Idea of Scale

[Sanderson]

Makes a big difference adjusting the height, at least if you're 6'2". Set in the OR configuration tool at 6'2" my in-game imaginary head was about a foot above the ingame model's shoulders.

I don't believe we'll ever get 100% "true scale" in ED. I could be wrong but things aren't 1 to 1 in ED, unless my eyes are deceiving me. I have a hard time believing the distances and sizes, while they may be to scale relative to each other, they aren't to real scale. So, there's really no way to get "real scale".

That's ok for me but, planets will always look smaller than what a real planets perceived scale is relative to what we are used to.

I wish FD would tell us what the actual scale is.

I don't know the right way to say this but if whatever starting point FD used for scale isn't 1/1 with real life it'll always look off.Might be to scale relative to the rest of the game but it'll never be true to scale IRL and always look smaller/langer relative to whatever "scale" FD used. Obviously it wasn't real life scale.

 

[Ancipital]

Another thing which seems to have a bearing is the position of the eye relief- all the way out, away from the eyes makes it much "bigger" for me (remember to tell the Oculus config utility). I can't crank it any closer than halfway in or I constantly feel my eyelashes hitting the lenses, but doing so makes everything "smaller", but improves peripheral vision.

 

[Mike Evans]

I don't believe we'll ever get 100% "true scale" in ED. I could be wrong but things aren't 1 to 1 in ED, unless my eyes are deceiving me. I have a hard time believing the distances and sizes, while they may be to scale relative to each other, they aren't to real scale. So, there's really no way to get "real scale".

That's ok for me but, planets will always look smaller than what a real planets perceived scale is relative to what we are used to.

I wish FD would tell us what the actual scale is.

I don't know the right way to say this but if whatever starting point FD used for scale isn't 1/1 with real life it'll always look off.Might be to scale relative to the rest of the game but it'll never be true to scale IRL and always look smaller/langer relative to whatever "scale" FD used. Obviously it wasn't real life scale.

Everything is scaled relative to each other correctly. How you experience the game will alter the perceived scale and correctness. If you want everything to be 100% to scale with real life you need to make sure your eyeballs are exactly the right distance away from your monitor given your particular FOV settings to get the right look. Any closer and things will look larger and any further away will result in things looking smaller than they are in real life. With Oculus you have to set it up right to account for your eye spacing and what not I believe. There is no magic number being used on purpose to make everything seem off. The only thing any 3D game creator can do is ensure internally everything is scaled relative to everything else correctly. Getting that to feel right is completely up to the player and how they're experiencing the game.

 

[Tinman]

I don't believe we'll ever get 100% "true scale" in ED. I could be wrong but things aren't 1 to 1 in ED, unless my eyes are deceiving me. I have a hard time believing the distances and sizes, while they may be to scale relative to each other, they aren't to real scale. So, there's really no way to get "real scale".

That's ok for me but, planets will always look smaller than what a real planets perceived scale is relative to what we are used to.

I wish FD would tell us what the actual scale is.

They have already told us several times that the game is indeed true to scale. Even in this very thread:

Our models are built with a consistent scaling relative to each other so 1 metre in our game should equate to 1 metre in real life and thus oculus providing they're set up correctly. There was no reason to fudge scaling like they do in FPSes.

(There are several more quotes about this that can be found.)

The sense of things like planets "being smaller" is simply because our brain have a hard time accepting that something of that size can move so fast by out ship while in supercruise. If it's moving that fast our brains simply "have to" make the assumption that they are smaller since otherwise it wouldn't "make sense". There is very little the devs can do about this. When planetary landings comes along it will get easier to get this scale across, but even then we will always have a hard time to accept these scales. The same thing can be experienced in SpaceEngine for that matter. If you move around the planets to fast they loose their sense of size.

I don't know the right way to say this but if whatever starting point FD used for scale isn't 1/1 with real life it'll always look off.Might be to scale relative to the rest of the game but it'll never be true to scale IRL and always look smaller/langer relative to whatever "scale" FD used. Obviously it wasn't real life scale.

A scale "starting point" is irrelevant. Besides what is a "true" meter in terms of computer code anyway? As long as everything is scaled correctly relative to one another this doesn't matter. 1 meter or a centimeter are just a way of labeling something. They could just as easily been called something else. What matters is the relative size. If everything in the entire universe was shrunk down several orders of magnitude in an equal measure so that everything still had the same relative size differences between them there would be no way to tell the difference.

EDIT: Goddamit Mike! You must stop doing that! This is what I get for getting a cup of coffee while in the middle of writing this!

 

[Eggplant!]

Mike is correct here folks!

I think one of the things that make everything *seem* off and small is the apparent velocity and acceleration change you can experience in this game. The rapid parallax makes your brain think things are smaller than they are since you can't normally travel so fast. Plus, we get to basically ignore inertia in this game. If you really accelerated so quickly you'd be fine pulp. These contribute to your brain thinking things are smaller than they are.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Mike is correct here folks!

I think one of the things that make everything *seem* off and small is the apparent velocity and acceleration change you can experience in this game. The rapid parallax makes your brain think things are smaller than they are since you can't normally travel so fast. Plus, we get to basically ignore inertia in this game. If you really accelerated so quickly you'd be fine pulp. These contribute to your brain thinking things are smaller than they are.

Also this phenomena is very easily observable when closing in to city with airplane, especially at considerable heights. Our sense of scale is confused for considerable time before it settles down.

 

[withnail]

Those neutron stars are bleeding small though. And fiendishly dangerous too.

Never had a problem with scale tbh.

 

[Sanderson]

Everything is scaled relative to each other correctly. How you experience the game will alter the perceived scale and correctness. If you want everything to be 100% to scale with real life you need to make sure your eyeballs are exactly the right distance away from your monitor given your particular FOV settings to get the right look. Any closer and things will look larger and any further away will result in things looking smaller than they are in real life. With Oculus you have to set it up right to account for your eye spacing and what not I believe. There is no magic number being used on purpose to make everything seem off. The only thing any 3D game creator can do is ensure internally everything is scaled relative to everything else correctly. Getting that to feel right is completely up to the player and how they're experiencing the game.

I get that and wasn't complaining.

Does this mean that everything is scaled relative to the player size in game? That's the only way "scale" will ever "seem" right, IMO, is if scale is relative to the player model.

For example: Let's say the player model is 6', is a planet that has a diameter of 25,000 miles really 22 million times bigger than the player model?

 

[Eggplant!]

I get that and wasn't complaining.

Does this mean that everything is scaled relative to the player size in game? That's the only way "scale" will ever "seem" right, IMO, is if scale is relative to the player model.

For example: Let's say the player model is 6', is a planet that has a diameter of 25,000 miles really 22 million times bigger than the player model?

According to the many posts by the devs, yes. Everything has a standardized scale. That includes the player model, and everything in the game.

I think Mike's point is that to be perceived as right, it depends on proper setup of your fleshy meat-space interface to the game world. It will depend on your inter-pupil distance and headset configuration (in the case of VR), and FOV+monitor+distance to screen (in the non-VR case).

And then there are all of those problems mentioned above with you being able to do things in the game that humans have no real world experience with that throw off your brains ability to explain what it is seeing. Pecisk put it most plainly with his airplane example. Flying around in an airplane makes it feel like everything on the ground is made for ants. It's because that's your brain's best explanation as to why the ground appears to be moving so fast. Imagine that multiplied by orders of magnitude by traveling at multiple times the speed of light and being able to observe the universe around you. Or, around stations, you can accelerate from zero to 400km/s in just a handful of seconds, which should impose something on the order of 12-15Gs of acceleration on your body, yet you feel nothing. The lack of sensory input and relation of experience to the real world causes your brain to explain things away as being small.

 

[BigBossLucas]

Everything is scaled relative to each other correctly. How you experience the game will alter the perceived scale and correctness. If you want everything to be 100% to scale with real life you need to make sure your eyeballs are exactly the right distance away from your monitor given your particular FOV settings to get the right look. Any closer and things will look larger and any further away will result in things looking smaller than they are in real life. With Oculus you have to set it up right to account for your eye spacing and what not I believe. There is no magic number being used on purpose to make everything seem off. The only thing any 3D game creator can do is ensure internally everything is scaled relative to everything else correctly. Getting that to feel right is completely up to the player and how they're experiencing the game.

Try This Mike, recently I was on a road, driving because of vacations in my country, I was playing the following game Imagining that I was in an ED Asteroid's field.

I looked for the farthest landmark beside the road, end there it was, a tall radio antenna barely visible, and I though "I'm usually able to spot for small ships in ED when the're something like 10 km away" and I start to shot at them when the're at +- 3km away... Well, I reseted my car's odometer and waited until I was at 10mt. from that antena, and my odometer showead 8 km from my initial position to that antenna, I did that exercise over and over noticing that at 8 km no big truck was visible from 8 km, but in the game I can easily spot a sidewinder at that distance.

Why is that?, and pardon my English I'm from Mexico

I actually play on my 27" widescreen at 1080 and my eyes are like 2½ feet away. from that screen.

 

[Sanderson]

According to the many posts by the devs, yes. Everything has a standardized scale. That includes the player model, and everything in the game.

I think Mike's point is that to be perceived as right, it depends on proper setup of your fleshy meat-space interface to the game world. It will depend on your inter-pupil distance and headset configuration (in the case of VR), and FOV+monitor+distance to screen (in the non-VR case).

And then there are all of those problems mentioned above with you being able to do things in the game that humans have no real world experience with that throw off your brains ability to explain what it is seeing. Pecisk put it most plainly with his airplane example. Flying around in an airplane makes it feel like everything on the ground is made for ants. It's because that's your brain's best explanation as to why the ground appears to be moving so fast. Imagine that multiplied by orders of magnitude by traveling at multiple times the speed of light and being able to observe the universe around you. Or, around stations, you can accelerate from zero to 400km/s in just a handful of seconds, which should impose something on the order of 12-15Gs of acceleration on your body, yet you feel nothing. The lack of sensory input and relation of experience to the real world causes your brain to explain things away as being small.

I've read the many posts, I still have a hard time believing that stars and planets are scaled to the player model. I'm not saying they are not, I'm just saying that it's hard to wrap one's head around if indeed a 25,000 mile diameter planet is really scaled 22 million times bigger than a 6' player model, for example.

I play in a DK2, so maybe that has something to do with it but, to me and IMO the scale relative to each other is correct but, the overall scale seems way too small. IMO.

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They have already told us several times that the game is indeed true to scale. Even in this very thread:



(There are several more quotes about this that can be found.)

The sense of things like planets "being smaller" is simply because our brain have a hard time accepting that something of that size can move so fast by out ship while in supercruise. If it's moving that fast our brains simply "have to" make the assumption that they are smaller since otherwise it wouldn't "make sense". There is very little the devs can do about this. When planetary landings comes along it will get easier to get this scale across, but even then we will always have a hard time to accept these scales. The same thing can be experienced in SpaceEngine for that matter. If you move around the planets to fast they loose their sense of size.



A scale "starting point" is irrelevant. Besides what is a "true" meter in terms of computer code anyway? As long as everything is scaled correctly relative to one another this doesn't matter. 1 meter or a centimeter are just a way of labeling something. They could just as easily been called something else. What matters is the relative size. If everything in the entire universe was shrunk down several orders of magnitude in an equal measure so that everything still had the same relative size differences between them there would be no way to tell the difference.

EDIT: Goddamit Mike! You must stop doing that! This is what I get for getting a cup of coffee while in the middle of writing this!

Might want to be careful with the "Goddamit", I got an infraction for saying "backside" so, a friendly heads up that your breaking the rules there bud.

 

[Eggplant!]

I've read the many posts, I still have a hard time believing that stars and planets are scaled to the player model. I'm not saying they are not, I'm just saying that it's hard to wrap one's head around if indeed a 25,000 mile diameter planet is really scaled 22 million times bigger than a 6' player model, for example.

I play in a DK2, so maybe that has something to do with it but, to me and IMO the scale relative to each other is correct but, the overall scale seems way too small. IMO.

What specifically makes it feel too small? I can travel at 100s of m/s near a moon and it doesn't move perceptively. That makes it seem pretty big. It's not until I'm moving 100s of km/s that I can see planet sized bodies parallax, which seem about right. If I wasn't thinking about how fast I'm actually moving it might seem small.

I have no real insight into how they are accomplishing the scale. There are limits to the floating point representations that can work on home computers in real time. No you probably can't have a model of the pilot and a model of a planet being rendered with the same transform. But there are lot of tricks to accomplishing this scaling stuff, especially when you can leverage separations between which objects really need to interact with each other. Point is, that making the scale right isn't so hard that they wouldn't just do it.

 

[Kaldar5]

I still have a hard time believing that stars and planets are scaled to the player model. I'm not saying they are not, I'm just saying that it's hard to wrap one's head around if indeed a 25,000 mile diameter planet is really scaled 22 million times bigger than a 6' player model, for example.

Yes and real astronauts have had the same problems too.

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth.” ― Neil Armstrong

Humans don't have much experience with the massive scales of space. Of course space didn't "look right" to you, it's not in your normal experiences. Reality didn't even "Look right" to Niel Armstrong. The Frontier devs created the game at a 1:1 scale.

If something does not look huge, get closer. Then it will look huge.

 

[Sanderson]

What specifically makes it feel too small?

Distance, in a word. The size of celestial bodies relative to the player (me) and the distance from it.

I can travel at 100s of m/s near a moon and it doesn't move perceptively. That makes it seem pretty big. It's not until I'm moving 100s of km/s that I can see planet sized bodies parallax, which seem about right. If I wasn't thinking about how fast I'm actually moving it might seem small.

I have no real insight into how they are accomplishing the scale. There are limits to the floating point representations that can work on home computers in real time. No you probably can't have a model of the pilot and a model of a planet being rendered with the same transform. But there are lot of tricks to accomplishing this scaling stuff, especially when you can leverage separations between which objects really need to interact with each other. Point is, that making the scale right isn't so hard that they wouldn't just do it.

This sort of thing is used quite a bit in games but, according to Mike, this isn't the case in ED at all, as everything is 1:1.

For me personally, size/distance looks off. In ED things look smaller and closer than in real life. While still huge on the DK2 in general game terms visually, objects and distance relative to the cockpit and player model looks condensed.

I'll try to explain. Last week I was near a planet, it looked to me to be about 30' diameter and 50-60' feet away, as opposed to many thousands of miles in diameter and distance. Still a very cool thing to play but, again to me, it seems off.

If I had to guess I'd say scale or distance isn't 1:1 and since Mike says scale is 1:1, then I'd guess distance is not. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's "just me" but, for many ED's scale in a DK2 looks wrong.

 

[Dejay]

Everything is scaled relative to each other correctly. How you experience the game will alter the perceived scale and correctness. If you want everything to be 100% to scale with real life you need to make sure your eyeballs are exactly the right distance away from your monitor given your particular FOV settings to get the right look. Any closer and things will look larger and any further away will result in things looking smaller than they are in real life. With Oculus you have to set it up right to account for your eye spacing and what not I believe. There is no magic number being used on purpose to make everything seem off. The only thing any 3D game creator can do is ensure internally everything is scaled relative to everything else correctly. Getting that to feel right is completely up to the player and how they're experiencing the game.

What could help is things like a realistic distance from the floor and greeble and recognizable objects that we know the scale of.

For example a captains cabin with normal furniture and a big look outside. Or people walking around outside. Or if containers would look exactly like shipping containers in real life.

 

[Mazhurg]

I've read the many posts, I still have a hard time believing that stars and planets are scaled to the player model. I'm not saying they are not, I'm just saying that it's hard to wrap one's head around if indeed a 25,000 mile diameter planet is really scaled 22 million times bigger than a 6' player model, for example.

I play in a DK2, so maybe that has something to do with it but, to me and IMO the scale relative to each other is correct but, the overall scale seems way too small. IMO.

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Might want to be careful with the "Goddamit", I got an infraction for saying "backside" so, a friendly heads up that your breaking the rules there bud.

Do this test.

Get the closest you can to a planet. Start diving straight into it at full speed, let say 350M/s - That is equivalent to 1260Km/Hr, or 746M/Hr or 650Kts or 21Km/min 12 miles/min. Diving at this speed will still take you a long time before you reach the planet surface (assuming you have the patience to try it) and your horizon will be flat, heck just like on a planet.

Mind you, getting to the surface will make the texture disappear but the point here is that as you approach the planet at the languishing speed of 1 mach (if at sea level) you really start to appreciate the true scale of things.

 

[Mike Evans]

I get that and wasn't complaining.

Does this mean that everything is scaled relative to the player size in game? That's the only way "scale" will ever "seem" right, IMO, is if scale is relative to the player model.

For example: Let's say the player model is 6', is a planet that has a diameter of 25,000 miles really 22 million times bigger than the player model?

Yes the player model is the right scale to everything else. That's what everything being scaled correctly relative to everything else means

 

[Mike Evans]

Try This Mike, recently I was on a road, driving because of vacations in my country, I was playing the following game Imagining that I was in an ED Asteroid's field.

I looked for the farthest landmark beside the road, end there it was, a tall radio antenna barely visible, and I though "I'm usually able to spot for small ships in ED when the're something like 10 km away" and I start to shot at them when the're at +- 3km away... Well, I reseted my car's odometer and waited until I was at 10mt. from that antena, and my odometer showead 8 km from my initial position to that antenna, I did that exercise over and over noticing that at 8 km no big truck was visible from 8 km, but in the game I can easily spot a sidewinder at that distance.

Why is that?, and pardon my English I'm from Mexico

I actually play on my 27" widescreen at 1080 and my eyes are like 2½ feet away. from that screen.

Sidewinders are a lot bigger than a truck I would imagine. They're like 18 metres across and 4-5 metres high for example.

 

[Gimi]

Old comparison of a Sidewinder and an Airbus A480 I made back in March 2013.



The measure for comparison used is the hight of the person present in both images.

 

[Dirk Braben]

--snip--