Sense Of Scale

[Old Duck]

My alt-CMDR is flying a Type-7 out in deep space, and unless it's totally in my head, the sense of scale (PS4) has changed since this latest 3.3 update went live. Part of it may be due the the fact that the headrest no longer blocks my view when looking around, but it also feels like the changes in lighting are creating a sense of depth that was lacking before. Whether this translates to things like flying through the mailslot is yet to be seen, but I am slowly making my way back to the Bubble.

Has anyone else noticed this? It's kinda amazing how "big" my Type-7 feels all of a sudden!

 

[Dbrn47]

Anaconda is a Corvette classed ship... You're looking for Farraguts and Interdictors for your immovable capital class vessels, even Frigates would be slower than what we have now and would probably the largest ships that any player would want to fly in this game since the Battle Cruisers don't do much 'flying'.

 

[Dbrn47]

My alt-CMDR is flying a Type-7 out in deep space, and unless it's totally in my head, the sense of scale (PS4) has changed since this latest 3.3 update went live. Part of it may be due the the fact that the headrest no longer blocks my view when looking around, but it also feels like the changes in lighting are creating a sense of depth that was lacking before. Whether this translates to things like flying through the mailslot is yet to be seen, but I am slowly making my way back to the Bubble.

Has anyone else noticed this? It's kinda amazing how "big" my Type-7 feels all of a sudden!

Well, the problem is it's all in your head to begin with... So all this 'sense of scale' and 'immersion' stuff is up to you. Personally I seem to get immersed in stuff like Elite pretty easily, where for some the slightest detail crushes their gameplay experience beyond repair. The ships in this game have always felt as big or as small as they were intended to me. The first time I hopped into a Beluga and Cutter was extremely different than a Python or Assault Ship, even more over a Vulture or Sidewinder. I don't play in VR either, so there's that.

 

[OBYOZ]

I agree with OP, in NMS when you land on your mega ship and look out from the bridge, it feels massive. Don't get that with ED for some reason.

Even flying through the slot feels the same in all ships. In a sidewinder the slot should feel massive.

 

[Jukelo]

I agree with OP, in NMS when you land on your mega ship and look out from the bridge, it feels massive. Don't get that with ED for some reason.

That's because in NMS you can move around on the bridge and get close to the window, which gives you a sense of scale as your immediate surroundings move from your pov but not the far end of the ship. When the picture is still there is no sense of scale.

Even flying through the slot feels the same in all ships. In a sidewinder the slot should feel massive.

There is no reason the slot should feel any more massive in the sidewinder than in any other ship. The slot is the same size regardless of your ship, and your perception isn't affected by the size of your ship since 1) you don't see the rest of your ship and 2) even if you could, we've already established you can't have a good sense of the scale of your ship without moving inside it and without proper human-scale detail at the visible far end.

 

[ShadowWolf Kell]

This is why I love the Python's cockpit. Regardless of how large it is, it feels properly cramped due to the low angle of the wind shield and the massive bulkhead separating pilot from copilot.

Except in VR it's not cramped at all. In fact, it feels more like the iClipper or iCutter in VR. It's definitely bigger than the Krait's.

VR actually does a pretty good job of giving you a real sense of scale. And no, the interior of a station doesn't look any bigger from inside an iCourier than it does from inside an Anaconda. The bridge of the Anaconda definitely looks massive though, and looking over your shoulder makes you realize you could fit most of an iCourier on the bridge.

You can actually "walk around" your ship in a way in VR. Things look very much to accurate scale. It's not unlike walking around in Subnautica.

[video=youtube;_OoVH3aXra8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OoVH3aXra8[/video]

 

[Old Duck]

You can actually "walk around" your ship in a way in VR. Things look very much to accurate scale. It's not unlike walking around in Subnautica.

Since we may still be far off from space legs, I would [heart]love[heart] for Frontier to unlock the bridge camera. Instead of giving us 4 fixed cameras, most of which are fairly useless, let us move the camera around our bridge / cockpit just like we can the exterior camera. Like you say, this is supported in VR, so give the rest of us this opportunity. The ability to move around and see parallax through movement would be a HUGE improvement to giving monitor players a sense of scale of the interior of our ships.

Oh, and let us get CLOSE to our ships using the external camera. I should be able to put that camera right on top of the deck bolts of my Anaconda. It would be the next best thing to space legs, and trivial for Frontier to implement.

 

[uliando]

I want stars to be redone to not shimmer and have different shaders so we can see star size at glance.

 

[Burke]

Im guessing the scale is wrong for the same reason other GFX are toned down. Consoles cant cope like PCs can. The coriolis station itself is like maybe 1/3 of what it should be. What kind of idiot would make a station like that with a tiny little slot? That slot would be big enough to get a cutter thru each way and and type 7 down the middle all at the same time. At least. Now we have a problem where they cant add ships like the panther cause the slot is too small. I would not be surprised if scale affects space legs.

Imagine if there was a catastrophic failure and ships needed to exit the station quickly. For safty reasons alone the slot is most unlikely. The entire station needs to be scaled up.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

On an unrelated note, just learned that AIM-9 Sidewinder ;-), a popular Air-to-air missile is three meters long. Now picture one standing beside you. It never looked so big in movies, and even in DCS World VR it doesn't look that huge. Until you eject from the cockpit and land near your plane on the runway to be able to "spacelegs" ;-) pardon, "dcs feet" stroll around the plane ;-)

Not with live ordnance, I wouldn't.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Yes this was my first real issue with elite after falling for it, and spent quite a bit a time experimenting with it.

Best results in game are with the fov set as high as possible before / until the sense of scale in the height direction is lost.

The cockpit fields of view are just wrong and compromised horribly for gameplay over realism. Start to trace down the blueprints for an anaconda or corvette and imagine how it would look if the bridges were really to their lore. You would have to turn your head a full 90 degrees of more before seeing the sides properly which of course is not action combat. Last I rationalised or avatars are about 4 meters tall I in game.

Another great test is to kiss the tip of the nose of an anaconda to a tourist beacon. It’s the only measure of distance at the scales we’re imagining in game, and it shows the distance in meters from the beacon to some point in your ship. See if that adds up, it doesn’t.

The final proof is the fan YouTube videos and demo using elite assists in another environment. You have tangible proof it is *possible* to get the scale right, and elite simply doesn’t.

There’s nothing in the XMLs that help (to my knowledge).

It’s better not to fight this one as once you see it it sucks and you can’t win.

Edit: also a huge culprit is maintence of the hud size. The hud is identically placed on a cobra and cutter.. yet to lore the cobra radar area is about a foot long and on the cutter it’s a meter or two.

While I may not agree gameplay or realism is frontiers choice, but other games exist where it’s better handled.. look at how capital sized ships work in x eg. elite matches frontier style for sure.. the tunnel is fixed and rigid.

The shutdown also occurs when you find you can’t lower the fov smaller than the hud.. it’s clamped to that minimum when you set it to the low end. This is just choice because in vr, the other place where scale isn’t a problem, this limit is not enforced.

 

[Burke]

The HUD doesnt scale with FOV Looks like its been designed for a 4:3 ratio tv. Again i suspect this is because the game needed to work on consoles.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

The HUD doesnt scale with FOV Looks like its been designed for a 4:3 ratio tv. Again i suspect this is because the game needed to work on consoles.

I don’t think so.. I’m running 16x10 and the game feels much more natural at 16x9. That aspect ratio for tvs is definitely the sweet spot. Going taller makes it... well different, and making it wider gets epic fisheye like you’ve never seen before.

 

[Burke]

Spoiler

Look at the HUD tho, its 4:3 I cant remember how i did it but i altered my FOV in the ini files so its a little wider. Look at all that space it doesnt expand into, its like im looking down a fighter plane HUD even tho im on a bridge the size of a room.

 

[Burke]

So look. Technically you could play ED like this on a little old square tv.

Spoiler

So i sit here with my widescreen monitor and i wonder why im staring down that narrow HUD. I mean really it ought to be on a slider of some sort. The problem is that the 3 main readouts are anchored to the dash. Would it be so terrible to give that up? Maybe it wouldnt look totally right but nobody gonna notice.

 

[IamMe]

It has been discussed several times and the sense of scale feels off for 3 simple reasons:

1) Acceleration is way too high for ships the size of the ones in Elite, both how ships handle inside space and how they're treated by the game itself during landings, station docking etc is completely off and unrealistic. You can't have a station platform the size of two football fields move 180° in a few seconds. It feels like we're in a f-14 even when we're piloting something the size of the Empire state building.

2) Cockpits are too big compared to the actual pilot seat. Ship is almost double the size of what it should be to cozily fit current cmdr proportions. Once you notice it you can't go back, if you look at your cmdr with the cockpit angle in camera mode it looks almost like an action figure sitting on a bus driver seat.

3) Very low texture resolution of basically everything, planets, stations, ships, ruines, interiors, cockpits, you name it.

This^ (and i play it in VR)
Cockipts are unreasonably big, no manufacturer would build such cockpits looking from engineering and economical point of view.
However not all ships have that problem given that our avatars live in their ships so some comfort is needed but i guess bridge doesn't come under that point since it is a workplace rather than pilot's living room.
For example Phyton is quite good while Conda or ASP has no sense at all.
In aviation designing special study is used (programs are written for it) to give user enough freedom of movement, accesibility, usability, comfort and field of view while keeping it economical and performance wise lighter.

Another problem is acceleration and speed when approaching objects such as stations as well it's low resolution and surface details (understandable as it would require a lot of work and would cost us performance).
For me even planets are off scale again for landable ones there is no atmosphere therefore no air resistance so speed and acceleration kills it scale feel.
While gas giants, atmo planets and stars have distance approach limit which kills it scale too.
I guess if landable atmo planets ever come it could change making our ships more difficult and slower to land on.
Also atmosphere thickness when entering it will give much better feel of scale and planet's size.
In SC landing on atmo planet takes time and that's what gives feel of it's size. (Don't know for the rest of the planets since i tried it only once).

 

[babelfisch]

The HUD doesnt scale with FOV Looks like its been designed for a 4:3 ratio tv. Again i suspect this is because the game needed to work on consoles.

That doesn't make any sense since 4:3 TVs virtually don't exist anymore.

 

[babelfisch]

So look. Technically you could play ED like this on a little old square tv.


So i sit here with my widescreen monitor and i wonder why im staring down that narrow HUD. I mean really it ought to be on a slider of some sort. The problem is that the 3 main readouts are anchored to the dash. Would it be so terrible to give that up? Maybe it wouldnt look totally right but nobody gonna notice.

The HUD stops at ~2/3 from the top of the screenshot. I'd say the argument is mostly made up.

 

[Burke]

I'd say the argument is mostly made up.

Dont worry about the argument then, just look at the picutres.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

So look. Technically you could play ED like this on a little old square tv.


So i sit here with my widescreen monitor and i wonder why im staring down that narrow HUD. I mean really it ought to be on a slider of some sort. The problem is that the 3 main readouts are anchored to the dash. Would it be so terrible to give that up? Maybe it wouldnt look totally right but nobody gonna notice.

I would assume it's like that for VR purposes. Everything looks to be in the right place in VR apart from the side pop ups. I would like to be able to position them myself to my own preferences.