Hey everyone,
We're taking a wide look at the next update with this week's developer log and that's because Field of View (FOV) options are coming in 0.7! In today's log we'll deep dive into this new feature and insight from one of our developers who implemented it.
Last week we also celebrated our 18th birthday here at FuturLab and all the success we've had this year: https://steamcommunity.com/games/1290000/announcements/detail/3110292680171793001
Now for some fresh perspective
FOV Options
Increasing the FOV has been planned from the start to reduce the risk of motion sickness. We've done smaller tweaks to help this in the past by allowing the crosshair to be toggled permanently on, higher FPS options, and a few others. Now both the default has been raised but also you can choose what is comfortable for you on the FOV slider.
Every game has a FOV angle. If it's significantly different from what the eye/brain expects to see, it can result in motion sickness. FOV is one of the biggest contributors to queasiness in games for PC players as you are more likely to be close to the screen. With a higher FOV the more likely it is to match your brain's expectations of what it is looking at through your monitor.
Sorry that this wasn't implemented quicker but the system wasn't simple to work into the game and required dedicated programming time to rework some of our integral game systems. So to explain, here's a deep dive into the process from our Senior Gameplay Programmer Louis:
"Our aim for the new custom FOV system was to keep the hands/equipment visuals consistent across the FOV range, while making sure that the water spray VFX render correctly from the nozzle all the way to the surfaces you're cleaning, regardless of how low or high the FOV is. This ended up being a trickier task than anticipated for us because PowerWash Simulator works a bit differently from most FPS games. The washer spray interacts directly with the environment as a continuous unbroken stream of water, rather than muzzle flashes at one end and bullet decals at the other! After some R&D, we disassembled and rebuilt the whole camera setup, added lots of vertex shader magic, implemented new custom projection matrix calculations under the hood, as well as some forced perspective camera trickery to get things looking as they should. All in all, if you haven't noticed any differences in how the player looks in-game when playing with the new settings, it means it's working… so I hope this makes the game more accessible for the people who need it, thanks for your patience and happy washing!"
FOV options are also generally expected in the FPS community and now you'll be able to customize to your liking from 60 to 100 degrees FOV with increments of 1. With 100 feeling more like Quake and 60 may be handy for some macro screenshots!
Some examples (FOV setting below each image):
60 FOV
80 FOV
100 FOV
We hope this will help players prone to motion sickness and many of the legitimate negative reviews we've received on this issue. Overall we think it will reduce the perceived motion of the washer which is constantly in motion and look forward to everyone getting their hands on it next patch.
We'll be listening closely to feedback following this and will be looking at further potential tweaks/features to help prevent motion sickness in the future. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
Until Next Time!
Thanks for reading this visionary dev log. This is the first of several big surprises we'll be revealing for the 0.7 update, be sure to keep an eye on our socials and tune into our next dev log for more teasers!
Can you guess what it will be about from this?
We'll see you there.
If you want to vote on new game ideas, talk to the community, find some tough dirt - then join our Discord community: https://discord.gg/powerwashsimulator
Keep up with everything PowerWash Simulator by following our channels:
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PWS Wiki: https://powerwash-simulator.fandom.com/wiki/PowerWash_Simulator_Wiki