I found the game's default zoom when holding the right mouse button to be unrealistically low and unnecessarily difficult. This mod increases the zoom level to better represent the capabilities of the unaided human eye.

The reason this and previous arma games allow you to zoom at all is because the human eye can see in much greater detail than can be represented on a typical computer monitor, even today with more and more 2.7k and 4k monitors in use. Giving the player a naked-eye zoom allows the them to look more closely at distant targets and see them with a level of detail that roughly corresponds to an unaided human eye. Arma games are simulators after all, and being a simulator the AI is able to spot and take mildly accurate shots at you from over 300 meters away, which is realistic and what I would expect from an infantry combat simulator. However, in Arma Reforger I was finding that even when I zoomed in characters at 200m were too indistinct to identify, characters past 200 m had so few pixels representing them that it was difficult to even tell they were humans except in perfect circumstances with perfect alignment, and past 300 meters characters may as well be invisible.

The exact level of zoom chosen is based a document from the US Army on operating the M2 heavy machine gun[1]. The document describes what a dismounted human target looks like at various ranges, as follows:

- 100 meters: The target can be clearly observed in detail, and facial features can be distinguished.
- 200 meters: The target can be clearly observed, although there is a loss of facial detail. The color of
the skin and equipment is still identifiable.
- 300 meters: The target has a clear body outline, face color usually remains accurate, but remaining
details are blurred.
- 400 meters: The body outline is clear, but remaining detail is blurred.
- 500 meters: The body shape begins to taper at the ends. The head becomes indistinct from the
shoulders.

For the sake of fairness and balance, I calibrated the zoom level to match these descriptions in the best possible conditions: open grass field with clear skies with the sun positioned such that targets are backlit and their silhouette contrasting with the grassy background. This way, any changes in lighting conditions or environment should only make the target *more* difficult to see from this baseline, to try to avoid a situation where the player is given *more* visibility than they should realistically have. Also, this was calibrated for my own monitor (2560x1080 resolution) and my own gaming desk setup. The exact results will vary from player to player based on their screen resolution, monitor size, and distance from their viewing position. I make no claims that this is a perfect representation of real life, just that it is closer to realistic than what Reforger gives you out of the box.

The screenshots provided are the setup I used to calibrate the zoom level, in various lighting conditions. Each successive soldier is placed in 100 meter increments, to correspond with the HMG operation document. Their ranges are not exact, but I got them as close as I could using map grid squares and a ruler held up to my monitor.

Any suggestions on how to calibrate this more accurately, or even better make it adapt to the player's screen resolution and baseline FOV, are encouraged and appreciated.

[1] TC 3-22.50 HEAVY MACHINE GUN M2 SERIES table 7-3. "Recognition of dismounted target" https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/pdf/web/ARN5846_TC%203-22x50%20FINAL%20WEB.pdf

OLD VERSION DO NOT USE

Reuploaded at https://reforger.armaplatform.com/workshop/5A3B63312D7F97A7-RealisticEyeZoom to fix some formatting mistakes. I haven't figured out how to delete my mods from the workshop yet, but I'll be taking this down once I do

OLD VERSION DO NOT USE

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