The reflections on the scopes/optics on firearms appears to be a generic texture overlay, showing a field, with a forest and open sky. Same goes for the helmet visors on air crewmen.
The downside to this, is that, whenever indoors, or in an urban environment, the scope shows a reflection of something that is nowhere to be seen. {F18389} {F18390} {F18391}
1.) Look at a pilot's helmet visor when flying over the ocean.
2.) Note how it shows a forested field, when there is none in sight.
Look at the attached screenshot. The character is indoors, and behind him is a stone wall. However, the reflection of the weapon's scope shows an open field, forest, and sky.
The way to fix this, would be to possible apply RTT reflections for scopes, similar to rear-view mirrors and CROWS screens. Or, for some firearms scopes, just remove reflections altogether. Many firearm optics are designed to minimize glare, such as the EOTech holographics.
I've noticed the same thing about the reflections from the chopper pilot's helmet. It would be nice to this to be fixed but I don't think that its something the devs are likely to do. Its probably going to add a severe drop in FPS for a relatively minor cosmetic improvement.
FarCry3 have it and you can see who stay behind you, RTT and limit distance of reflection to ~50meters
FarCry doesn't have to keep into account all the ballistic calculations and the huge map dimensions (just to say the main 2) that stress enough already our computres.. that's the difference that allows it to use this feature and that would (may) cause A3 to become unplayable
But it could be nice to have it added as a post processing effect for the ones that would like the eye-candy and functionality. Also for the ones that would say it would give players with better computers an advantage, since it could be in the post processing effects, the motion blur that would be present would "tone down" this "advantage".
There are other games that use this technique, but have different texture overlays for different locations. So a 'field', a 'forest' an 'urban' an 'indoor' etc.
Also, for the helicopter reflection there should really at least be different ones depending on weather. If is is stormy the reflections still show a bright blue sky.
Even if it hits the performance too much and is impractical for all current generation machines, this should be implemented as the highest PiP setting or something. Even if it's just for the sake of screenshots and of making the game more future-proof.
If it's easy to implement, that is.
Yeah it's more obvious with vehicle windshields.
Perf hit shouldn't be much, NFS Shift (for example) has this for the entire car (proper reflections) and they don't do anything (negative) really.
The map size has nothing to do with PiP, however the view distance does and how much detail is rendered off the reflection.
Really I don't care if they make it PiP or keep the HDR Map as the reflection, it's such a minute detail when your trying to stop yourself from dying.
Plus if the angle of incidence of the reflection was done right, what you would see off the reflection is what you could see it you turned your head 45 degrees or less because of convex scope optics.
@Nicolii: Of course, not suggesting that it reflect everything, but at least the general environment and about 50m of objects.
It may even come in handy in combat (what if you saw some movement in a reflection).
And it's just plain odd to look at a helicopter when it's overcast (see attached picture).
In real life scopes are designed to counteract the reflection as best as possible so it would not even look like that, also I agree with PuFu, I would rather have it removed.
Agreed. High quality scopes even have a anti-relection layer, as reflection would interfere with the soldiers aiming and picture quality.
But making the game future capable by implementing this as a setting, is a very good argument. The idea from BloonerNL is also very good, using different textures.
Upvoted for consideration by BIS
To all those who ever said this would have a major fps impact, you guys obviously haven't seen like every other game out there that has real reflections. If reflections cause problems in this game, just like AI, or anything else, it's a problem with this game engine. When performance decreases simply because there are some dead AI on the island, that is an indicator that something is wrong with the engine. It would be great if BIS, after A3, would step back and actually modernize this engine. Because, regardless of all the neat new features, the engine is still outdated. At this point I'd rather have the Call of Duty IW engine than Arma 3's engine. Why, because they at least reduce whatever resources they can, like using sprites for particle effects. So real reflections are possible in some way that they do not negatively impact performance. Other devs for other games have done it, BIS can do it. And, yes, I can compare other games to Arma 3 because reflections are reflections. Calculations are calculations. I don't care about view distance or AI calculations. If other games can utilize efficient calculations, so can Arma 3. The devs just have to be dedicated to constructing efficient code to get this to work.
@antoineflemming: Agree completely.
@Vulcanexius: Not just about scopes, but other glass surfaces. Either make them transparent without reflections, or have proper reflections.
@Laqueesha: you could consider making this a general thing about reflections, not just weapons scopes in particular.
Here, take a look at reflections in NFS Shift, for example. They're not 100% accurate, but enough to look good.
This is still an issue, and still looks ugly. Heck even Borderlands 2 does it well, if anyone would like to know of an FPS example.
If this was added i think it should be a feature you can also disable for less performance capable machines.