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Field of View and You! (My research into FOV in Fallout 4)


Xnihil0

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Before I begin, I just wanted to note that this is research from only an hour and a half of testing between F:NV and F4. There's probably people who know way more about how it all works, but I couldn't find it readily available. Also, I'm sick and on strong antibiotics so I may have skipped steps or jumped to conclusions inadvertently.

 

The Problem: Many modded weapons in Fallout 4 look extremely small when you are holding them, in this case the mod "Modern Firearms". I had remembered that in New Vegas you could change the size of weapon view models via an ini tweak, so I decided to test it and see if I could find a solution.

 

After over an hour of testing, I can firmly conclude that Fallout 4's ini design makes no sense and is poorly optimized for tweaking.

 

Let's begin with Fallout: New Vegas.

 

  1. f1stPersonFOV controls your weapon view model
  2. fworldFOV controls your perspective of the game world, both 1st and 3rd person.
  3. fdefaultFOV controls your perspective when scoped.
  4. fdefault1stPersonFOV controls.. idk. I think it might be for cutscenes.
  5. fPipboy1stPersonFOV controls the Pimp-boy 3million (and the normal one too).
  6. fRenderedTerminalFOV controls the terminal.

 

Now it's not perfect, and could be expanded upon (they could have separated 1st and 3rd person FOV) , but these tweaks are very understandable and easy to adjust.

 

Now let's look at Fallout 4.

 

I should mention that to make these changes stick I had to make changes in Fallout4.ini, Fallout4prefs.ini, Fallout4_default.ini, and Fallout4prefs.ini in the directory. Still not sure which actually works or if they all have to be the same for it to change properly.

 

The settings in fallout 4 are streamlined and compacted, and not for the better (a theme with this game, unfortunately). Some have been combined, some have been removed, some have been combined and removed.

 

  1. f1stpersonFOV now controls your perspective of the game world in 1st person.
  2. fworldFOV controls your perspective of the game world in 3rd person.
  3. fdefaultFOV controls your perspective when scoped.
  4. The console command "fov [viewmodelfov] [f1stpersonfov]" will change the view model of your weapon, the pip boy, and I presume the terminal. eg: "fov 80 90". Oddly, "fov XX" does not work, and resets everything after leaving the console.

 

At first, this seems to make much more sense, until you realize what we've lost. Let's go over the problems I can identify. First, all FOV settings were normalized to 80 degrees, with game models adjusted accordingly, rather than using accurately sized models with varying FOV settings. Second, there is no known ini tweak that controls the view models, so you've got to change it via the console in game, every time. And third, the view model tweak combines weapons, the pip boy, and terminals. The ramifications of this are immediate if you decrease the view model fov to anything below 75 degrees: The pip boy is unusable. You can increase it a fair bit because of the nifty zoom functionality, but decreasing it is impossible. I have to wonder if the zoom feature was originally intended as a way to compensate for combining the view model FOVs, but was underdeveloped and the initweak was removed/hidden to prevent complaints (but here I am!).

 

Unfortunately, my original problem remains unsolved. While a view model fov of 60 looks fantastic with the Modern Firearms weapons, the pip boy is entirely unusable, zooming into the bottom right corner. And if even if it did, the unknown/non-existent state of the ini tweak would require me to make the changes every game session and forfeit achievements. I hope a long term solution rests in the creation kit, possibly allowing modders to adjust the size of their weapons' view models independent of other view models (I'm not a modder so I'm not sure what would be necessary). Until then we can enjoy the weapons they create in undersized, minuscule, glory.

 

I hope this was helpful or at least insightful,

 

Xnihil0

 

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