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[Orayn]

Just saw Notch responding to this PCGamer on Twitter, and I've gotta say, it's pretty amazing.

The default field of vision in Quake—yes, Quake, the groundbreaking Id Software shooter from 1996—was 90 degrees, an angle nowhere near the roughly 180-degree field of view that Wikipedia says normal humans possess. It also proved rather limiting in multiplayer conflicts, in which being able to see the people who are trying to kill you is an important part of preventing said killing. The Fisheye Quake mod went a long way toward rectifying that problem, but it suffered from issues of its own in the form of some pretty severe screen distortion.
It's a problem that's taken nearly 20 years to solve, but now, in the new millennium, there is light at the end of the tunnel in the form of a modified version of Fisheye Quake called Blinky. Its goal isn't actually to bring better situational awareness to Quake, however, but rather to demonstrate a "proof of concept to put peripheral vision into games," without requiring VR goggles.

Basically, Blinky takes a non-standard image projection and allows it to run in real time by combining several "snapshots" surrounding the player into a single image that shows a lot of visual information with relatively low distortion. This is just a basic proof of concept to see if the same idea can be applied to other games/engines in real time, so stay tuned!

http://www.pcgamer.com/peripheral-vision-in-games-gets-ultrawide-boost-with-new-quake-mod/

 

[Dragoon En Regalia]

TB reviews this in 3, 2, 1...

Anyway, this looks great, and hopefully more folks will play the game and its fan content now that news is breaking. There's still modding capacity for this game after so many years. Having a wide FOV's important when on the lookout for death knights and fiends.

 

[Orayn]

TB reviews this in 3, 2, 1...

Anyway, this looks great, and hopefully more folks will play the game and its fan content now that news is breaking. There's still modding capacity for this game after so many years. Having a wide FOV's important when on the lookout for death knights and fiends.

Moreso than just Quake, the application I'm hoping to see take off is the "fast partial."

It's theoretically the most flexible, since all you need to do is render a game in the highest FoV and resolution you can feasibly do in real time, then combine the center of that image with the surrounding region. The quality won't be as good as the full cube method, but you could do it with almost any game that supports a user-controlled FoV.

 

[Accoun]

I'm pretty sure there was a video of Q1 with 360 FOV on YT (sorry, on mobile so can't look for it). Looks like it was using the same, or similar,technology? Still, it's interesting.

 

[HTupolev]

I'm not familiar with Panini projection, but it looks like a very nice projection for capturing a wide game-world angle within a small viewing angle. Very good all-round characteristics, everything is easy to look at and straight lines aren't being distorted that much.

On the other hand, there's something comforting (from an analysis standpoint) of everyone using standard perspective projection. The Order 1886 tripped me up recently when I tried to measure the FoV, apparently the game has a bit of barrel distortion.

I'm pretty sure there was a video of Q1 with 360 FOV on YT

Yes, showing off many different projections. Although they "worked", most of them just don't look very good, for a variety of reasons. But I have to admit it's pretty funny seeing a game rendered in Mercator.

 

[majik13]

would be great if they showed the orginal FOV from that angle.

 

[Dictator93]

I'm not familiar with Panini projection, but it looks like a very nice projection for capturing a wide game-world angle within a small viewing angle. Very good all-round characteristics, everything is easy to look at and straight lines aren't being distorted that much.

On the other hand, there's something comforting (from an analysis standpoint) of everyone using standard perspective projection. The Order 1886 tripped me up recently when I tried to measure the FoV, apparently the game has a bit of barrel distortion.

Isn't that from the CA? That is, if they are trying to emulate the physical nature of a camera lens.

 

[HTupolev]

Isn't that from the CA?

No. Look at how the straight lines on the floor in these images are warped with some concavity depending on whether they're near the top or bottom of the image:

That's not "CA", it's emulation of the large-scale distortion of some wide-angle camera lenses. This was confirmed by the project's lead graphics programmer.

 

[Orayn]

would be great if they showed the orginal FOV from that angle.

Lemme fire up EZQuake...

And here it is next to the images from the article.

 

[Appleman]

Lemme fire up EZQuake...

And here it is next to the images from the article.

Super interesting, thanks

 

[Dictator93]

good pics.

Does the level of CA along the lien's distortion increase towards the edge of the screen? As in how it works with a wide-angle camera lens?

So the pixel offset of the discoloration increases.

 

[NeOak]

That is the first time i've seen that "standard".

 

[Calabi]

Doesnt our brain work the same way? Stitching together images otherwise the world would look pretty messed up.

 

[HTupolev]

Does the level of CA along the lien's distortion increase towards the edge of the screen? As in how it works with a wide-angle camera lens?

So the pixel offset of the discoloration increases.

Kind of hard to say. Here are somewhat higher-quality versions of the two images. CA in TO1886 isn't very blatantly clear aside from when you're injured.

That is the first time i've seen that "standard".

No it's not. Standard rectilinear perspective projection goes nuts as you approach 180 degrees. You just haven't noticed because you've been playing games with FoVs in the 50-120 range.

 

[Dictator93]

Kind of hard to say. Here are somewhat higher-quality versions of the two images. CA in TO1886 isn't very blatantly clear aside from when you're injured.


No it's not. The usual perspective projection goes nuts as you approach 180 degrees.

Too compressed to tell wish the PS4 had actually uncompressed screens!

 

[Orayn]

That is the first time i've seen that "standard".

That's the standard projection method at 170 degrees FoV. My screenshot a few posts up is what the game normally looks like at the default of 90.

 

[HTupolev]

Too compressed to tell wish the PS4 had actually uncompressed screens!

Heh, it's also a twitter link. Unfortunately I don't have my PS4 with me at this very minute.

 

[Orayn]

Doesnt our brain work the same way? Stitching together images otherwise the world would look pretty messed up.

They do, which is why binocular vision lets us see nearly 180 degrees without distortion. Granted, we do have a blind spot and not all of that ~180 is "full detail," but it's still very wide and expansive compared to how most game cameras work.

 

[majik13]

Lemme fire up EZQuake...

And here it is next to the images from the article.

great, thanks

 

[HTupolev]

They do, which is why binocular vision lets us see nearly 180 degrees without distortion.

Not exactly. Stitching isn't the key thing; even a single eye gets pretty good FoV, but one-eyed vision doesn't "have weird distortion." The key is more that our visual systems don't "use perspective projection" in the first place in any meaningful sense.

Also worth mentioning is that vision has no intrinsic 180-degree limitation. Most humans have less than 180 degrees of visibility, but it's not a hard barrier, and plenty of animals with similar binocular systems (i.e. cats) tend to have higher.

 

[Orayn]

Not exactly. Stitching isn't the key thing; even a single eye gets pretty good FoV, but one-eyed vision doesn't "have weird distortion." The key is more that our visual systems don't "use perspective projection" in the first place in any meaningful sense.

Also worth mentioning is that vision has no intrinsic 180-degree limitation. Most humans have less than 180 degrees of visibility, but it's not a hard barrier, and plenty of animals with similar binocular systems (i.e. cats) tend to have higher.

Yeah, this is a better way of putting it. Our brains to combine the images from both eyes to get a continuous image, but the combination isn't what gives us a wide field of vision.

...Man, just typing up this has me thinking about eye-tracking for VR and all that fun stuff. There's so much video games have barely scratched the surface of!