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I'm pretty sure that a picture-in-picture scope system has been suggested so far and the current scope system in PR is the closest we have to it but I played Alpha Project mod for a bit inspired by the fastropes suggestion and noticed they have a working scope system that has a visible difference in the zoom levels inside and outside the scope and didn't really affect my perfomance (well, maps are smaller but I tried it on a map with pretty high view distance). Has something like this been attempted so far. If it has been, I believe the DEVs have a good reason not to add it in-game.
Just wanted to start a discussion about this instead of making a suggestion without any knowledge before hand.

I'd imagine it'd have the same issues as Squad had when putting it in. With such large maps / view distances, this would probably cost way too much in terms of performance for typical players, cool as it may be.

That's not me arguing against it, it really is cool, but even in modern engines it's just too performance heavy for games like PR or Squad

It's not really a performance issue, it's just that the image inside the scope would be digitally zoomed in and thus lower resolution - would look worse and worse the more you wanted to zoom in.

Well, ACOGs don't zoom in a lot so I guess that won't be a that much of a problem, I think that assault rifle scopes would zoom in less than the sniper rifle on the picture.

[R-COM]Hulabi wrote:It's not really a performance issue, it's just that the image inside the scope would be digitally zoomed in and thus lower resolution - would look worse and worse the more you wanted to zoom in.

If it was done that way, no scope would be any better than ironsights, as long as you're capable of distinguishing individual pixels on your monitor. (The dot on a question mark is about one pixel. Can you see it?)

Games like Insurgency (the Source mod, not the PR game type) rerender the scene to get true zoom, but that requires rendering the view twice, once for unzoomed and once for zoomed. Unlike Squad, Insurgency runs on the older Source engine, so it has extra performance to spare on a feature that would theoretically cut your FPS in half.*

BF2 is also an older engine, though, and there appears to be a proof of concept of this working, so it should be feasible. It would definitely make the game more difficult to play for people on low end computers, unless it was optional. (Insurgency, the game, is all CQB so you never really need a scope.) For this reason, I don't miss it in PR.

* Since the scope doesn't take up the whole screen, some performance can be saved by trimming the rendered area, and possibly more advanced optimizations. However there is still overhead, such as the render/detail distance having to be increased so things don't look blurry/chunky/invisible. (In some games you can get lag when you zoom because it has to load entire models that the game previously considered too far to see.)