you may be using some specially modified shotgun but usually shotgun pellet spread is not as extreme as you might first think.

http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/bot44.htm

"Improved cylinder" is not any attempt at trying to constrict the shot, spread at most 9 inches at 30 feet. The widest spread is about 1 inch per yard and as the pellets are accelerated down by gravity the pellet spread will get taller at longer ranges.

This will make it "easier" to hit them at all, like if you had a rifle a shot that skimmed over their shoulder would land one or two pellets in them, but each individual pellet of a shotgun isn't very hard hitting, each about the equivalent of a small pocket-pistol with an FMJ pullet. The power from shotguns comes in landing all the pellets at once in the same instance, it's overwhelming.

You will notice in a few of those images of the target the "wad" which is the plastic cylinder that holds the shot in place in the barrel but falls away outside the gun, this may be light plastic but it can fly off in random directions and cause serious energy, it's analogous to a paintball only far faster than any paintball pellet and has sharp edges, it can kill. This is the problem with using shotguns for precision work like around hostages as the pellet flies off much more randomly than the lead pellets.

 

[Adeptus Aspartem]

I just tried it with my Assault Rifle, just to remember.
And jeah, if you've your gun on the hip, it actually looks like in the games. Just 1 diffrence: As a player you've no peripheral vision while focusing on the screen, while the person you're playing wouldn't see their gun as sharp as you.

About the parallax: It's waaaaay less drastic than in the picutre but he's somewhat right with that point.

PS: How can someone waste so much energy on something like this?

Captcha: Okey-Dokey

 

[Ando85]

Interesting, never really thought about that in such depth. I do see your point. But, the thing about ADS is the delay it causes which I think a few people have mentioned before. If you are at a full sprint with an assault rifle it is going to take a significant split second to raise the gun. Sure, it doesn't seem like a long time, but in these games a split second can be an eternity of difference.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

"I thought you were arguing that a side view of a rifle that does not include aiming down the iron sights"

Oh it can include aiming down the sights, with the other eye.

Well it's a matter of which is more realistic, is it realistic to lose the vision of the entire left field? I don't think so, it's treating every player like a cyclops.

I don't mean "realistic" as in pixel-perfect recreation, I mean it isn't unrealistic in the sense of "Games without ADS are SOOOOO unrealistic, no way you can hit anything with that accuracy without using the sights". Realism not in the sense of superficiality but the practicality of "you can't be accurate with a gun without visually lining up sights)

Well considering parallax perspective and both-eyes-open shooting they may very well be aiming using the sights.

"Both of those shooters are aiming with the sights."

This is what you don't address, how can you REPRESENT the increased vision you'd have with both-eyes-open that has accuracy of lining up sights with the target and also not having a quarter of their vision obscured by the weapon body as you see here:

See the part of the screen behind the gun, that would be concealed from right eye view and is obscuring targets you are trying to track, that would be visible with left-eye view.

I think a lot can be said for the classic view is all, in that - in some ways, such as fields of view - the non-ads type games are more realistic. Considering how many shooters are trained to shoot with both eyes open it would be unrealistically forcing all players to aim with greatly restricted perspective with the COD style ADS.

I am addressing the problem by dismissing it. You are solving a negligible problem of perspective that most people will never be aware of or think about even if they were by building a massive brick wall of unrealism. When a shooter is shooting, this is the important bit:

That is the most realistic and best way to visualize the experience of shooting a rifle in a single frame. If you're not seeing that, you aren't shooting a rifle. That's where the action's at. Everything else is details. Anything you can do to make looking down iron sights more realistic than it is already is just gravy.

 

[yeti585]

Think about it, the right eye would be looking down the weapons sights and out around at the enviroment. The left eye would be looking around with a better view at the environment and see the left side of the gun in your hand.

Your left eye would see something like this:

While your right eye looking down the sights sees this:

Now take the important part of what the right eye sees, where the sights line up and indicate where the bullets go, and lay that superimposed over the wider less restricted view of the Left eye. Then you have the classic "unrealistic" representation of aiming a weapon with a reticule in the centre of the screen:

"These games are so unrealistic, you can't aim without using the sights. Where does the reticule on the screen come from?"

The reticule comes from using the gun. It is a game REPRESENTATION of your right eye using the sights while your left eye is open.

The problem is, when you look down the sights of a weapon, you close your non-dominant eye. "What's a non-dominant eye?" some may say. you do see with both eyes, but you see the majority of things with one eye. Don't believe me? look at something across the room, a bottle or something is fine. Keep both eyes open and make a triangle with your hands by putting your thumbs out, your fingers together (other than the thumb), and put your hands together so that the thumbs go over top one another (same with other fingers). Now that you have your object (make sure it's not too big) and your triangle, put your hands up so that you can see the object through the triangle in your hands. Bring your hands back slowly so that you can still see the object all the way through. The hole in your hands will soon be over your dominant eye (This trick is used to determine the handedness of an archer).

Secondly, when you aim down the sights the sight is put in the middle of your screen, despite being on your right shoulder side. This suggests the left eye is closed without making half the screen black.

Thirdly, If that is a game representation of your right eye looking at the sights and your left eye open, then why is it not double visioned? Here's another experiment that can be done with only your hands. put your left arm out in front of you, and point a single finger up. Now make a "thumbs up" with your right hand. Put your right thumb a few inches from your right eye and put it over your view of your left finger, as if it's the sights of a weapon. you should find this odd because of the conflicting views of your eyes, causing the fingers to double.

 

[Treblaine]

The problem is, when you look down the sights of a weapon, you close your non-dominant eye. "What's a non-dominant eye?" some may say. you do see with both eyes, but you see the majority of things with one eye. Don't believe me? look at something across the room, a bottle or something is fine. Keep both eyes open and make a triangle with your hands by putting your thumbs out, your fingers together (other than the thumb), and put your hands together so that the thumbs go over top one another (same with other fingers). Now that you have your object (make sure it's not too big) and your triangle, put your hands up so that you can see the object through the triangle in your hands. Bring your hands back slowly so that you can still see the object all the way through. The hole in your hands will soon be over your dominant eye (This trick is used to determine the handedness of an archer).

Secondly, when you aim down the sights the sight is put in the middle of your screen, despite being on your right shoulder side. This suggests the left eye is closed without making half the screen black.

Thirdly, If that is a game representation of your right eye looking at the sights and your left eye open, then why is it not double visioned? Here's another experiment that can be done with only your hands. put your left arm out in front of you, and point a single finger up. Now make a "thumbs up" with your right hand. Put your right thumb a few inches from your right eye and put it over your view of your left finger, as if it's the sights of a weapon. you should find this odd because of the conflicting views of your eyes, causing the fingers to double.

What you say about the non-dominant eye is true... at first. But it is not inherent and unavoidable, you can train out of it relatively quickly to shoot with both eyes open and PERCEIVE simultaneously:

-A clear unobstructed view out of the left eye
and
-A clear aligned of sights over target through the right eye

"when you aim down the sights the sight is put in the middle of your screen, despite being on your right shoulder side. This suggests the left eye is closed without making half the screen black.

Yeah, for those games it would indicate that. But advanced shooting trains you to keep both eyes open when shooting. You shouldn't close your left eye when aiming down the sights. So how would you show that on screen?

then why is it not double vision?

Because when you are properly trained on Both-Eyes-Open shooting you DO NOT see double vision. 'Double vision' is your visual cortex "glitching out" as it can't understand that these drastically different perspectives of each eye should not be combined like that. This is well within the capability of your brain, it deals with parallax all the time, it just needs to be trained.

But that is YOUR brain. How does the game using just one screen represent what a character with two eyeballs sees?

Just the previous page this was explained with examples.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/jump/9.384012.15229933

 

[ElPatron]

Finally, five feet is not a long distance sprint, if anything he would be up in your face in about a second.

I can't hear that from the other end of my 20" barrel. It will get to the target faster than the target runs at me.

Also, you have a fucking shotgun, I don't think accuracy matters as long as the barrel is pointing forward.

Shotguns spread buck and bird shot at a rate of ~1 inch for every yard, give or take. A barrel pointing forward? Too many variables. Only if you gave me those soft lead USGI buckshot rounds with that POS they dare calling a "wad", now that I bet I could hit blindfolded.

If we're talking only about reflex shooting, why would the tightness of the sights matter?

Edit: Also, what AR15 are you using where you can "loosen" the sights? Are you talking about having a modular iron sight on a railed rifle and loosening the fastener? I'm confused by what advantage that would provide. Maybe you mean using the night-time rear sight even during the day?

1. Looser apertures allow you to get a faster sight picture at the expense of precision.

2. AR15? I can't tell you a whole lot about them apart from mechanical details. I know that *probably* most factory sights have two apertures, one is looser and the other is tighter. However, they are still tighter than, say, a MP5. Maybe you have seen an airsoft replica or whatever - they are much more "open".

 

[ElPatron]

If you shoulder and cheek a gun, it's going to be more restrictive than simply shouldering it. There is no room for argument in this. Your spine means this is a fact.

Okay, then we definitely shoulder differently. If I want total mobility, I simply do not shoulder. Now, call this some kind of birth defect, but my spine allows me to shoulder and cheek with the same movement restrictions as simply shouldering.

Okay, I need to take off my cheek if I want to look behind my shoulder.

Make an example of a move I shouldn't be able to do while cheeking but that I should be able to do while shouldering. I'll try it when I have the time.

Well it looks like someone has never held a weapon before let alone fire one. The only firearm you use both eyes when aiming is a handgun.

No. Rifles and shotguns are fine too.

 

[LetalisK]

1. Looser apertures allow you to get a faster sight picture at the expense of precision.

2. AR15? I can't tell you a whole lot about them apart from mechanical details. I know that *probably* most factory sights have two apertures, one is looser and the other is tighter. However, they are still tighter than, say, a MP5. Maybe you have seen an airsoft replica or whatever - they are much more "open".

Okay, it was the terminology. When you said "looser" I was thinking the sights were jiggling back and forth or something and it'd didn't make sense. XD