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I feel the scale is right for ships and planets, but it's the stations and landing platforms that feel off. The buildings in front of the landing pad are HUGE but look smal
Sense Of Scale
- Thread starter Old Duck
- Start date
Yes. I recommend trying to land a Corvette smack bang in the middle of Dav's Hope.
When approaching, it 'feels' like it will fit.
Well, Corvette bigger than I thought.
We need ground crew, they don't have to be functional, just loiter and look nice.
Yes ground crew! And imo the srv handles smaller than it is which makes it feel small in comparison to everything, making ship feel small, etc. I NEED to get VR
Do you take into account both the relative positioning of the cockpit you are in and the size of the landing pad you are on? My guess is not.
Also it is worth keeping in mind that pretty much all the ships will be probably be elevated off the pad by at least the height of an SRV meaning that in smaller craft the flight control buildings may seem shorter than you expect. In larger craft (especially the likes of the Corvette and Anaconda) those buildings will naturally feel smaller as the buildings are essentially the same size regardless of the type of vehicle or landing pad size.
Yes Spock, all your answers are very scientific and logical, but I think you are missing that I and others are talking about how the game "feels". You must fun on date night, LOL.
BTW, there's no other game on my PS4 where I have to perform mental gymnastics / geometrics to feel the scale
BTW, there's no other game on my PS4 where I have to perform mental gymnastics / geometrics to feel the scale
Replace PS4 with PC, and I'm on the same page.
I do believe that the scale is correct, however the game (in 2D) does not transmit the scale. And players should not have to use rulers, calculators and microscopes to find the hidden little details that give off the scale, it should be completely apparent, like in all other games. It isn't though, mostly because of the reasons that were already mentioned in the topic.
It's simply because you're the ship and not a human. Ships are huge. No wonder other things feel small ;-)
Space Legs to the rescue!
Space Legs to the rescue!
I do not have to perform any mental gymnastics at all - the sense of scale is so obvious you would have to have it on the tip of a nuke fired straight at you personally for it to be any more obvious.there's no other game on my PS4 where I have to perform mental gymnastics / geometrics to feel the scale
Ummm Old Duck, you were once told (in your older thread) by Obsidian Ant quoting developer post that you're wrong about the scale of things - which is right. Just stumbled upon this while trying to find the relevant images.
Here's the developer post, and here's your old thread.
I still uphold what I said, we're a ship, and ships are big. Thus our perception is distorted.
Here's the developer post, and here's your old thread.
I still uphold what I said, we're a ship, and ships are big. Thus our perception is distorted.
The details are there if you choose to acknowledge them.
Inside the cockpit for example the CMDR Avatar provides a clear frame of reference, as do door ways visible through the windows of at least some flight control buildings, and various other "little details" that are there and quite apparent.
Where the scale of planets and moons are concerned, the size is more obvious in the smaller body cases than the larger ones due to curvature being more prominent and orbital/sub-orbital travel times being greater.
Where the scale of stars and gas giants are concerned, the scale tends to be less obvious due to their immense size and gravity wells essentially scaling with said size in a mostly consistent fashion - as would naturally be expected.
The frames of reference in space flight games tend to be different than with planet bound titles, there is little that can be realistically done to change that. In space flight titles, you are heavily dependent on the readouts and instrumentation in order to provide a sense of relative position in space and therefore scale of said elements in space. Some space titles do not scale things accurately, nor precisely - they just use artistic license with the gaming environment. Those games that do scale things fully and properly tend to get these kinds of topics in the relevant discussion forums.
One of the most appropriate quotes in this matter is the one by Neil Armstrong, but there are quite a few listed here: www.seasky.org/quotes/space-quotes-earth.html
Some of them will be more relevant than others to this topic.
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I do not have to perform any mental gymnastics at all - the sense of scale is so obvious you would have to have it on the tip of a nuke fired straight at you personally for it to be any more obvious.
Considering the number of people of people agreeing with me in this thread, perhaps you should perform some mental statistics before declaring something is "obvious"
That's why I'm not arguing that the scale itself is wrong this time 'round, but rather the sense and feel of the scale on my 2D monitor. That thread you link to is eye-witness evidence that ED doesn't do a wonderful job at "communicating" this scale to the player who doesn't own a VR rig.
Now that said, I'm a bit baffled by the actual scale of many cockpits and certain other visual cues which unnecessarily cause this misconception. I currently don't have a jet combat game on my PS4 (still waiting for Ace Combat 7), but I'm betting if I take a screenshot from a fighter jet cockpit and put it side-by-side with a screenshot from a screenshot from my Eagle or DBX, they'll look to be the same scale though we know they are not.
If fact, we could test my argument by showing the view from some of these ED cockpits to friends who have never played ED before. I doubt they will ascertain that the cockpits are the size of small-to-large-to-very-large rooms from the pilot's seat alone.
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I am seeing a blatant trend in those that agree with you - they typically ignore the "little details" that are there.Considering the number of people of people agreeing with me in this thread, perhaps you should perform some mental statistics before declaring something is "obvious"
With station exteriors or planetary settlements, I'm fine with the scale. There are lots of little windows and human-sized elements that convey how large they are. The problem for me is only on the landing pads inside. The doors and railings help, but they're not enough. FD could add a few rows of windows in the walls and other human-size elements - passenger waiting areas, loading equipment and consoles, security scanning, etc.
Honestly I can't remember any other space game in my long experience of the genre where the scale of objects was immediately apparent while flying around in spaceships. But with this I don't want to say that you're wrong and I'm right, it's for the most part a purely subjective thing, everyone of us perceives and elaborates informations in different ways, and may gets different reactions.
In the previously mentioned Freespace/Freespace 2, even though capital ships were clearly very big, with flagships like the Hecate and Orion classes in the 1-2 km range and the Colossus dreadnought at 6 km, I hardly could get the impression of their majestic size while zipping around dogfighting at many hundreds m/s. But the sheer hugeness of the Colossus immediately became apparent the moment one trundled along its hull from stern to bow at more sensible speeds. If one had the means to get even closer to the ship surface and moving along it at walking pace, it would have seemed literally neverending.
Maybe the game who best conveyed ships dimensions at a glance for me was X3, thanks to a clever use of intricately detailed textures and greeble, but even there the only way to really grasp their size was to fly right next to them in your spacesuit, zoom all out on the external camera and marvel at the insignificance of your presence next to them.
It's simply because you're the ship and not a human. Ships are huge. No wonder other things feel small ;-)
Space Legs to the rescue!
To give a bit more context to this bit of information that is never stressed enough, I made a small clip in the last X to give an actual demonstration of the importance of perspective, parallax and point of reference in conveying scale in a 2D visualization of a 3D world:
As I wrote previously, there's a lot of subjectivity in the actual perception of proportions and relative sizes, so things could still appear overall small or overall large in different ways to different people, but I hope the video makes more apparent the difference in relative perception from ship pov to legs pov.
Solid post and vid! Unfortunately: "You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to AkenBosch again.", so a virtual +1 from me. If somebody can rep AkenBosh for me, I'd be grateful ;-)
I am seeing a blatant trend in those that agree with you - they typically ignore the "little details" that are there.
I also detect a trend on your posts, as always typically pick on the most insignificant things and present them as actual counter-arguments to a much larger issue, as if you're not trying to have an actual discussion, but simply trying to win an argument by any means necessary.
Like on that thread where someone states that the ship's GUI is the same for all ships, a fact not even David Braben could dispute, but you somehow manage to say he is wrong because "in some ships the chair is on the left, others on the center, and others on the right".
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BTW, there's no other game on my PS4 where I have to perform mental gymnastics / geometrics to feel the scale
It's good to keep in mind that many games DO intentionally mess with scale of things like:
- in 3rd person games it is very common to have much bigger doorways (both wider and taller) than IRL
- in 1st person games the player's hands and weapon are rendered with a different FOV value
These tricks are used specifically to make the scale feel more natural on screen. Maybe the fact that Elite doesn't use any tricks make it look wrong?
BTW I totally agree that ship cockpits are grossly out of proportion in most cases, being 3x or 4x larger than I would expect on a spacecraft meant for human pilots. If you look at the Cutter bridge you can see that it's a living room sized space with nothing but 3 chairs in it, and the chairs are on tall "legs" roughly 1 m above the floor so that the pilot has a chance to see something above the huge dashboard.
Hardly...
But I have noticed a trend amongst certain groups who take snipets completely out of context to attack people personally in a blatant attempt to silence counter arguments that they can not actually argue against.
Less ad hominem,
More add hominid.
More add hominid.
There's a mission where the Colossus first shows up where it hangs around after the end of the mission. You can fly right up to it and trundle along at slow speeds right next to the hull, and yes, it's bloody enormous. The only real problem with the sense of scale is the lack of surface details (due to the age of the game really, and even FSopen doesn't correct this that much)
Freespace 2 is a fantastic game though. Best capital ship combat EVAH!
Wierdly, I've noticed that even when using a monitor, things feel bigger in E: D if you move your pilot's head around. I must be due to the change in perspective giving your brain an additional frame of reference, or something, but the stations always feel massive if I watch them pass by to the side of the ship.
