GoldSrc was initially designed for 4:3 screens, as 16:9 and 16:10 screens were rare for PC's back in the 90's. At this time the FOV degrees was built to work horizontally rather than vertically.

The effect of this is that when upgrading from a 4:3 screen to a 16:9 screen, rather than seeing more to the left/right than you would on 4:3 what really happened was some of your view at the top/bottom got cut off. Your sideways vision remained as it was. This meant that you got the same 90 degrees of FOV from a sideways perspective. (Or whatever "default_fov" is set to.)

To get the correct FOV on a 16:9 screen you needed to change your default FOV to 106.

Here are 3 screen shots showing this:

a) 1280x960: A classic 4:3 aspect ratio with "default_fov" at 90


b) 1280x720: A widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio with "default_fov" at 90


c) 1280x720: A widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio with "default_fov" at 106


The visibility of the view model should be a dead giveaway as part of the hand gets cut off at the bottom. You can also compare how much of the floor and ceiling you can see.

Those of you using 1280x1024 (5:4), common for classic 17" TFT's at the time, will be most at advantage by default because you got given a higher vertical field of view with the same value.

For Sven Co-op specifically the field of view setting was adapted to work with the vertical axis instead of horizontal. This means that when we upgraded from 4:3 screens to 16:9 wide screens we got what we expected, which was a wider horizontal view but the same vertical view. Those using super-wide 21:9 screens got an even better result.

This meant that we also had to change the default FOV setting to accommodate a vertical perspective. 90 degrees was far too wide. Converting the initial 4:3 ratio would result in a new FOV of 67.5 degrees, though for the sake of a smoother default, and the large preference for a slightly wider field of view, we opted to round our default up to 70 degrees.

This change was developed during Sven Co-op version 5.04, which was released on 5th July 2016.

Here are 4 screen shots of 2 scenarios (one increasing in resolution, the other decreasing in resolution) showing this change:

a) 1024x768: A classic 4:3 aspect ratio with "default_fov" at 70


b) 1360x768: A widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio with "default_fov" at 70


c) 1280x960: A classic 4:3 aspect ratio with "default_fov" at 70


d) 1280x720: A widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio with "default_fov" at 70


The visibility of the view model now shows a consistent proportion of it on display in all circumstances. You can also compare how much of the floor and ceiling you can see.

Those of you using 1280x1024 (5:4), common for classic 17" TFT's at the time, will now be most at a disadvantage by default because you're going to get a narrower field of view. This ratio of monitor is really not suitable for viewing 3D scenes from a human 2-eye perspective.

(This change does not currently apply to other GoldSrc engine games such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike.)