Treblaine said:
I tried using a couple of my rifles to test your theory, but it doesn't really work. Obviously, there is a parallax effect when switching from right eye closed to left eye closed. However, if I line up the iron sights with my right eye, the rifle appears far larger in my left field of vision than what you propose it to be. With my left eye, the visual field is still largely obscured by the rifle and the sights appear at far less of an angle than what is typically represented as the non-ADS view of the player's firearm. Any videogame which stayed true to your proposal (right FOV represented by the reticle while weapon model represents the left FOV) would be extremely irritating/impractical as the majority of the screen would constantly be obscured by the weapon model.
By forcing the player to take a moment to switch to ADS view, it realistically simulates that a combatant cannot constantly keep his/her weapon sights perfectly aligned at all times. Soldiers are trained to keep their weapon shouldered (ie sights are not aligned in either left or right fov, no cheek weld) while scanning for targets. When a target is found, the soldier repositions his/her weapon and head to form a cheek weld and align the sights. If stationary or moving very slowly, you can scan for targets by peering slightly above the sights without breaking your cheekweld, but if a videogame is attempting to simulate movement through a battlefield or a zombie apocalypse (rather than hunting from a deerstand or shooting paper from a bench), a toggleable shouldered position to cheekweld would be the most sensible choice. The current ADS systems is not perfect, the shouldered position often shows too much of the firearm, the ironsight view often does not obsure enough of the screen, and the standard FOV simulated on a computer screen or TV is not the same as that of the human eye (hence the rather awkward zoom feature found in the ADS view of Red Orchestra 2, the weapon sights are shifted to the FOV created by the human eye). Anyways, these ADS systems are FAR more realistic than the hipfiring-only nonesense found in games like L4D2 or Half-Life 2. Your proposal would not be particularily realistic, as it would imply that the shooter can maintain constant alignment of the sights regardless of movement or circumstance. In reality this just isn't possible, nor prefferable (impractical when scanning for targets in vast majority of situations).
As an aside, shooting with both eyes open would be extremely difficult to simulate in videogame, in my case I find both fields of view overlap (with the visual field of my dominant eye appearing opaque, while the visual field of my other eye appearing transparent).
