Scale of planets in E: D

[Chrome]

What you call fisheye distortion is kinda the opposite. I think the game engine uses a rectilinear projection. This has the feature that straight lines remain straight, but particularly as the angle gets wider, the further out you go, the more stretched things become. For a narrow field of view this effect isn't significant.

The assumptions made so far sound ok, but would only hold true if the exact centre of the field of view was centred on the centre of the object being measured. As the object moves away from centre, it will appear bigger with increasing distance. Does that help at all?

I think it's far simpler than that....

I'm fairly sure the engine is scaling the assets in real time, you're not actually going as fast as the game shows you. It's both instancing areas where celestials are visible and scaling them when you get close.

Basically, you have a 64 bit integer to use for coordinates (as far as rendering is concerned). On a low level, that's what you have and it'll have to do. In order to portray Elite's insane scales the game cheats by scaling celestials around you rather than actually moving you all those distances, to give the illusion of scale without having to use insanely high coordinate numbers.

I'm almost 100% sure that what Zieman observes is what actually happens - Celestials get bigger or smaller depending on distance (and likely speed).

I hope i'm making sense. I always find it hard to explain stuff >_>

 

[Porina]

I'm fairly sure what I described is what happens in most games when trying to fit a 3D space onto a 2D screen. I'm not great at explaining stuff either... but let's have a go.

Imagine you have a spherical object some distance in front of you. Now imagine you have a second object exactly the same size and same distance, but somewhat off to one side. From a given viewpoint, they will have the same angular size. The problem here is we're projecting them onto a flat surface. If you're looking at the object in front of you, you can imagine a cone starting from the viewpoint to the object, and where it crosses the viewing plane you get a circle. Without moving your viewpoint, the cone to the same size/distance object to one side will be cut by the viewing plane at an angle, hence giving us the stretched circles.

Then again I don't think any of that would explain why an object would appear smaller than expected. It would only possibly explain why it might be bigger.

I don't think speed should affect this, but then again I'm not familiar with game universe physics since things can get somewhat messy as you get near c, let alone past it. If there is any suspicion then it would be simplest just to stop moving before measurement.

 

[Zieman]

I don't think speed should affect this, but then again I'm not familiar with game universe physics since things can get somewhat messy as you get near c, let alone past it. If there is any suspicion then it would be simplest just to stop moving before measurement.

Oh yes. One detail I forgot to mention:
I always dropped out of supercruise and stopped my ship before taking the screenie. Didn't think of possible 'game engine cheating', but did it because I didn't want any extra error to the distance measurement.

 

[who?]

I think it's far simpler than that....

I'm fairly sure the engine is scaling the assets in real time, you're not actually going as fast as the game shows you. It's both instancing areas where celestials are visible and scaling them when you get close.

Basically, you have a 64 bit integer to use for coordinates (as far as rendering is concerned). On a low level, that's what you have and it'll have to do. In order to portray Elite's insane scales the game cheats by scaling celestials around you rather than actually moving you all those distances, to give the illusion of scale without having to use insanely high coordinate numbers.

I'm almost 100% sure that what Zieman observes is what actually happens - Celestials get bigger or smaller depending on distance (and likely speed).

I hope i'm making sense. I always find it hard to explain stuff >_>

I wonder if this explains some of the issues Rift users have complained about, where in (stereoscopic) 3D the planets seem to be far closer than they should be.