how do you like your Yolk?

[rod55]

Hi A2A Pilots,

I might be the last one to perceive this, valid or not, but when I use the forward cockpit view and pan down slightly (with joystick hat switch), so that ONLY THE TOP HALF OF THE YOLK GRIP HANDLES show at the foot of the monitor/screen, THEN I get a significantly stronger impression of ME REALLY FLYING THE PLANE. For me, this is true for all planes e.g. the FAB T6, Comanche and C182.

When I pan further downwards and fly with the whole yolk and grip handles in view, then the strong impression goes away and, to my perception, appears that I'm just watching the plane (FLY ITSELF).
Pan too far up, so that you cant see anything of the grip handles, and the view feels rather monotonous.

Of course I pan down to operate controls, and pan left and right for visual awareness and enjoy the scenery e.g. the wonderful Orbx products.

I've not been smoking anything, honest (and its too early in the day for a pint or two or)!

Rod

[Oracle427]

I prefer my yolk sunny side up.

I use Track IR, and have configured my views to barely show any portion of the instrument panel. I can see the upper halves of the airspeed, attitude indicator and the VOR head when looking forward.

[DHenriques_]

Hi A2A Pilots,

I might be the last one to perceive this, valid or not, but when I use the forward cockpit view and pan down slightly (with joystick hat switch), so that ONLY THE TOP HALF OF THE YOLK GRIP HANDLES show at the foot of the monitor/screen, THEN I get a significantly stronger impression of ME REALLY FLYING THE PLANE. For me, this is true for all planes e.g. the FAB T6, Comanche and C182.

When I pan upwards and fly with the whole yolk and grip handles in view, then the strong impression goes away and, to my perception, appears that I'm just watching the plane (FLY ITSELF).
Pan too far up, so that you cant see anything of the grip handles, and the view feels rather monotonous.

Of course I pan down to operate controls, and pan left and right for visual awareness and enjoy the scenery e.g. the wonderful Orbx products.

I've not been smoking anything, honest (and its too early in the day for a pint or two or)!

Rod

Interesting question.

From the beginning when I first started using desk top simulation I have always set up my view to reflect as close to what I would be seeing in the actual aircraft. Anything else would seem unnatural and "Gamey" to me.
Dudley Henriques

[RotorWash]

You should have your head out of window 99% of the time, instruments are just a glanceing reference. why would you waste valuable monitor real estate with a yoke ?

[RotorWash]

I prefer my yolk sunny side up.

I use Track IR, and have configured my views to barely show any portion of the instrument panel. I can see the upper halves of the airspeed, attitude indicator and the VOR head when looking forward.

Thats about as realistic as it gets, as long as you have a 1:1 zoom range set

[dvm]

Dudley is right on. I have always used a view as close to what you would actually see in the real world (yes it makes take offs and landings more difficult but much more realistic). I have had TrackIR since it became available (2001) and I can't believe anyone could fly the sim without it. I would likely have quit the hobby years ago if it were not for head tracking. Once you are accustomed to it it is as close as you can get to being able to look around in a real flight scenario. Panning around with a hat switch is as old school as flying with a 2D panel (in my humble opinion).

[Oracle427]

.85 zoom is a bit more realistic to me.

[RotorWash]

.85 zoom is a bit more realistic to me.

You should not use any zoom at all, you should be repositioning your seat position to establish your views (not zooming). I use ChasePlane in conjunction with trackir to achieve this. .85 may feel comfortable, your scenery is developed to dispay 1:1, using zoom, distorts your field of view and depth of field (for not a better word), so i have been told ?

I dont think people like to debate views, as a realistic views takes them out of there comfort zone and away from there perceivement. Feel free to chip in on flight sims most contravercial subject ?

I would like to hear from the guys at A2a regarding this, as i would imagine scaleing would be a crucial development factor that defines the whole experience. PMDG recommend no zoom, adjust seat positioning to suit your monitor, what does A2a recommend ?

[Oracle427]

I'm not sure if scenery is developed for 1:! zoom as the stock sim starts with .65 zoom if I am not mistaken. Who knows if any particular zoom level was ever a consideration.

I just set it to something that resembles what I see in the real cockpit when I go fly. I also adjusted the aircraft config file to move the eyepoint to a more realistic position for me. I normally can't see any part of the cowling when I fly and the default eyepoint is therefore way too high for me as well as too far back.

If the FOV were realistic, we'd need a nearly 180 FOV and that would produce a serious fisheye effect. .85 is a compromise for me as it is my "field of focus" around the center of my FOV. That said, I can certainly see things 90 degrees to either side of my head and can make out a runway or trees and hangar buildings as I come in to land on final without having to turn my head to either side IRL.

When flying IFR in a jet aka PMDG, 1:1 makes perfect sense as there really is very little need to move your view to look very much around the outside. It's just not the way those types of aircraft are flown.

I say everyone should do what works best for them, but in the end it's all a compromise until we get wraparound VR visuals.

[RotorWash]

I believe .65 was set at as default to suit the monitors of the time. The modern sim, now has software such as ChasePlane, other view suits, and of course, Trackir, 1:1 was how they hoped it would be viewed, but the software was not available at the time to accomplish this. Using any zoom values, has a similar effect as your auto's rear vision mirror. As in the real world, move your seat position to adjust your view, leave the binoculars for the passengers

[DHenriques_]

When flying IFR in a jet aka PMDG, 1:1 makes perfect sense as there really is very little need to move your view to look very much around the outside. It's just not the way those types of aircraft are flown.

Everybody will differ on these things of course.

When IFR I find it especially important to use a view point for the panel that represents what my eye would be seeing in the actual aircraft. This isn't of course done out of any concern outside the cockpit but rather that it allows me not to depart from my regular scan pattern where the panel and my peripheral view is more familiar and standardized.
I have always found myself setting up for my flights this way whether VFR or on the clocks. For me the sim experience is much more real this way.
Dudley Henriques

[Medtner]

When flying IFR in a jet aka PMDG, 1:1 makes perfect sense as there really is very little need to move your view to look very much around the outside. It's just not the way those types of aircraft are flown.

Everybody will differ on these things of course.

When IFR I find it especially important to use a view point for the panel that represents what my eye would be seeing in the actual aircraft. This isn't of course done out of any concern outside the cockpit but rather that it allows me not to depart from my regular scan pattern where the panel and my peripheral view is more familiar and standardized.
I have always found myself setting up for my flights this way whether VFR or on the clocks. For me the sim experience is much more real this way.
Dudley Henriques

I think to this end it is useful to have the same view point as one normally has, even in IFR. Unless you honker down and put on foggles in real life during IFR?

My thought is, as Dudley is saying, realism. In real world IFR the dangers of vertigo and spatial disorientation are often caused by what one can marginally see out of the windows. Weather systems and immersion is so good these days that it is actually really difficult to hand fly in total IMC, simply because of the cues outside is tricking one to do corrections.

The only time I don't use a normal point of view (and I use a .7 zoom or something - to get part of the peripheral vision, and of course Track IR) is when I'm practicing IFR in VMC. Then I have a preset that gives me only the panel, so that I can practice relying solely on the instruments.

[RotorWash]

1.1 is a very defintive ratio I dont understand why you guys set your views using zoom ? Virtually, every prefered view is achievable, and much more, by moving your seat fore, aft, horizontally, vertically. and pitch

If i may re-phrase my question, what significance does the setting 1;1 ratio deliver to us within the sim, anyone ?

[Alan_A]

Photographer here. Normal field of view is something I think about a lot. The answer to "what is a normal field of view?" is "it depends."

The problem with the 1:1 ratio (on my sim it's expressed as 1.00 zoom, or 100 percent) is that by itself it doesn't mean anything. 100 percent of what? There's no indication that 100 percent has anything to do with a normal field of view - it's just a number. How it looks depends on multiple factors - monitor size, monitor resolution, distance from the monitor. For me, 1.00 isn't realistic at all - it looks as though my nose is jammed against the windshield. 0.70 looks like a normal field of view with some allowance for peripheral vision. However, if I was using WideViewAspect=True, the equivalent setting would be 0.40. There are some detailed videos on YouTube that have been discussed here in the past (sorry, I don't have links handy, but maybe somebody else does) that discuss how zoom works in the wide view setting.

There are similar issues in photography. Normal field of vision is considered to be given by a lens focal length slightly longer than the sensor width. For 35mm film, a 50 mm lens is the classic "normal" lens (about a 40 degree field of view). But not everybody agrees with this choice, because again, there's no allowance for peripheral vision. Many photographers choose a 35 mm lens (54 degree field of view) as their standard working lens for his reason. Note also that on a large format negative, a 50 mm lens wouldn't be normal - it'd be wide angle - again because field of view is relative to sensor (or display) size. The additional factor that makes all of this difficult is that in neither case - photograph or monitor - are we talking about a natural way of seeing things. Even on a very big monitor, you're flattening three dimensions into two, and reducing the "normal" field of view to fit into the monitor frame, which is usually going to be smaller, maybe much smaller, than what you can see with your natural vision.

Now, about that "natural vision" - there's an even more basic problem, which is that it's impossible to account for "normal" because we don't stare fixedly at things. Oracle427 is absolutely right to talk about a "field of concentration," because that's how we really see - we zoom in and out depending on what we need to concentrate on. Also, your eyes are never still - it may feel like they are, but what they're really doing is darting around and putting together a composite picture that the brain translates into what you see. It's a process known as "saccading." From the Wikipedia entry:

Humans and many animals do not look at a scene in fixed steadiness; instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental, three-dimensional 'map' corresponding to the scene (as opposed to the graphical map of avians, that often relies upon detection of angular movement on the retina).[citation needed] When scanning immediate surroundings or reading, human eyes make jerky saccadic movements and stop several times, moving very quickly between each stop. The speed of movement during each saccade cannot be controlled; the eyes move as fast as they are able.[3] One reason for the saccadic movement of the human eye is that the central part of the retina—known as the fovea—which provides the high-resolution portion of vision is very small in humans, only about 1–2 degrees of vision, but it plays a critical role in resolving objects.[citation needed] By moving the eye so that small parts of a scene can be sensed with greater resolution, body resources can be used more efficiently.

Where you focus - and the composite you put together - is going to be very different depending on whether you're in level VFR flight, or landing (relying on peripheral vision), or doing an instrument scan (closely focused on a much narrower field of view). "Normal" is different in each case.

So... to put all this in a much less long-winded way (tl;dr)... it's complicated.

And you should pick the zoom settings that look right to you.

Agreed that there's a lot of excessive zooming out on, say, YouTube videos. But too much zooming in isn't necessarily right either.

Hope this helps.

[AKar]

It may indeed a good time to refresh a little what the zoom means. As mentioned, it is important to realize that there is no "proper" setting for the zoom [✦], and having it at 1.0 or some other setting for most realistic views is a fallacy that has been circulating like forever. What comes to the viewpoint, or eye position, it is rather straightforward: a realistic camera position inside the virtual cockpit should be similar to one's eye position in the actual cockpit. Good airplane simulations do this rather well, but one may need to adjust it a little for personal preferences in seat position or for one's real life height for instance. One should not move it around into unrealistic positions to get a proper field of view, because this distorts perspective. Zoom is for that.


Now, the zoom is what confuses people a lot. It simply controls your viewing angle. It does not change perspective. The problem of having a 'proper' zoom figure (if there even exists one) needs to be broken down into two.

First, let us find a realistic zoom setting for a given cockpit view. The factors that comes into play are, as has been mentioned, your screen size and your viewing distance. Imagine that the display is your window into the virtual world. To set up the zoom correctly, you'd need to see the same angle of the virtual world in your display picture that you would see through a window of similar size and at similar distance in reality.

In the picture below left, note that changing either the viewing distance or the display size, or both, will alter your view angle. What is the view angle in the virtual world is what the zoom controls, and for a realistic setting, it should match your physical viewing conditions. I am pretty sure one can find the angular measures for FSX/P3D zoom settings from somewhere, maybe even directly from the config files. Matching these would result in a situation in the picture below right, where the left drawing, representing our setup, is superimposed on an Airbus cockpit.



If one knows the angular measures for zoom settings, this all can be achieved with a ruler and a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation, without ever launching the sim. But the important point is this: your "correct" zoom setting for a realistic view depends directly from your display size and viewing distance! And that what is described above is the only realistic way to set up a view in an absolute way.

But, second, the problem now comes that with many setups, one ends up with kind of tunnel vision. This happens in particular, if one has a relatively small monitor and long viewing distance. In reality, we constantly move our eyes around so that we can see sharply in around 90° angle while not moving our head at all but eyes only. Even worse, we have this peripheral vision of around 180°. When using a fixed display, there is no realistic workaround for this issue, period. One may reduce the zoom setting some, at least I do, to simulate our wider field of vision in reality, but this compromises the accuracy of the setup we achieved earlier. There is nothing one can do about this fact, and one needs to compromise the realism if wishing to have a wider field-of-view in fixed physical setup. Only way to increase field-of-view while retaining the accuracy of the picture, would be to increase the display size and/or reduce the viewing distance, and recalculate the new (wider) zoom setting for the altered setup.


[✦] There is one real exception.

-Esa