I don't play FPSes on consoles so I can't speak to what makes sense for FOV there. I've never been willing to give up the fine degree of control and responsiveness that you get from the keyboard+mouse combination.
I agree with you that three monitor set ups with 120 degrees per monitor does cross the line. That's a bit much to be able to accept.
Oh, I understand the issue perfectly. I've been playing FPSes for about 20 years. Yes, at times I've played on organized ladders (sometimes with a great deal of success).
Older games that allowed complete freedom of the definition of the FOV were generally limited in the ladder play that I participated in. However, the limits were always larger than 90 degrees.
My bone of contention isn't necessarily the imposition of a limit for such play. I just happen to think that 90 degrees is a ridiculously small, arbitrarily chosen limit designed to meet the limitations of the 4:3 ratio monitors that we used to play on.
Push it out to the 110 or 120 degrees that I referred earlier and I have less of a problem with it, especially since the newer 16:10, 16:9 and wider ratio displays can handle the view without distortion. Throw in multiple monitor set ups and I don't see why, say, 140 degrees shouldn't be doable these days.
To your point about playing with a 360 view? Have you actually tried that on any sort of large scale or architecturally busy map? It might work on a simple, cartoonish flat palette map design like TF2 where the sight lines are also typically limited to 10-20 meters. Then it might be possible to train yourself to pick out players fast enough to be able to react. I'd eat your lunch playing any game where sight lines are generally much longer and/or terrain is much more complex.
I can't imagine playing the OpFlash/ArmA series that way, for example. Forget Red Orchestra, the Battlefield series, Soldier of Fortune, Joint Ops, etc.
Call of Duty or America's Army? Maybe. The maps tend to be a bit smaller for CoD. AA's maps tend to be tight urban ones these days instead of the much larger ones from earlier in the series.
As a point of comparison: it's considered cheating in most first and third person shooting games multiplayer to increase your FoV beyond certain limit.
An attitude which I never understood. Games designed to enforce a 90 degree FOV fail to take into account that on average, our peripheral vision encompasses about 150-160 degrees for most people.
This is so because it gives you vastly superior awareness of your surroundings, making it much harder to surprise you with flanking.
Well, that's sort of the point of peripheral vision, isn't it? There's an easy test that I was taught in junior high that quickly demonstrates this. Hold your arms out in front of you, thumbs up. Move them to the edges of your vision on both sides until you can just see them. Stop, and take a quick look left and right. If you're like most people, you'll find that you're arms are now almost straight out from your sides.
Games which take into account this awareness tend to to do one or both of two things. The first is to allow an FOV up to some arbitrary limit somewhat greater than 90 degrees, say 110 or 120 degrees. Anything after that tends to get so distorted as to be useless on a single monitor anyhow.
The second option is to show some sort of indicators on the side of your monitor and/or allow a quick free look around of just your head. The best implementation of this model belongs to an FPS series that emphasizes realism in its player model to an extent that I've seen nowhere else. I'm speaking of course of the Operation Flashpoint/ArmA I-III series. This game series has been working on this basic model since, what? 1998? The ArmA branch of that series has also provided native support for multiple monitors and TrackIR since the first iteration.
If a FPS this fanatically dedicated to realism (OK, as long as you forget the brain dead AI and concentrate on everything else!) thinks this is OK, then why can't other games at least acknowledge the issue?
My dad had some "Best of" Analog and Astounding collections dating back to the mid-'50s. Those omnibus editions got me hooked on sci-fi at a very young age.
I remember reading more than one story out of those where using pulsars to determine a ship's current position was a key plot point. According to Wikipedia, the first pulsar was discovered in 1967. Given the intense interest that most sci-fi writers and readers had in astronomy, I would be very surprised if that information wasn't common knowledge within the community almost immediately.
And all those new buildings and stadiums going up at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars (each!) has nothing to do with rising costs. Nope, not at all.
Gapminder.Org is a GREAT site for seeing how things have improved for the entire world's population over the past 200 years. Dozens if not hundreds of variables are available for plotting. If you let the default graph of life expectancy over income per person play out, you'll see that every country has seen vast improvements over that span.
The Sub-Saharan African countries in particular didn't really see much improvement until the end of WWII, but since then the average life expectancy has gone from around 30 to the mid 50s and lower 60s. Cape Verde is all the way up to 75 years.
Income per person has increased in some cases by more then a couple orders of magnitude. Even the poorest nations have seen at least some growth in income.
One of the best ways to affect increased income is to increase education. Higher literacy rates translates directly to the ability to learn new skills. Availability of educational resources that are available over the Internet therefore directly impact people's ability to earn more, which directly impacts their ability to feed their families.
While I'm not a devout Christian by any means, this whole debate boils down to that simple proverb: "Feed a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
I have two sisters with Masters degrees. One went the fairly traditional route of 4 years for an undergrad degree, a decade or so in the work force, then another decade or so working on her Masters at a traditional institution as time and budget permitted. She finally completed her degree shortly after she turned 40. She has been working as an globe hopping industrial trainer, author, and project manager all along.
My other sister took about 20 years to complete her undergrad degree and another 4 to complete her Masters' in non-profit administration online. She is now the director of a small non-profit organization that trains dogs as companions/ assistants for people with various physical disabilities.
While my younger sister would concede that the MOOC does have some disadvantages when compared to the more traditional model, she chose to go that route because it was (a) cheaper and (b) was something that she could largely adapt to her schedule.
Neither one of my sisters felt it was necessary or beneficial to be buried in a Masters' program for 24 hours a day, though. I think that's a model that may fit well with particular areas of study. I certainly don't think it's the only model that works.
Or Common Sense by Tom Paine. Then remember that both sets of documents were originally published anonymously in order to protect the authors.
Still think being Anonymous (especially in this political climate) is a bad idea?
So have some cheap ass iron bullets for the range and some expensive tungsten ones for when your life is on the line.
Iron won't work because it's not soft enough. The bullet has to deform to grip the rifling inside a barrel. Besides, the whole point of going to the target range is to become a better shooter. You can't do that when the bullets you're using differ significantly from the ones you hunt with. The ballistics properties change too much.
Steel shot has become more popular for duck hunting, though. Many states require it. The big drawback with steel when compared to lead is the significant drop in range due to faster loss of pellet speed. The normal advice is to bump up a pellet size or two. That works to some extent, but a hunter still risks creating cripples until a s/he learns the limits of shooting with steel.
Finding a replacement for bullet lead that is both (a) reasonably abundant and cheap, (b) has a reduced impact on the environment, and (c) conforms reasonably well to the performance characteristics of lead isn't easy. Hopefully we'll find a solution soon.
LyX is a project that I'm very fond of. It doesn't follow the WYSIWYG model at all. Instead, it leverages TeX's different way of thinking about document creation entirely; separate the data from the presentation and manage the creation of both separately. The whole idea is to concentrate on the task of writing without getting distracted by constant re-formatting challenges. It works quite well once you learn to relax and not obsess over every paragraph and image placement while you're writing.
Frankly, I think LyX creates some of the most beautiful printed documentation I've ever seen. Sadly, it doesn't do so well at e-publishing yet. I have hopes that will change, though. I would love to use it to handle all of my document creation needs.
As it is, I end up writing in LyX, exporting to
Play around with the stats on Gapminder some time. There's the objective, empirical data that you're looking for.
Look at how the various societies do over time. Look for the sharp breaks in how well a given country is doing. At those points you're liable to find a change in the type of government.
"Take that, you hostile sons-of-bitches!" -- James Coburn, in the finale of _The_President's_Analyst_
