[Sandwich]

Originally posted by DTP

All this talk of FOV & scale is nonsense. If we made the ships look bigger using FOV, then think what would happen when you chase the fighters, they would not be in your sight for long, unless they where flying in a semi-straight line, something even the AI does not.

You would simply not have the human reaction time needed in order to react to a fighter�s movement.

Want proof.

Ok, take Quake2 or Quake3,
Find a server and join, for Quake2, FOV 90 is default for Quake2, and I think it is the same for Quake3.

In console, type FOV 50 for Q2 and (I think) cg_fov 50 for quake3

Wow things suddenly got bigger, but notice, that you will find it hard to keep track of others strafing past you.

Also, the speed of which you move forward and backward seems to be very slow. That�s because the objects near to you (walls, players) are out of sight, while the things in sight are actually quite far away, and as we all know when looking at things that are coming against you, but are still far away. It seems to be moving very slow. Then when it is 100 meters away it seems to be picking up speed, and finally screams past you.

A lower field of view will also make it harder to navigate, since you simply wouldn�t be able judge the location of your shoulder, against an object that has left the 50-degree view zone.

So if you want bigger ships, Scale is the only real option. But then 1:1 scale (non scaled) Textures will seem pixilated, because while the ships take up more space on your screen, your screen didn�t
Get bigger in Size or resolution.
 
I think Volition did a lot of testing of this, before they settled on this FOV and Scale.

I see no reason to embark on a quest. That has a very doubtful outcome.

No, no, and no. First off, space combat is quite possible at a different FOV - just look at the whole Star Wars series of space sims - capships in there had the right sense of scale.

Second, did you see the first LOTR movie, Fellowship of the Ring? Remember when Frodo senses the Nazgul coming along the path he and the other 3 hobbits rolled down to? Remember how the camera angle did that weird effect of zooimg in on Frodo while everything else seemed to get further and further away? That's the kind of change we're talking about here - I don't know enough about cinematography to know if that's the same as FOV.

[Goober5000]

Me neither, but I do know that the effect DTP described is the proper effect for scale.  When you're extremely far away, things don't move at all, and as you get closer, they speed up.  It's called parallax.

[Goober5000]

Hmm.  Well, the only reference to player FOV that I can find in the campaign is float Viewer_zoom defined in freespace.cpp and set to 0.75.  I'm not sure how that translates into the angle.

[Goober5000]

Ugh - well, that's not going to work.  I bumped Viewer_zoom down in stages, and although the ships started looking more imposing, they didn't really start looking "bigger".  I had to go all the way down to 0.3 before the capships started looking substantially bigger - but even then, they didn't seem that big.  Not to mention that the small FOV made me terribly motion sick.

So FOV doesn't look like it's going to work.  What about scale?

[LtNarol]

scale seems to be right, although I maintain that most fighters and bombers are rediculously enormous, the capital ships would be rediculously enormous where they any bigger and too un-imposing any smaller.  Halfing the dimensions of fighters and bombers would help a lot in my opinion, but i still think the problem itself lies in fov and perspective.

[Anaz]

when loading the model...multipy all of the vertex positions by two....



whaaaat? It could work...

[Goober5000]

...

No it couldn't. Then you'd have too-big ships occupying the same area - things would get crowded.

No, I think the only way to do this would be to change the unit of measurement used in the engine.  This would increase the scale of distances, models, and everything.  But I don't know how to do that.

[Bobboau]

and all the offsets and all the thrusters and all the polygon centers and all the glow points and subsystems and paths and gun points and every thing that has a radius and every weapon and table value that has mention of anything to do with any of the four dimentions of space/time, and all the physics code and and model colision code and two hundred and fifty thousand other lines of code to make sure that everything knows that everything is to be scailed, and other things I couldn't remember.
scaleing is not as simple a solution as it sounds there is a _LOT_ of code that just assumes the values it's given is the value that it's suposed to be,
now, why don't we set the fov to be substantialy smaller than it is but when ever someone moves the stick the view rotates as to look in that direction giveing the illusion of you moveing you're head/eyes, this was one of the few things I thought was realy a good idea in Iwar, now there will be some problems in keeping the HUD aligned properly but I think these problems would be far simpler than trying to get _EVERYTHING_ scaled

[Nico]

in Max, I'd simply scale the camera down, but I guess in FS2 that's a no go