UT3's shoddy widescreen in Gamespot 8.5 review

[Paddy the Wak]

np ... 8)

[Paradigm Shifter]

im installing mine now, i will report back with shameless druleworthy screenshots if at all possible

Good to see ya round again. ;)

I was gonna pick UT3 up today... but it'll have to wait until next week or something now. :)

[Sweetz]

I wouldn't say they "got it right" entirely. The games did, after all, default to vert - behavior. You still had to manually increase the FOV via .ini edit. And there were a handful of UT2k3 engine games where this wasn't possible.

Furthermore, FOV changes didn't affect the player's in-view weapon, they still get cut-off regardless of the FOV setting, kind of like they're rendered in a separate viewport.

[dopefish]

:?:

[Sweetz]

It's not a separate viewport. In most games, in first person view, they occlude the player model, lower the camera to about upperchest/neck height on the player model, and then display some guns on the screen irregardless of FOV. This is why when you change the FOV, the guns stay the same, since they are independent of the FOV. They're more dependent on the screen resolution itself. Moving these would require additional tweaks.

Just think of the player's hands and guns as being rendered like the HUD. It's just an overlay on top of the scene.

Saying it's an overlay would suggest it has it's own render view and is composited onto the normal environment view though, sort of like a skybox? I guess technically not a separate viewport.

The Unreal engine is actually the only major FPS engine I know of where the gun models aren't affected by changes to the FOV though. FOV changes in Quake, Doom 3, and Source engine games do affect how much of the the first person weapon models are drawn - it seems like their a part of the main world viewport, whereas in UE it seems they are not. Obviously there's some kind of difference between how these engines are positioning and drawing their first person models.

Anyway, main point is even with FOV changes, UE is still has widescreen flaws compared to other engines.