sights Have red-dot sights and other holographic sights behave more realistically. (and proposal)

[kaboom1212 7]

      Hey Battlestate Games & community, I would like to propose the idea to make laser based sights, such as the Eotech holographic, EKP-08 and any other sights that cast a light onto glass; standard red-dot sights, behave more like their realistic counterparts. Below I have linked multiple images for you to take a look at. As well as three proposals. Please take the time to look at them and consider implementing them.
Proposal  1: ADS and looking through a sight and how the mind "casts" the red-dot

*Mind my gross feet in the picture and the absolute mess of my room.

      Take a look at the images I uploaded of my current in-game ak-74m. Then take a look at the images I have uploaded of my VFC VR-16 Airsoft rifle. As you can see everything seems to add up alright. Both are working guns and from the perspective of the viewer, both red-dot sights work perfectly fine. For reference sake, the red-dot I am using is the Holosun HS406a Tube Red-Dot sight.

      Now as many of you may know already, red-dot sights in most games are very inaccurate to their real life counterparts because of the limited perspective of cameras and 2D environments. Escape from Tarkov is already one of the most realistic games I have played (in-terms of gun physics) however the developers haven't seemed to have done anything about the way red-dot sights perform in real life. In reality the biggest benefit of a red-dot is that you can keep both eyes open to cast the dot into the middle of your vision while focusing on a target thus eliminating the need for a rear sight in the case of an iron sight. This can allow for faster aiming and wider fields of view. The best way I would describe it, is like giving yourself a hip-fire reticle, like in more arcade style games such as call of duty, or battlefield. Now in games, you cannot easily show this because of the limited perspective of a camera. It would be especially difficult to try to cast a dot into your character's vision very well and have it be usable, but there are ways of attempting to make sights more realistic. Take a look at the images provided below. 

      I have tried to illustrate (through crappy photo shopping) what it looks like while looking through a sight in real life. Basically my brain automatically stops focusing on the frame of the lens and sort of blurs it out. Meanwhile my other eye can still see perfectly around the sight, therefore I can see the ground perfectly, while aiming down my sights in real life. In my opinion Escape from Tarkov should attempt to replicate this and add not only to the uses of red-dots, but also to the realism of them. One method would be to blur out the frame of the lens as well as make it more opaque.

      Look at the first eotech, which is basically how most games would show it. The second image is an attempt to emulate how those sights look to me. If you were to blur the top of the sights out, and make them more opaque, you could open up the shooter's field of view, and more effectively portray what it feels like to use a red-dot sight. This is a somewhat easy way of making the sights more realistic. By opening up the shooter's view, via blur and opacity, it can better simulate how the sight would function in reality.

 

Proposal 2: Glass quality, breakage and dust. 

      One of the most important parts of a sight is it's quality of glass. Glass quality can be changed through numerous things but I'll focus on some of the main ones. First: Better sight? Higher Quality Glass. Here is an example. My sight The Holosun, has good quality glass but it is slight tinted. This is helpful for shading and certain scenes, but sometimes having perfectly clear glass can be more helpful (though that is a subjective opinion). In comparison, when I was buying my sight I had the option of buying the Aimpoint Patrol. The aimpoint was about $400 CAD more expensive but it had a higher clarity of glass and was less tinted inside (at least to me). One method of showing glass quality in game would be to add slight tinting to some of the sights with lower quality glass. Thus making people WANT the better sights. They will offer not just an aesthetic change but a functional one as well. 

      Breakage and dust. As you can see in my pictures my holosun has flip-up sight protectors on it. These are used when transporting the lens to prevent it from getting scratched. Now in-game you most likely wouldn't want to have any sight protectors but this does bring up the fair point of getting your lens scratched and beat up as the raid goes on. I would like to propose that as time goes on if you aim down your sights i.e. "Expose" your sight and walk through bushes and trees there is that chance that your lens could get scratched, which will somewhat impede your vision. I would also like to propose the idea that dust can get into your lens which you will then have to wipe off if you go prone in dust areas, as well as the longer you spend in a raid. These may seem like minor issues, but taking care of your lenses is actually incredibly important in real life when shooting and should also be important in a realism based game such as Escape from Tarkov. These effects should be reset after a raid, but would facilitate the need for a cloth of some kind for cleaning. This effect would also be applicable to Ballistic goggles and other vision based equipment. You could also wipe off lenses with your hands but it will be less effective.

Proposal 3: More options, micro-dots, mid-tiers

      Adding in more real-life mid-tier sights to give people more options. For example, I know more people that own a Holosun than those that own an Aimpoint, simply because Holosuns are cheaper sights. Yet I don't see very many in-game because they haven't been added in yet. It would be nice to see some more of these sights offered by the traders. For example, you could get a cheaper Holosun microdot from traders at say, level two, and at level 3 have access to the aimpoint microdot, which would showed as being better. It would offer more sight choices and lower price options for the traders and newer players. Now you already have this implemented with different TYPES of sights. But I mean different versions of the same sight, as in the difference between the Holosun Tube sight (mine) and the Aimpoint Patrol. Same as the Aimpoint T1, and the Holosun 403a microdot sight. Stuff more like that.  

Anyways those are my proposals. I would very much like to see the first one implemented as red-dot sights will otherwise just be glorified iron sights. Dust stuff isn't very important for games but it could be a big part of the game later on. And more sights would be coming anyways, so I suppose I didn't really need to list that one.. but oh well. Anyways thanks for reading my essay. 

 

[Alepap 1]

I think the transparency is really hard, if not impossible to do in Tarkov, because there is no 1st person viewmodel, like most traditional shooters. I'd love to see them fix a lot of the dots ingame, with regards to blooming and clarity, add visible glass with lensing and tint depending on the sight. And of course keybinds for changing brightness for NVGs.

Edited October 26, 2020 by Alepap

[Spectator6 592]

Hello @kaboom1212!

Great post! 

Unfortunately, this can't be done since EFT uses 3D weapon models while aiming. The only way to achieve a smooth and consistent "transparent-ish" sight picture would be to use 2D images.

Now, technically, they "could" switch over to layered 2D images once the player reaches the "top" of the aim hold (a trick that many games use), but I imagine they would encounter two issues that pretty much make it a no-go

1. Currently, with the way recoil and weapon sway are animated throughout the "true" positions of the player model, transitioning to a 2D representation would mean this sense of movement and adjustment would need to be abstracted somehow. Which is no easy feat...
2. Probably most importantly, using 2D images would likely be a huge pain in the neck when it comes to dual-rendering any sort of magnified optic. I don't know for sure, but I imagine that currently some of the weapon model is used to mask/hide the "raw" edges of the picture-in-picture camera render. If, instead, those hard edges were made transparent, it may reveal too much of "how the sausage is made" behind the curtain and not look appealing at all.

Either way, while I'm with you 100% on that being the proper way to represent our two eyes, sad to say it's likely one of things we'll just have to dream about instead

[Spectator6 592]

Here is a mock-up I did some time ago that kind of shows what I mean about the dual-rendered scopes. 

https://imgur.com/a/ZXkdJb9

It'd have to be a circle, obviously, but it'd also have to float properly within the frame/housing. And since there's no depth, it'd look like it's pasted on rather than "within" the housing when the character is moving a bit and weapon is swaying/titling/angling/etc.

Which reminds me of one more thing to add to the above..

3. The way EFT models eye-relief is also tied to camera distance based on the 3D model. Moving to 2D would mean this would have to be abstracted and reworked as well. And, whew... That's a LOT of work with no guarantee it will actually result in something that's up to their standard of quality, etc.

Edited October 26, 2020 by Spectator6

[dkg 7]

Interesting idea but besides of technical difficulties there is one more thing - the aesthetics of the guns which is important part of EFT. I think that would be controversial change.

[Vortex_Bear 51]

I really love your suggestions. I don't care as much about the eyesight blurring out the scope, because ultimately it remains to be a game. However I would love for BSG to properly implement the tinted glass for all optics, which could be an additional level or balancing the optics naturally.

I also love the idea about dust and the glass potentially breaking. If someone where to hit your optic it should definitely be able to get damaged, and be repairable from the stash, similar like the visor of a helmet. Dust coming into your optic could be another way to counterbalance geared players by using smoke grenades, or even grenade explosions dusting up the optic and needing it to be wiped. I'm taking it a step further and say the same thing should be implemented for helmet visors as well.

For example a nade inside factory that goes off close to you would dirty of both your optic and helmet, maybe not to the point where it's entirely covered in dust but just enough for it to be slightly harder to acquire aim. There could then be multiple stages of how dirty both the visor and optic could get. The wiping motion should however be relatively quick to perform.

In the case of an optic being shot out, you could then either continue to use it as it is, flip up your backup sights in combination with the broken optic, or remove the optic entirely and only use the flip up backup sights.