Adjustable Projection Type and Field Of View would be highly beneficial for Widescreens and Curved Monitors

Official Microsoft Flight Simulator Wishlist
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As there are more and more widescreen and curved monitors out there in 2020 it really is time to support them by implementing settings for the type of view projection and the FOV. Especially on curved screens the rectilinear or central projection does not look good at all which is annoying and eliminates so much of the immersion that you could’ve got with such a good looking simulator.

I’m tired of the image getting stretched the further you look away from the center of the screen which basically only allows me to only use of the inner most parts of my ■■■■ expensive monitor.

There is a view projection type I’d suggest to implement and that is the “Panini Projection”. With this projection everything would look soo much better on curved widescreens, especially if i could match the FOV with the real FOV that the monitor covers

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Hi and welcome to the forum.

I use a 35 inch BenQ Ultra Wide as a central screen and can see where you are coming from with your suggestions. I’ve not heard of the ‘Panini Projection’ thing though so that was interesting. I might do a bit of ‘googling’.

Don’t know if this will really happen anytime soon though since the dev. time will more likely be spent on VR stuff ?

Anyway, it would certainly get my vote.

:relaxed:

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Thanks, unfortunately u are right.
The odds that this feature will be implemented any time soon in any game are pretty low but thats a thing that is REALLY bothering me.
I spent almost 6K on an entire new setup with the best and newest Hardware to figure out that game Devs are kinda stuck in the last century. Actually none of the triple A titles I tried so far does support such features only a few Indie games.
And of course I do have the most curved, biggest and widest gaming monitor you can have with 49" of 1000R curvature and a 32:9 ratio which makes it even worse. :expressionless:

Below I’ve attached a screenshot of the view I actually see and than a version which i manually converted to the panini projection.
Obviously it loses quality if its being converted afterwards. Which is the reason that this feature has to be directly implemented into the game but at least you can get an understanding of how much this would improve the overall look and feel.

Note:
If you look at these images on a non curved monitor don’t forget that these effects would be amplified quite a lot on curved ones.

FS2
FS25120×1440 820 KB

Panini FS2
Panini FS23000×1102 448 KB

Additional Fun Fact. Many common Game Engines already do provide the tools to use the Panini Projection. like Unity or Unreal Engine.
I don’t know which Engine the FS is based on but it’s likely that it has them too.

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Why I am suddenly yearnin’ for paninis now

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I’m getting the sandwich maker out. Meatball and mozzarella panini coming up :grin:

Seriously though, I do agree with the OP here. I clearly see the issue on my 21:9 monitor that can only get worse the wider you go.

I’d certainly like to see more done to help the immersion in this respect.

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I wouldn’t count on it any time soon.

Here are the comments from the devs about multimonitor support from the latest Q&A a few days ago (I would put this in the same category):

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This is a must in my opinion. I have a samsung 49 inch wide screen at 5120x1440. In a 172 the side panels get stretched in to the central view and make the airvents look enormous compared to everything else.

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I have the same monitor. Yeah, difficult to do a traffic pattern when it looks like the runway on the side of the screen is within an arm’s length.

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Could you teach us how to implement this kind of solution you have done? Or there is any tutorial to follow the task

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That’s the issue. I can’t offer you a workaround. This type of projection transformation is not really feasible to be done as postprocessing. What you saw in my posted images was just a manually transformed single screenshot. If you want to do this for every frame in realtime you would have to render the game in a much higher resolution than your monitor has, than apply this conversion to the frame and output it. this would just take a ridiculous amount of computational power which simply is not feasible when you already have to deal with such a high demanding simulator.

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Hello, after I am also affected by this issue I wanted to ask if someone has already found a solution. Or such a solution can be expected soon!
Greeting Guenter

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Hi, that’s the unfortunate point of my whole topic. there is no possible solution for this issue. this has to be fixed in the game engine itself so no mod no nothing can fix it becaus this is a image projection issue. as long as game devs and game engine devs aren’t aware of this issue nothing will change in any game.

apparently even tech people are still not fully aware of these circumstances as you can see in this video.

even though he at least was talking about the fact that triple monitor optimization is still not focussed on enough but he was just talking about fov changes. fov changes wouldn’t help on widescreen curved monitors. in fact you could even see that the image in the triple monitor optimized game was still stretched to much…

my suggestion for everyone who is bothered by this is to spread the message that there would be a solution and hope that by spreading it, one day the awareness of people in the necessary positions who can fix it is raised.

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Hi, this is really very unpleasant, I have a curved Samsung Odyssey 49 inch. hopefully this will be fixed soon. thanks for the infos!

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My screen is a 210° projector wall, so I couldn’t agree more :wink:

Actually, a configurable FOV and projection in the Sim should be much easier to implement than multi-monitor support. This would be a great intermediate solution for everybody using multiple monitors with NVIDIA Surround.

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As monitors are no longer flat and range in curvature from R1000 to R1800, it would be good to specify the curvature to avoid visual disturbances.

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I too have a Samsung Odyssey with a large curve.

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Same monitor here, the image is stretched and blurry at the sides and an FOV setting is very much needed.

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Desperatly waiting for MSFS to fit my Samsung Odyssey. Best immersion with the large curve, but the frog eye effect is always there. After some time I think you get used to this too

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I did a little Googling and found this nice description of the Panini projection on the wiki for the panotools photo processing software: The General Panini Projection - PanoTools.org Wiki

Essentially, it’s a cylindrical projection: compared to the flat plane used for a rectilinear projection when rendering 3d scene into a 2d frame buffer, it will keep horizontal angular distances constant in pixel size across the entire view (unless you use some projection parameters to vary it).

This can help solve two specific problems:

  • most people have ultrawide monitors at a size and viewing distance that gives them a smaller physical FOV than the virtual FOV used in the simulator – this is what causes visible distortion on flat ultrawide monitors, when the angular distances in your eye don’t match the angular distances from the rendering.
  • for curved monitors, if the virtual camera point and your physical eye position don’t both match the center point of the curvature, you will get additional distortion from any projection

I did some arithmetic earlier, and for a 34" diagonal flat 21:9 monitor, assuming a 90 degree horizontal FOV (which in X-Plane roughly matches my view in MSFS), the existing flat projection should be correct at a viewing distance of about 15.6" (a 45-degree angle from center to each edge of the screen, for a total FOV of 90 degrees) – however a comfortable viewing distance for me is 26", making the physial FOV much much smaller at this monitor size.

To avoid distortion, I would need a 56.6" diagonal flat 21:9 monitor – or I would have to alter the projection. (Note a flat 32:9 monitor would have to be significantly larger than that to avoid distortion. I didn’t do the math for curvature, but I’m pretty sure I’m not sitting at the center point of the curve of my current 34" 21:9 non-flat monitor either. Will have to look up the details on that later!)

The Panini projection looks like exactly something you’d want for this, as it can reduce the horizontal “stretching” effect either completely or partially, which makes it look more like you used a smaller FOV on a tinier world.

I’m not sure offhand whether it’s possible to natively render the 3d scene into a cylindrical projection and have everything line up right; the fact that straight lines don’t appear straight in the projection is likely to be a problem there.

This probably means you have to render to a larger resolution than the screen, and apply a transformation on the rasterized output.

Looks like in the Unity engine this is a post-processing effect after rendering, which makes sense:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.universal@7.1/manual/Post-Processing-Panini-Projection.html

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