Aim-Down-Sight is unnecessary for realism

[Kopikatsu]

So, is there anyone else who thinks that aiming down sights makes it HARDER to aim? Between the gun itself and the muzzle flash, I can't see shit when I'm shooting in most modern shooters. This goes double for handguns for some reason.

Then the problem lies with excessive zoom and muzzle flash.

Also, I started playing shooters before shooting guns so I assumed that the tip of the ironsight was my aiming point - actually it's right above the tip. That caused me to be very inaccurate because I was covering my target with the sight.

...Huh. Yeah, I always put the ironsight on the target. I guess I'll try aiming a bit lower next time.

 

[LetalisK]

Anyway, you are in fact making your point come across. But no scenario is a vacuum - I'm not adding complication. Okay, if for some reason you're in the US military and you're sporting a M16A4 and supposed to kick down doors and enter buildings, you'll probably do some kind of "point shooting". Why? Because of the length of the rifle making it harder to wield and aim in enclosed spaces. Not because of the sights (although the zero on the sights is a little bit offset from the bore).

We do the same thing with M4s too. Pretty much any weapon in close quarters, actually. It has nothing to do with the size of the weapon and everything to do with the time it takes to get a proper sight picture. That's also why we sometimes use CQC reflex sights, blending the speed of point shooting with the accuracy of sight shooting.

 

[ElPatron]

We do the same thing with M4s too. Pretty much any weapon in close quarters, actually. It has nothing to do with the size of the weapon and everything to do with the time it takes to get a proper sight picture. That's also why we sometimes use CQC reflex sights, blending the speed of point shooting with the accuracy of sight shooting.

Well, that discrepancy might be explained by me being used to very loose sight apertures. Since I live in Europe only 1% of my time (BS estimate) with AR15 has actually involved live-fire ones.

 

[SlaveNumber23]

I believe the ability to aim down the sight in games is more about functionality than realism, it zooms in and lowers the sensitivity, allowing you to aim more accurately.

 

[GenericAmerican]

Well it looks like someone has never held a weapon before let alone fire one. The only firearm you use both eyes when aiming is a handgun.

And it really doesn't look anything like that even if you had both eyes open.

 

[LetalisK]

We do the same thing with M4s too. Pretty much any weapon in close quarters, actually. It has nothing to do with the size of the weapon and everything to do with the time it takes to get a proper sight picture. That's also why we sometimes use CQC reflex sights, blending the speed of point shooting with the accuracy of sight shooting.

Well, that discrepancy might be explained by me being used to very loose sight apertures. Since I live in Europe only 1% of my time (BS estimate) with AR15 has actually involved live-fire ones.

If we're talking only about reflex shooting, why would the tightness of the sights matter?

Edit: Also, what AR15 are you using where you can "loosen" the sights? Are you talking about having a modular iron sight on a railed rifle and loosening the fastener? I'm confused by what advantage that would provide. Maybe you mean using the night-time rear sight even during the day?

 

[Jamieson 90]

Ironsighting is like the bane of PC gaming. I remember back in the ealy 2000's when games like Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Quake and UT didn't have it or had very little of it. The results were very fast paced games, now we have games like COD etc etc where the games are like a snails pace with IS's contributing to that.

 

[Lev The Red]

for realism? yes, they are.

anyone who has spent more than a few minutes firing a weapon knows that you cannot hope to hit anything with any consistency without the use of sights of some kind. hell, it takes skill to group shots even when you ARE aiming down sights. shouldering a rifle doesn't make its recoil disappear, it just transfers it into the shooter, who has to adjust for and manage it to aim accurately.

i want to say the anyone who thinks Call of Duty or Battlefield are "realistic" shooters knows absolutely nothing about weapons. a silencer will not turn an AK's bang into a whisper or even a hiss. a trained soldier can, even in full gear, run more that 10 feet before doubling over in some kind of asthmatic fit. bullets do not magically reload themselves from half-spent magazines into new ones. most importantly, a bullet fired from the hip is almost always a bullet wasted.

while not perfect simulators by any means, Red Orchestra and Day of Defeat are games that represent guns fairly well. they are also very unforgiving and difficult games. so much so that they can become unfun when you miss most of your shots and die after 1 or 2 hits.

Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor and others are not realistic. they are, however, fun. and that's what's important. i play Call of Duty because i want to run down a hallway with an AK-47 and shoot people. when i want realism, i take my Mosin to a range and waste a few hundred rounds trying to hit center.

 

[Treblaine]

Uhh, because the floating reticule (that cross in the middle of the screen) REPRESENTS what your right eye sees as the point-of-aim of your gun.

The thing is its easier to represent what the right eye sees through some abstraction rather than always show the right eye view (inherently more obscuring) and then try to represent the clearer view of the left eye.

I think I understand what you are trying to say, but when I shoot my brain doesn't create an abstraction to represent what my right eye sees and impose that over what I see while I watch a wide view with my left eye. That is not a good description of what you experience when you shoot a rifle. That's why so many people are asking if you have ever fired a rifle. Aiming down the sights in a game is very obviously a much better recreation of what it's actually like to shoot a rifle than communicating the same information to a player through means they would not experience in real life while the player enjoys a view that is very unlike the one they would experience while shooting. The whole parallax issue doesn't matter because it has nothing to do with the act of firing a rifle. That is what a 'realistic' game is trying to illustrate to the player. It doesn't matter if you can see the side of the rifle or not.

I hope that wasn't tedious to read, I felt kind of weird explaining it.

You question answers itself, why are you asking why you wouldn't ACTUALLY see an abstraction, when it is being abstract, not exactly wthe way you see it but the IMPORTANT PARTS of what you see.

And you would actually something exactly like this with the Binden Aiming Concept where there is an illuminated or bright reticule:

[yputube=NpGSKKgWWks]

This part talks about a magnified right field view but without any magnifying scope like a red-dot sight or simply dayglow front bead,then the images of each eye merges and the from post stands out as a floating reticule over the target without the weapon body obscuring the lower part of the target as the unobstructed left-field merges over the top.

This is not totally natural, but soldiers and many other shooters do in fact train to shoot with both eyes open and their left eye lookign at the target. Look at this footage of this very experienced shooter:


Though it's hard to find definitive examples of both eyes-open shooting due to how safety glasses are rightly so often used and the cameraman tends to not film where the person is facing as that's where the weapon is pointing you can't see if both eyes are open.

And there are a lot out there who encourage both eye-open shooting with all firearms:


If this is being done, how do you with a single frame represent what two fields see? With abstraction. If the right field was shown with the body of the gun obscuring the screen like a thick pillar down from the target then how do you show what the left eye see, that isn't obscured by the right eye being so close to the gun? Well you don't. You show the left eye field predominantly and represent the left-eye with an on-screen reticule.

Have I convinced you?

At the very least, how ELSE are games going to represent "both eyes open" perspective as the old "Peer through iron sighs" obscures view on screen in a way that wouldn't be if both eyes were open.

I didn't ask a question.

I thought you were arguing that a side view of a rifle that does not include aiming down the iron sights like the pictures in your original post was as realistic in games as aiming down the iron sights. Is that correct?

I thought we were talking about realism, and you're telling me we should be using abstractions to convey the information a real shooter would gather by staring down the sights. The important parts of what I see are not conveyed to me through abstractions in real life, so that approach is very unrealistic. The most ingenious method to mimic human sight would fall far short of making up for something as unrealistic as that. I know some shoot with both eyes open, I'm saying it doesn't matter. Both of those shooters are aiming with the sights. The act of shooting by aiming down iron sights is more realistically portrayed in games by the player looking down iron sights. Trading that for a left-eye view of the weapon is a far less effective way of portraying the experience of shooting from iron sights. Anything that doesn't include iron sights is less effective.

I kind of like where you're going with this in that it would be nice if games did a better job mimicking human vision, I just think your proposed solution is a heck of a lot less realistic than the way it is currently done and a very poor way to convey the experience of shooting. I usually regret my attempts at analogies, but it seems like trying to make a fishing sim more realistic by cutting out the rods-and-reels to make room for more realistic wind and waves. It's missing the core of the experience.

"I thought you were arguing that a side view of a rifle that does not include aiming down the iron sights"

Oh it can include aiming down the sights, with the other eye.

Well it's a matter of which is more realistic, is it realistic to lose the vision of the entire left field? I don't think so, it's treating every player like a cyclops.

I don't mean "realistic" as in pixel-perfect recreation, I mean it isn't unrealistic in the sense of "Games without ADS are SOOOOO unrealistic, no way you can hit anything with that accuracy without using the sights". Realism not in the sense of superficiality but the practicality of "you can't be accurate with a gun without visually lining up sights)

Well considering parallax perspective and both-eyes-open shooting they may very well be aiming using the sights.

"Both of those shooters are aiming with the sights."

This is what you don't address, how can you REPRESENT the increased vision you'd have with both-eyes-open that has accuracy of lining up sights with the target and also not having a quarter of their vision obscured by the weapon body as you see here:

See the part of the screen behind the gun, that would be concealed from right eye view and is obscuring targets you are trying to track, that would be visible with left-eye view.

I think a lot can be said for the classic view is all, in that - in some ways, such as fields of view - the non-ads type games are more realistic. Considering how many shooters are trained to shoot with both eyes open it would be unrealistically forcing all players to aim with greatly restricted perspective with the COD style ADS.

 

[Coolshark]

I'm amazed at how complex this conversation has gotten...

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

But if you don't like it...then don't use it.

But I like to think that I would actually aim a gun before firing it not run around like Clint Eastwood. Do you think real guns have sights just for decoration?

It's better to shoot with both eyes open, I thought that was common knowledge.

 

[GenericAmerican]

Lets just say that as far as games are concerned. I don't thinks its possible to accurately represent what you would actually see.

And lets leave it there, because as far as the Escapist users go, I know most user's experince with guns comes from video games, or a gun control wikipedia article

 

[Vykrel]

cant we just assume that your character is closing his left eye when he aims down the sights?...

 

[Ledan]

*snip*
"Both of those shooters are aiming with the sights."

This is what you don't address, how can you REPRESENT the increased vision you'd have with both-eyes-open that has accuracy of lining up sights with the target and also not having a quarter of their vision obscured by the weapon body as you see here:

See the part of the screen behind the gun, that would be concealed from right eye view and is obscuring targets you are trying to track, that would be visible with left-eye view.

I think a lot can be said for the classic view is all, in that - in some ways, such as fields of view - the non-ads type games are more realistic. Considering how many shooters are trained to shoot with both eyes open it would be unrealistically forcing all players to aim with greatly restricted perspective with the COD style ADS.

So increase the FOV. Problem solved.

 

[Treblaine]

for realism? yes, they are.

anyone who has spent more than a few minutes firing a weapon knows that you cannot hope to hit anything with any consistency without the use of sights of some kind.

Why??

Why is every second post on this thread like this?

Don't you understand, THEY ARE LOOKING DOWN THE SIGHTS... and at the same time, looking out the left eye unobstructed. The right eye reticule over target is projected onto the centre of the screen.

Do you understand what I was saying about Parallax? About "Both eyes open" shooting?

 

[Treblaine]

*snip*
"Both of those shooters are aiming with the sights."

This is what you don't address, how can you REPRESENT the increased vision you'd have with both-eyes-open that has accuracy of lining up sights with the target and also not having a quarter of their vision obscured by the weapon body as you see here:

See the part of the screen behind the gun, that would be concealed from right eye view and is obscuring targets you are trying to track, that would be visible with left-eye view.

I think a lot can be said for the classic view is all, in that - in some ways, such as fields of view - the non-ads type games are more realistic. Considering how many shooters are trained to shoot with both eyes open it would be unrealistically forcing all players to aim with greatly restricted perspective with the COD style ADS.

So increase the FOV. Problem solved.

FOV ain't the problem, FOV won't solve how there is a huge pillar of the gun running half way up the middle of your view, yet your right eye WOULD see right around it.

Ideally you want 90-degrees FOV, and counterstrike style crosshairs for aiming.

 

[Salad Is Murder]

FOV ain't the problem, FOV won't solve how there is a huge pillar of the gun running half way up the middle of your view, yet your right eye WOULD see right around it.

Ideally you want 90-degrees FOV, and counterstrike style crosshairs for aiming.

I'm thinking more and more that maybe you probably haven't ever fired a gun before, so I put together this information brochure for you:

So we just need to implement that into the games, right?

 

[Ledan]

*snip*
"Both of those shooters are aiming with the sights."

This is what you don't address, how can you REPRESENT the increased vision you'd have with both-eyes-open that has accuracy of lining up sights with the target and also not having a quarter of their vision obscured by the weapon body as you see here:

See the part of the screen behind the gun, that would be concealed from right eye view and is obscuring targets you are trying to track, that would be visible with left-eye view.

I think a lot can be said for the classic view is all, in that - in some ways, such as fields of view - the non-ads type games are more realistic. Considering how many shooters are trained to shoot with both eyes open it would be unrealistically forcing all players to aim with greatly restricted perspective with the COD style ADS.

So increase the FOV. Problem solved.

FOV ain't the problem, FOV won't solve how there is a huge pillar of the gun running half way up the middle of your view, yet your right eye WOULD see right around it.

Ideally you want 90-degrees FOV, and counterstrike style crosshairs for aiming.

I see your point. Zoom in so you only the iron sight is represented, since that is where your eye would be while aiming. You shouldn't see the entire gun.
In games is hard to represent peripheral vision, and eye movement. Therefore you can't have the screen show as much as a person would see, because their focus would be on the sights.

 

[sketch_zeppelin]

Iron sighting is just an intresting game play mechanic. its not there to nessecarliy make the game more realistic. its there to change how you play an FPS. it makes it harder to aim at the hip so running and gunning is toned down in favor of using cover and persion aiming and it offers you a quick zoom option to help you out, thus offering an incetive to switching your play style.