I'm not saying 4:3 is the 'correct' AR, It is just the standard to compare it to.



Maybe we should put an emphasis on this for developers.

I too am going to do terrible things to people if this is not fixed. Seriously Devs, how can you make a great new engine and produce lovely looking games like Far Cry 2, and not support the proper FOV for widescreen users? Wide FOV = good.

I'm not looking at the screen right now, but I was running 1600 x 900 on a 16:10 monitor (with black bars on the top and bottom) and that looks right as far as how much of the gun I could see.

At first I thought this was the reason everything felt so cramped, and it wasn't until I googled "far cry 2 fov" that I found out the problem. I'm probably just going to play in a 4:3 resolution until this gets fixed.

And what about all those FPS games from the last console generation which are 4:3 only an have an equivically narrow FOV for that aspect ratio. Surely you won't argue that those were designed for a narrower aspect ratio than the 4:3 they exclusively support?

I am playing it on a 16:9 plasma, as I have done nearly all my gameing on for about 4 years now. The thing is, haven't been talking about feelings. As for my feelings, I'd like a wider FOV, just like I'd like a wider FOV on pretty much every console based FPS around. That goes for the games designed to target 16:9 this generation just the same as it does the ones designed to target 4:3 last generation.

The narrow FOVs of such console games do feel wrong to those of us who are accustomed to the wider FOVs of PC games. However, for console gamers who have generally played such narrow FOV games, and who sit respectively further from their TVs than PC gamers sit from monitors, such narrower FOVs feel perfectly natural.


And, GeneralAdmission, the image you edited is an accurate representation. To clarify the situation, imagine that screnshot is of a cutscene where you talk to two people, one on the left edge of that 16:9 view and one on the right edge. Now imagine if narrower aspect ratios didn't add to the top and bottom of the image, but instead cut off the sides; that would leave 4:3 users not being able to see the charachters talking to them.

There is a lot of debate about the correct implementation of widescreen but shouldn't the view get wider the wider your screen gets no matter what the aspect ratio the game was designed in ... Far Cry 2 doesn't.


btw ... click the image to see the full res 5040x1050 version of that screenshot without the lines etc. ...

Checking the Gamerprofile under Docs/My Games/Farcry2.

I saw these two options.. I havnt seen them brought up in this thread yet. Does anyone know if they have any impact on this issue?


ForceWidescreen="0" AspectRatio="0"

"0" being the default value

this is bad. I was wondering why this game was giving me headaches.

I thought that devs had wised up to this... guess not. The games too addicting to stop, IMO... So i'll just tough it out until there's a FOV hack.... hopefully its soon cause i'd really hate to play all the way through this game like this.

It should get wider when you go to wider aspect ratio, and it should get taller when you go to a narrower aspect ratio. Far Cry 2 unfortunately doesn't do the former to properly support wider aspect ratios than it's intended 16:9 view. However, it does do the latter, which allows it to preserve intended view when using narrower displays.

Far Cry 2 needs some serious widescreen support, incase none of you knew this is what happens when you set ForceWidescreen="1" from your GameProfile.xml in "X":\Documents and Settings\"username"\My Documents\My Games\Far Cry 2



You get the black bars. Has anyone else messed around with the settings? Cant seem to work the AspectRatio="0" setting. Doesnt seem to do anything.

The screens get wider or narrower ... the height doesn't change so the vertical FOV shouldn't change.

Which is why I posted this to explain ...

The narrower aspect ratios are no taller ... so their vertical FOV does not change.

There's something funky about this game. The FOV doesn't feel right even when playing with a 4:3 res and looking up and down makes me feel like I'm playing Duke Nukem 3D; like the view is distorting.

I figured that was about right, based on Dopefish's AR list.

I agree with you that cutting off the sides of the screen--resulting in loss of important game elements--is certainly not the right solution. That would be the equivalent of a pan-n-scan solution (PnS needs to die out already!).

With that said, would you agree that the current widescreen implementation of FC2 on the PC is severely lacking? I don't have the game, but the horizontal FOV shown in the screenshots is definitely 'cramped', IMO. Given that widescreen displays are rapidly taking over the PC and TV markets, I think games should cater to widescreen first: expand the horizontal FOV (90-100 degrees is nice), maintain a consistent vertical FOV across all platforms, and letterbox the output on 4:3 or 5:4 displays. This is exactly how wide-AR TV shows and films are displayed on 4:3 screens.

And of course, horizontal FOV should play nice with Triplehead.

-edit-
Yikes. I didn't know Crysis has a shark level. I guess that's another game I won't be able to finish.

Then you have a cut-scene that was made for widescreen and needs to be anamorphic in narrower aspect ratios.

That option gives you the developers intended 16:9 view, with black bars to fill in the extra vertical resolution on your 16:10 monitor.


And as I explained, if you do make a game for 16:9 and then make narrower FOVs narrower instead of taller, then you wind up cutting out the sides of the intended view, potentially leaving 4:3 users and such missing important visual information.


It certainly is, but as I've mentioned, the same goes for the vast majorty of other console centric games which came before it.


Letterboxing is an option, and avalable in FC2 as DD's screenshot shows. However, real time rendering allows those black bars to be filled in with imagery, much like some movies are filmed foropen matte. I think that is a better option for games; why use black bars when you can fill the screen with something worth looking at?


Yeah, a lot of developers shamefully overlook the few that venture any wider than 16:9.

Sure, it may feel better to you, but that doesn't mean it was designed that way. It was designed for 16:9 for the consoles. Almost all newer games use a low FOV. I don't like it, but that's what they're doing. To "correct" the screen to how it was intended, it would be Vert+ for anything less than 16:9 and Vert- for anything higher.

I think this problem primarily exists for a couple of reasons. Games that are developed for consoles, you are typically sitting further back. The further back you sit, the less terrible the low FOV feels. I tried playing Battlefield: Bad Company on the 360 up close and it just felt too zoomed in, but once you move back and sit further away, it feels okay. So the initial problem comes from the fact that it's a console game first. And Far Cry 2 is a console game before it's a PC game. When you move to the PC, you are suddenly sitting up close. If you tried playing a typical PC game with a regular 90 degree field of view on a console, sitting further away, you'd think it was just as terrible.

So, for it to be "correct," the game would be to be fixed so that it scaled horizontally with a vertical field of view similar to 16:9.