i decided to make this not because i care
that much about zoom, but simply because so many people seem to completely misunderstand the concept and be so entirely misinformed on the topic.
Put simply, it's not zooming in: Your normal view is zoomed out. The standard 70-90 degree view in fps is zoomed out to about 30-50% of real life distance vision. It's exactly like the mirror on a car, "objects in mirror are closer than they appear"; everything that looks 50 yards away by default in an fps is more like 17-25 yards away, because the view as been distorted to give you wide peripheral vision in a tiny viewing space.
In real life you have a 180 degree field of view; you can't see things in the corner of your eye with complete detail, but if you're paying attention, you will notice important things like a person waving at you or a car coming at you. In order to provide true-to-scale 180 degree view in a game at 100% scale, your display setup would have to look like this:
think about it. Is your screen even half that size?
hell no. So of course the standard 90 degree view in fps is not remotely close to true scale.
the 90 degree view is a compromise - you get half the peripheral vision of real life, and (optimistically) half the distance vision, without the major fish eye distortion which results from compressing 180 degrees into a standard-sized display. I certainly wouldn't want to play without it. That being said, the distance vision is a joke compared to real life. A field of view around 30-45 degrees is far more accurate to human eye distance vision, but it's like playing with blinders on.
This is why games have begun to integrate a universal zoom option separate from scopes, binoculars, and other optics, because it allows you to use real life distance vision whenever you want. Yes, maybe it could use some animated blur effects around the edges in a vague attempt to simulate the effect of your eyes focusing, and to make it look less robotic... But that's
cosmetic.
To address those that complain that shooting at long distance in "realism" mode is too easy: Blame the shooting mechanics, not the truescale vision. Far too many people on this forum would rather introduce or retain totally unrealistic elements in order to bandage major flaws in other mechanics.
In my thread on cqb mechanics, everyone wanted to retain a gimpy hip shooting mode just to cover up the fact that attaining a perfectly-aligned sight picture is too fast in ro. No one bothered to think that maybe sight alignment should be a gradual process, in which getting the sights to your eye is quick, but perfectly aligning them is gradual and takes a second or two.
This is essentially the same thing; people would rather remove true-to-scale distance vision from the game than address the fact that rifle recoil is too low, perfect sight alignment happens too quickly, sway is a bit too low (though it shouldn't be nearly as high as ro1), etc. Keep your **** straight people. Don't mix, match, and confuse your problems. And for christ's sake,
get over ro1; it was good for its time and was a step in the right direction for military shooters, but it had a ton of awful flaws, and if you use it as your definitive model for the way everything should be in a military shooter, you're going to have one extremely warped and inaccurate idea of realism.
Stop polluting threads focused on other topics with your ill-supported and misinformed whining about zoom. From a realistic perspective, if anything the zoom feature should be expanded. You shouldn't ever be
forced to zoom (i.e. When using iron sights) but you should always have the
option to zoom via a key, whether your weapon is at the shoulder, at the hip, whether you're standing still, walking, or running. For those who want to continue automatically zooming during is, a simple "is starting zoom" field could be added to the preferences menu.
For those who want to continue playing their automobile-side-mirror simulator, you can take the side mirror off your own car and shove it up your own ***.
