The Anaconda has a length of 150m. Passing it with your SRV should take 5 seconds. That's what I wanted to point out.
Sense Of Scale
- Thread starter Old Duck
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The Anaconda has a length of 150m. Passing it with your SRV should take 5 seconds. That's what I wanted to point out.
SRV does 33 m/s cruise, that is 73mph, faster than the UK motorway limit. That is insane speeds for off roading. Used to off road a fair bit out in Bahrain and Oman, purpose built machines, we wouldn't dare go above 35 mph, end up killing ourselves.
I concur. To the extent that even after four years and much disenchantment with other aspects of the game, I still have moments of pause and marvel at the sheer magnitude of it all. Passing alongside an Orbis Starport and following through to landing on the pad and entering the hangar - all seems gloriously expansive.
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You should try ED in VR, the sense of scale is actually spot on IMO.
A single 2D screen will invariably feel different for numerous reasons but in essence the sense of scale is the same. You just get a better appreciation for it in VR.
There’s no way anyone gets the feeling that the srv is going that fast. I can’t speak for VR but I’d say at max speeds it feels like I’m going 35-45 mph, which sucks because it spins out like it’s doing 73.
I have the same problem with super cruise too. Only when I’m interdicting someone and go flying past a planet or star do I ever feel like I’m going ftl. I get there’s nothing for me to relate my speed to in deep space but at that point I’d say ED need to get creative instead of “realistic.” Blur my HUD a bit at max supercruise or have more sound effects.
As far as scale goes, my Corvette feels a bit too small. Anything under the big 3 feel okay to me though.
I agree. There are other cues around speed and movement that are off. Star animations are too fast. Details that are visual points of size reference are too big. Cockpits are waaay too big. These details matter.
The difference between ED and Skyrim is that in Skyrim you are constantly confronted with 'bananas' in every shot: things you know intuitively the size of and use to infer scale. In ED you dont. This is made 'worse' because ships in ED, bar the SLF, dont have cockpits but bridges. They are ships you are supposed to be able to live in for an extended period of time. In typical sci-fi, ships are more like an F16 where you are in for a few hours at most before you dock. As such, without VR, we tend to assume our bridges are cockpits, and we 'downscale' everything as a result.
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.
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Very much this, the dropship family of ships suffer particularly - they look like the scale of Aliens Dropship or Apache gunship size - but aren't
Ferdy has the look of a 1 or 2 seat fighter as well from outside.
edit - when I first tried Vr in ED a long time ago - the thing that most stood out was the sheer size of the SRV tires in the Oculus "start" page - never mind the ships ( you're sort of standing in the hangar).
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When I use my rift I feel like I am in the ship. And the scale is just awesome and seams right. But most of the time I play on 3 monitors. And this is more like a comic book.
Interesting in 2D (Monitors) is the station holofac on the left in the cockpit. When I want to get it right, so that I come out of SC and hit the station spot on, the station holofac has to be off to the left and a little down towards the bottom. In the rift the station holofac has to be straight. Which makes me think that everything in 2D is a little distorted and the graphics are primarily rendered for VR.
Fly/land safe.
CMDR Steyla
Interesting in 2D (Monitors) is the station holofac on the left in the cockpit. When I want to get it right, so that I come out of SC and hit the station spot on, the station holofac has to be off to the left and a little down towards the bottom. In the rift the station holofac has to be straight. Which makes me think that everything in 2D is a little distorted and the graphics are primarily rendered for VR.
Fly/land safe.
CMDR Steyla
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I'd agree with the firstgen scaling being retooled. The Eagle and Viper especially look like pop-canopy fighter designs from the outside, till you look at the little teeny dude inside. The default pilot interior view in 2D doesn't really reflect that to me; the inner guts feel a lot closer than they actually are, which sometimes weirds out my sense of scale. When we got better cameras I really started to notice the gigantic amount of deadspace inside the cockpits.
I don't play in VR but the scale issue is also very noticeable when taking external screenshots where the cockpit and pilot are visible. As others have mentioned it's like the ships were scaled up from a reasonable cockpit size to the point they are now and FD just left a small pilot chair in the middle of the apartment-sized cockpit. I'm not certain why they did this but there has been some speculation that it has to do with FD's preference for fixed weapons. If the ships were say 2X smaller then hitting with fixed weapons at current combat speeds would be even more difficult for smaller ships like the Eagle or SLFs. FD most likely decided to increase the "hitbox" area by a factor of 4X by scaling the ship scale up approximately 2X instead of adjusting ship speeds. That's the only explanation I can think of that makes sense from a gameplay perspective.
There are of course many ways they could have fixed the issue but it obviously wasn't a priority which is rather surprising given how much emphasis they have put on native VR compatibility. They could of course have scaled the pilots back up to a normal size but effectively then they would have to either reduce the typical speeds which again runs into combat issues with fixed weapons. The other option would be for them to add more components to the inside of the cockpits (monitors, additional chairs, etc.) so that it doesn't look like you're sitting in a chair in the middle of a large room and the cockpit would be more believable. That however wouldn't fix the absurd height of the cockpits where you have a 5 m ceiling that is a massive waste of space but at least the floorplan would make more sense.
I don't know of any other space sim games where the scale is so far off as it is in ED so it really is a rather unique issue in that regard. Even in SC where they are designing ships for larger alien species and the scale is intentionally larger it isn't absurd and illogical in terms of the use of that space. At this point it's just something we're stuck with since FD isn't going to go back and "fix" the issue. The best we could hope for is that they might add some additional visual "content" to fill up the cockpits with a plausible use of that space but even that is unlikely to happen.
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Good thing there's no gravity in space, because otherwise cleaning the glass in my Keelback would require
Then again, maybe that's why the glass is always so dirty!
The art design of Elite is great but it's very poor at conveying scale. For an example, just look at the details at any landing pad; you'll notice pistons and fans are massively over-scaled, which warp the sense of size. The most notorious bugbear is the oversized cockpits which destroy much of the illusion of size.
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Deleted member 38366
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Hm, I'm not a VR user - but I've read some Threads that talk about the same issue.
In these Threads, some mentioned that correcting a VR parameter (I assume in an .xml Config File) for the eye separation apparently makes a huge difference.
Supposedly ELITE sets that number quite low and manually increasing it was reported to "fix" that scale issue.
You guys would have to dig through the Forum for that.
In these Threads, some mentioned that correcting a VR parameter (I assume in an .xml Config File) for the eye separation apparently makes a huge difference.
Supposedly ELITE sets that number quite low and manually increasing it was reported to "fix" that scale issue.
You guys would have to dig through the Forum for that.
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It's always looked off to me too.
When I look at the canopy, and see the scratches, I have no frame of reference to the size and distances of those scratches, except for what I've seen IRL, so my brain fills in the blanks and tell me that the scratches are like what I've seen on plexiglas at a hockey rink, therefor the scratches on the canopy are small, the canopy is close to me, and smaller than what the design is.
Looking around the cockpit I see an empty chair. It doesn't look massive, the empty ones are set back from the controls, which also fuddles the sense of scale. The massive chairs should be towering close to, and over the various control panels, unless we have gorilla length arms in the future.
I'm glad it looks good in VR, but kind of irrelevant in that not many people have a VR set up.
When I look at the canopy, and see the scratches, I have no frame of reference to the size and distances of those scratches, except for what I've seen IRL, so my brain fills in the blanks and tell me that the scratches are like what I've seen on plexiglas at a hockey rink, therefor the scratches on the canopy are small, the canopy is close to me, and smaller than what the design is.
Looking around the cockpit I see an empty chair. It doesn't look massive, the empty ones are set back from the controls, which also fuddles the sense of scale. The massive chairs should be towering close to, and over the various control panels, unless we have gorilla length arms in the future.
I'm glad it looks good in VR, but kind of irrelevant in that not many people have a VR set up.
I think one of the main problems with the sense of scale in ED, is down to the fact that there is very little in the way of the kind of instantly familiar and recognisable finer details that's needed for you brain to subconsciously latch on to and say "Ah yes I know how big that little thing is, so that other larger thing must be really big." On planet surfaces for instance a lot of the smaller detail needed for this doesn't really kick in until you're practically down on the ground. The feeling of distance isn't communicated very well either. On planets though this is mainly due to them having no atmosphere, so there are no clouds or atmospheric haze fading out things in the distance. This seems to be a problem in the interiors as well though, such as in the hangar bays. Sitting in the cockpit of a large ship like a T9 for instance, I never quite feel as far off the ground as I know I should be and the doorways and railings along the sides of the hangar feel somehow too small and close in. I think also the problem might be that some of the models and textures of things like that really are just not properly to scale. The door in the back of the Python's cockpit for instance looks like one of those perspective tricks from Alice in Wonderland, with a set of steps leading up to a tiny little door. If space legs ever get put into this game, then I think there will be quite a bit of remodeling going on in some of these ships.
Sometimes the scale feels to small simply due to the sheer speeds you are traveling around at. When you're flying around at gods knows how many times the speed of light, it does tend to make the systems feel a bit small, especially the planets. Loop round a gas giant at speed in supercruise and it feels inconsequential small. Park up on one of it's nearby moons and stop and stare at it, and suddenly it's massive size begins to hit home.
Sometimes though in real life it's hard to gauge the scale of things like distant mountains or buildings, until you're practically stood at the foot of them. If you've ever gone on holiday on a commercial airliner and looked out the window as you're taking off, the city you're flying out from soon shrinks down and makes it feel as if you're looking down at a little model village. So your sense of scale of things is all relative to your perspective and speed at which you are travelling, to whatever it is you are looking at. So even if things are right in ED, sometimes it still might feel wrong.
You get a similar sort of thing zooming around in Google Earth VR. Even with the perspective set to always realistic, when flying high above cities and mountains they feel smaller than they are but quickly expand to real size as you bring yourself down to the ground. Tip: if you want to experience a real vertigo inducing moment, fly yourself down to stand on top of the i360 in Brighton. That did it for me way more than any of the skyscrapers. Love Google Earth VR btw. I can easily spend 2 hours at a time flying about in it. If only ED could capture that feeling of exploration and discovery that Google Earth has.
I play in VR by the way, just for your info.
Sometimes the scale feels to small simply due to the sheer speeds you are traveling around at. When you're flying around at gods knows how many times the speed of light, it does tend to make the systems feel a bit small, especially the planets. Loop round a gas giant at speed in supercruise and it feels inconsequential small. Park up on one of it's nearby moons and stop and stare at it, and suddenly it's massive size begins to hit home.
Sometimes though in real life it's hard to gauge the scale of things like distant mountains or buildings, until you're practically stood at the foot of them. If you've ever gone on holiday on a commercial airliner and looked out the window as you're taking off, the city you're flying out from soon shrinks down and makes it feel as if you're looking down at a little model village. So your sense of scale of things is all relative to your perspective and speed at which you are travelling, to whatever it is you are looking at. So even if things are right in ED, sometimes it still might feel wrong.
You get a similar sort of thing zooming around in Google Earth VR. Even with the perspective set to always realistic, when flying high above cities and mountains they feel smaller than they are but quickly expand to real size as you bring yourself down to the ground. Tip: if you want to experience a real vertigo inducing moment, fly yourself down to stand on top of the i360 in Brighton. That did it for me way more than any of the skyscrapers. Love Google Earth VR btw. I can easily spend 2 hours at a time flying about in it. If only ED could capture that feeling of exploration and discovery that Google Earth has.
I play in VR by the way, just for your info.
Pretty sure you can demo VR in a lot of stores these days. I'd recommend those who have a problem with scale should give it a try. It's not that it looks good, it is that the scale of everything including the ships makes complete sense, from a tiny bolt in the ship, a scratch on the canopy right up to a starport several km's long. It still blows my mind approaching the Gas giant Merope 2 whilst gravity braking into Alcazar's hope (Radius 76,000km) On a monitor it just looks like a toy, or when you watch space videos on youtube, you will never get a true sense of scale, depth and sheer mass unless you are actually there, VR puts you there.
Am personally glad they scaled everything correctly.
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Makes absolute sense. Even though i can probably try out elite on friends VR gear i wont do it, cause i m sure i wont be able to play after i see the glory!