Telling if you can shoot stuff or not with the narrow "line" we have right now can get tricky and sometimes difficult at times.
What if there was a button you could press to view a "cone" of what your character can see/shoot and what not?
Here's a mockup:

I think it's hard to make, it break the realistic in some way, and just useless.

You just need skill, which comes not for so long time. Just orient on red point in crosshair, it appears if some object(s) is on imaginary line of sight. Also if you aiming behind the soldiers, it help's too. Green point appears if you brought a mouse directly on enemy and can shoot him.

This is more like for the situations regarding behind the buildings and other awkward positions. Also, the game already has this "field of view" coded into the game, because of the cursor displaying the green or red dot, so creating a visual may or may not be that hard?

That's fine and dandy however, you would need a sight "circle" as you can instantly shoot in all 360 degrees around you in an instant.

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

But what's the point? Moar hardcore (!) - that what I'm saying.

I would rather see something like this


The aim helper should also snap into position quicker than it does now, right now it's more of a smooth transition.


It could just draw a 30° cone depending on where the crosshair is at any given time. It could also just draw a circle around the character with red parts indicating where they have good cover from. Many times I've tried to use trees as cover only to find that I'm just slightly out of position and get shot, but the AI doesn't have this problem obviously =p

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Ozymandias, King of kings, God of Caves, Wizard.

Tried that when experimenting with the helper. With the fastest setting it became blinking, very confusing. I still might open it up as an option later to control the smoothness with a slider.

To visualize the cone correctly, I guess it's more difficult than it sounds. It would have to represent a volume with depth, as obviously you might be positioned so that you can't shoot at the ground behind an obstacle, but you can shoot at something behind and above the obstacle.

Let's say there would be an area with building ruins with walls with windows that can be shot through. If that is positioned at the bottom of your screen where you basically have rays straight down, how would you visualize the stacked levels of occlusion (wall above the window occludes line of sight, the window doesn't, the wall below window occludes again)? How to render red with some depth, then green a little behind it, then more red on single pixel so that it holds the information we want from the cone?

Simple, don't try to use trees as cover thinking you're not exposed The tree collision models are not as wide as the soldier is, I'm fairly sure, so they only provide partial cover.

What if this visual occlusion-detector wasn't a cone, but was something more dynamic. With a button press you could send out an "imaginary" wave from your gun (because that's where bullet collision calculations start, no?) in the direction of your crosshair. The said wave will collide and disappear where bullets would hit and pass through anything the bullets would.

I can make a GIF for late to demonstrate.