Is that what Asobo thinks is the average they should base their settings on? No wonder it looks so distorted.
Highly unrealistic I think. An even triangle (60 deg FOV) sounds more like a median realistic proportion between viewer and monitor. Some a bit closer, some further away even, the latter particularly in multi-monitor setups.
And those who care most about realistic visuals, the more serious virtual pilots, are not those who sit the closest to the screens I would assume.
I’ve got a curved Samsung cf791 (3440x1440 21:9 screen) and I am sitting about 50 to 60cm in front of the screen. Honestly I don’t see much of a difference between any “3D” game on which I’m able to set FOV somehow.
As others pointed out already there always is distortion due to the nature of projecting 3D space to a 2D screen, anyway I’ve seen much worse (cought - Cities Skylines - cough) so I personally won’t call this “major” too.
Anyway it might be because of the curvature of my screen that the situation isn’t really noticeable.
Also I pretty much dislike the attitude in this thread - it seems to me quite harsh only because others got a different point of view (pun intended 
).
PS: the most serious simmers put the screen directly onto their eyes nowadays (VR).
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Is this a genuine concern as I don’t see this on the bugs list with the highest votes?
I’m also not sure if the OP is genuinely trying to get somewhere with this thread as they clearly aren’t listening to posted reasons.
Suggest this thread be closed to avoid moderator police.
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Agreed - if you take this to the extreme and consider a 360deg FOV then you simply could not perceive anything but a major pincushioning effect. What is probably required is simply what most would term as ‘magnification’, but given the human eye’s binocular arrangement in the skull, and our theoretical 180deg maximum FOV, then maybe it would mean that we would need to start with that flat 180deg viewport (to slightly misuse the term) and then simply crop that view/image to give us our preferred ‘zoomed’ view and then scale it up to fit the monitor (s). TBH I’m not sure of the results.
That’s just using a specific FOV that’s smaller than 180 degrees, which is what already happens.
Note you can change the FOV now, within a limited range, with the “Zoom” option in the settings. There are a few threads on the forum discussing this feature and the common zoom <-> FOV mappings in degrees (though most of those I’ve seen have targeted 16:9 and will not tell you the corresponding horizontal FOV for 21:9 or 32:9 monitors; MSFS keeps the vertical FOV constant for a given zoom level, and scales the horizontal view according the aspect ratio of the screen – note that because of trigonometry, that’s not a linear scale in degrees.)
I’m not sure of the veracity of this statement.
I’ve never tried reducing the FOV to an extremely low level but does it do the opposite of pincushioning like a telephoto lens might? (as opposed to the pincushioning effect of a fisheye lens)
Yes, zooming in and out works exactly like a zoom lens. The FOV gets narrower/wider, and it’s mathematically equivalent to cropping a smaller/larger rectangle from the viewing plane.
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There is a formula, but it’s easier to watch Russ Barlow’s excellent video explaining how MSFS Field of View works:
The wider the FOV, the closer you have to sit to the monitor for it to look natural - and it only looks natural from that one view point, if you move, things start to look distorted.
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Don’t think that’s correct. It’s not like cropping. Then there would be no distortion depending on where on the screen an object is (normal in the middle, very stretched horizontally on the sides). A zoom lens does not necessarily have such a strong pincushion distortion in wide angle as the virtual MSFS camera has.
Like on the startup screen of MSFS you have a cropped picture (on a 21:9 monitor) with no pincushion distortion.
But in the sim you do have major pincushion distortion on a 21:9 screen for anything outside the cockpit.
It’s all arbitrary and could be changed, pincushioning could be made scalable, adapting to different distances users have to the screen.
I think we all can agree, that really no majority of users sits 36 cm (14") away from a 80cm (32") wide screen. Less than 5%, if even that many. But that’s what it takes now to get the scenery in the default wide-angle cockpit view to not look distorted. (you can’t even see the sides of the screen without moving your head to the side from that very close proximity to the screen. Probably condensation from breathing onto the screen becomes a problem then too. 
)
Using zoom is not a solution, if a certain cockpit panel is to fit onto the screen in default cockpit view for flying a visual approach, needing the instruments and decent FOV on one (wide) screen without flipping around views in this most critical phase of flight.
The viewpoint can not be moved backwards in the cockpit camera settings to compensate for the narrower zoom angle, only sidewards.
And the cockpit is drawn 2D always. Because many would object, if round instruments look like ovals when moved to the sides of the monitor. But it’s funny how few object these distortions once they happen outside of the cockpit windows.
It would be sensible, to make the pincushion distortion for the world outside of the cockpit user scalable.
Using a 60° FOV (an even triangle) as default for pincushioning adaptation and making pincushioning scalable to both sides of that value should solve the problem and be more realistic by default for a majority of users.
Have you worn prescription glasses?
When you first get the pair, they adjust the frames so the center of the lens is matching to your pupil. The center of the lens is the focal point in which your eye will be able to see clearly through. Remove one of the lens and move it around your eye left/right/up/down/closer/farther of center. Notice how it gets a little distorted? That’s how concave lenses work
Ultrawide monitors function in a similar fashion. Some people in this thread have explained it in far better detail that i have. I’m just using the laymans explanation to translate some of these fine responses effectively saying “that’s literally how it works”
It seems like at this point youre arguing for arguings sake.
As one fine fellow in this thread put it:
Final thoughts: It’s a video game dude. If your immersion is ruined that badly by it, stop playing it.
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Here read up
…and such people are not passing medical exams to become real world pilots. For obvious reasons. I don’t understand why people argue against making the extreme pincushioning distortion in MSFS (made for users who sit 36 cm / one foot away from a ultra wide (>80cm/30") flat monitor) at least user scalable, so a more realistic and wider variety of users could have their perspectives on the screens without these avoidable distortions?
Wide monitors do not have to look distorted. No idea why you keep bringing up that false premise.
There are no distorting lenses when looking out the cockpit window of a real airplane.
And there should be none then simulated when projecting that picture/perspective onto a monitor.
that article is irrelevant to the discussed subject. Monitor curvatures are not the point here.
And it says also this:
For … ultrawide monitors larger than 30 inches, it’s best to sit around two to four feet away from the screen for the best experience.
“Two to four feet away”. I sit three feet away… Exactly as they say. In a 60° FOV approx.
But Asobo has made the pincushion distortion for users who sit a bit more than one foot away, strangely. Thank you for making my point.
I do not sit far away from the screen. I sit about 90 cm / 3 feet away from the screen. It’s a 60° FOV approx. It’s the very average and recommended distance according to experts. And it’s a distance that’s realistic when using sim cockpit hardware.
Because this over here is general discussion. The place to just put in a wish is the wishlist. There is already a wish about a separate changeable FOV setting somewhere so you can add your vote and place your comment if you don’t want people with a different opinion to speak up. Or just add your own whish there and collect votes - if there are enough votes it gets attention by the devs, over here it won’t anyway.
No, Asobo likely tried to find a sweet spot between VR friendly (display sitting on your eyes) and flat 16:9 screens.
This entire discussion betrays a lack of knowledge of how 3D rendering works. There is no ability for Asobo, or anyone else rendering a 3D scene, to programmatically pick a greater or lesser extent of pincushion distortion.
All 3D rendering happens on the graphics card and happens based on a rectangular projection. There is simply no other projection that anyone can select and there’s a super good reason for that: the entire math of rasterization is based on the fact that a straight line is a straight line. Picking any other projection other than a rectangular projection suddenly makes it so that the graphics card would be unable to do any reasonable rasterization math, as straight lines not only become curves but can become waves or all sorts shapes.
Any game that does a cylindrical projection in order to get a more uniform field of view at the edges of ultra wide projections does the following: renders it even wider than the screen (by 1.5 to 2x), and then, after rendering is completed, distorts the finished pixels by a reverse cylindrical kernel to squeeze in the sides more than the middle.
This is extremely performance draining, and does reduce the visual clarity of the finished image a good deal, and so is nearly never implemented as a post-process filter, except in a few racing games, which have nowhere near the scene complexity of MSFS.
Finally, despite the objections to the contrary, yes, even in a game, zooming is optically identical to both cropping and reducing the FOV. If you zoom in further, this is the same as if the default camera had cropped out the more distorted edges. You can confirm this because the stuff near the edges at wide zoom has more distortion than stuff near the edges at close zoom.
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That could be. But it would be easy to scale pincushion distortion just differently horizontally for different FOV, also VR.
Yes, and that’s one point the existing wishlist topic likely is for:
And especially for VR:
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it’s not a software problem. It’s a hardware problem
Contact your monitor manufacturer for assistance
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