WideViewAspect & Zoom: Part 1

These are the results of my investigations into how the 'WideViewAspect' flag affects the FSX 3D view. This is much talked-about in the forums but reliable information is scarce. I have combined such real information as I have found with the results of my own experiments. I hope it is helpful to others, and I am happy to hear additional information or corrections.

Updates:

(1) I believe eyepoint is saved in aircraft.cfg and zoom in camera.cfg (i.e. neither is in panel.cfg as I said in the video). You are on your own if you want to edit this stuff manually!

(2) When I made this I wasn't sure about the bit where I suggest zooming out from 1.0 if you have a big screen. Now I'm more confident and I can give you numbers. Check out Part 2 for a detailed treatment of this.

(3) I found the pictures didn't quite match up when calculating the equivalent WVA=T zoom, although they were very close. Originally I dismissed the discrepancy as due to arithmetic rounding or some such, but recently I have realised there is a more fundamental problem. In my comparisons I have always used a resolution of 1280x1024 on the 4:3 monitor and 3840x1024 on the wide monitor (actually 4066x1024 to account for the bezels). The problem with this is that 1280x1024 is not a 4:3 ratio, it is 5:4! I think this means I should be using the physical dimensions (width and height) of the monitors in my calculations, not the pixel dimensions. Alternatively, I should redo my experiments using a true 4:3 resolution on the monitors (so 1024x768 and 3072x768 would be okay), in which case the ratios of the pixel dimensions should be exactly the same as the ratios of the physical dimensions. And in that case I would hope to see a perfect match...