Can player view ever match the model?

First off, i know absolutely nothing about coding games.

But in nearly every FPS or Third Person Shooter, the field of view is different to the model.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 you can be entirely behind a concrete block unabloe to be seen but on your screen you can see right over the top of it.

MNC on Steel Peel you can go on the right side of your base as a Sniper and be completely unable to be hit from the front while being able to kill everything.

Not a flame/rage thread, just wondering if it really is that hard to put the players viewpoint where the model actually is : ie Where the char's eyes are on FPS is where you see.

Also, making weapons and character models interact with the environment. Many, many games have the ability to put your weapons through textures and geometry (ie BC2 where you can have your sniper going through a solid concrete block)

agreed. sightlines should be equal. I run into this when using the sniper and i'm deuling with another sniper. He will be completely behind the glass and shoot me.

That's the whole point of playing in a Third Person perspective. First Person not so much.

It can, but there are good reasons not to.

Generally there's been a rule in games that moving the camera too much is a bad thing. For first person shooters, there might be a bit of view bob, but a lot of games turn that off. Plus, the view bob has nothing to do with how the animated character the player is playing is moving. When a person moves their head tends to move quite a bit more than you might realize, so applying that movement directly to the player's view usually causes problems for the player.

An old game I remember playing, the name of which escapes me, the first person weapon models and player view exactly matched the third person view. They made sure from the first person perspective it felt good, but the end result was all the characters ran around with their head perfectly upright holding their guns straight in front of themselves unnaturally. In games we tend to cheat a number of things to make them look or "feel" better to the player, and that usually results in a discontinuity between what the player sees and what other players see.

Third person games solve this in some ways by making sure the "first person" view is of the same character everyone else sees, but tends to result in some odd control problems concerning shooting.


Here's a basic example, one that actually relates to MNC:
When you play a third person shooter, and you shoot at something that's under the weapon's reticule, assuming perfect accuracy and no bullet travel time, should you hit it 100% of the time? The obvious answer most people have is "of course!"

The real answer is no, not always.

In a first person game, players are used to not having to deal with things like the gun being behind a wall, what you see is what you shoot. In a third person game your camera could be high above the player or far to the side, the player and their weapon might be completely behind a wall. For single player games most of the time we let players shoot through walls, but for multiplayer this gets way more complicated for the reasons you mentioned.

Even if you do shoot from the gun itself (which we try to, except in some unfortunate cases), in a third person game you're still shooting from the gun and not the center of the player's view like they do in first person games, so it's possible to get shots around corners.

I also worked on a game where when players went prone on the ground we matched their view to the actual ground plane. This was very frustrating from a player's point of view if they went prone on the ground next to some small rock or happened to be in a small ditch, but now their vision is blocked. In real life while going prone a person would of just adjusted their location such that this isn't an issue, but in games you simply don't have that level of situational awareness. The "easy" answer to that is just make the computer do it for you, but that gets in to trying to figure out what the player wants. 90% of the time, regardless of what rules you give the computer, it'll be wrong.

you lost me at 'Generaly..'


Seriously though, a good example of this is red faction guerilla. I think it was refered to as 'Clipping' and there too it was able, and often common to get shot by someone, whom you could only see the very tip of thier gun, yet they could see you in your entirety.

And while mentioned its more prominent in 3rd person, i seem to find its just as rife in 1st person shooters too. CoD for example, the amount of times you spy a sniper, all you can see is the very tip of thier head and then they shoot you. you watch the killcam and they are pointing their gun over the wall at you.

Yeah its irritating at times, but generaly has just been accepted.

I don't think the player view would be as much of a problem if you could simply change which shoulder you were looking over/aiming over. As it stands, anyone shooting to the right of their cover has an advantage over someone trying to shoot around the left side of their cover.

It's why most players seem to leave the spawn and immediately run up the righthand side of the map.

Lol i always go left...don't know why just ALWAYS go left.

Because you hate Dave Tennant?

I would like to see a "lefty" view option. maybe in the controller settings on the console/profile.

that problem only occurs in FPS games the whole first person mode gives u a different view than what ur character is doing. the reason u can cornersnipe in this game is that the bullet leaves the gun from some part of the barrel so as long as that part is thru the end of the glass itll still shoot thru

OMG I always run right...and it bugged me as to why! thank you for pointing out the obvious reason I missed!