Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Fineus on January 12, 2004, 08:48:30 am
-
Hi all, I suddenly realised something regarding the scale of FS2 ships lately and I thought I should mention it - not sure if it's been said before but here goes.
We all know that the current scale on FS2 ships is kinda screwy - and we've looked at lenses and such. That said:
Screw the realism, screw what it should look like. I think I'm right when I say everyone here wants to see sodding huge capital ships with highly detailed fighters skipping between them like nats. These ships are supposed to be huge - especially the larger ones - and the view point just doesn't reflect that.
So, and this is where we get back to the old topics... what needs to be done to make the fighters seem small but detailed (up close) and the capital ships huge? I'm thinking it should take at least 4 or 5 seconds to fly past a cruiser. up to 10 to fly past a destroyer. Yes I realise that these little fighters are supposed to be fast - but when you flash past a captial ship in less than 5 seconds it doesnt feel like it's that massive. This needs to be addressed by what, FOV changes? remodelling the ships? Lenses?
-
Apparently, the best way to address issues of scale is to go direct to the source, and change the scale of the game. Everything is 20 times too small, but the simplest solution, to resize them all up, would need code changes to tell FS that a meter is now 20 times bigger - not easy, nor particularly fun to code I'd imagine.
-
What if we made every ship larger than a poseidon 20x larger...
wee! I can't read!
-
I guess changing it at the source would be easiest - since then we wouldn't have to remodel everything. Also, if the way the game handles distance is change universally then all original missions etc. will automatically be at the right size - but much the scale will have changed (I mean to say, if you remodel the Colossus to be its "true" size, there's a good chance it'll smack into other ships in missions that haven't taken the new sizes into account. By changing the size at the source, everything is changed).
-
I think the capital ship problem is largely due to the crappy default FOV, which not only makes the bigger ships look too small but also creates several other strange effects for things appearing near the edges of the screen, like making background planets look elliptic and stretching out ships very close to you to the point that they actually seem to move relative to the background when you turn. It seems that setting the FOV to 0.3 or 0.4 fixes all these things and really makes a big difference, but it has the side effect of making the backgrounds look way too big and blurry. Is it possible to have the background sphere/skybox adjust its distance based on the FOV, or would that just put the elliptic planet issue back in?
As for the actual model sizes and scales, it already takes about 10 seconds to go past most destroyers in an average speed fighter and cruisers are much smaller (maybe 1/5 of the size), so it makes sense that you should fly past those fairly quickly. There is the whole issue of many of the fighters and bombers being too big (their models, that is, not the visible size ingame), but I'm not sure how those could be changed without significantly altering the gameplay.
Apparently, the best way to address issues of scale is to go direct to the source, and change the scale of the game. Everything is 20 times too small, but the simplest solution, to resize them all up, would need code changes to tell FS that a meter is now 20 times bigger - not easy, nor particularly fun to code I'd imagine.
Well that wouldn't really accomplish much, since the relative scales between everything would remain exactly the same. You would have to change some things and not others to see a difference, but that would screw up the gameplay in existing missions.
-
Originally posted by Kalfireth
I guess changing it at the source would be easiest - since then we wouldn't have to remodel everything. Also, if the way the game handles distance is change universally then all original missions etc. will automatically be at the right size - but much the scale will have changed (I mean to say, if you remodel the Colossus to be its "true" size, there's a good chance it'll smack into other ships in missions that haven't taken the new sizes into account. By changing the size at the source, everything is changed).
But, then also, how would speed be changed? Would 90m/s still be 90m/s or will it become 1800m/s?
-
the TIME you need to get past a cruiser is perfectly correct. The fighter flies 50 m/s and will pass a 300 m cruiser in 6 seconds. Works really fine.
The size issue still is a problem. However, to have it look more realistic we'd need something like a "zoomx5" function. However, that would tremendously screw up AI fight as well as dogfighting as you'd never be able to aim again. So let's leave it like it is. You can adjust it a bit with the FOV...
-
This is where it all becomes an issue I guess - there's a lot involved in this.. every speed would need to be reworked, missiles, laser fire, ships...
So perhaps perspective would be easier - I really don't know...
-
i like the speeds.
What could possibly work is to resize capships. And ONLY capships. And i mean resize i.e. change the descriptions, too.
changing the units wouldnt change anything.
-
But then suddenly a "300" m cruiser wouldn't be 300m anymore. And it wouldn't take 6 seconds to fly-bye.
-
Originally posted by Raa Tor'h
But then suddenly a "300" m cruiser wouldn't be 300m anymore. And it wouldn't take 6 seconds to fly-bye.
precisely what I said.
It would be a ~1500 m cruiser, that would take ~30 seconds to fly-by.
-
That is the problem; if you just multiply everything by 20 or whatever, as Lightspeed said it wouldn't do anything, but if you only change some things like the capital ship sizes, it would mess up the gameplay and all existing missions would become useless. I say just leave all that stuff as it is and instead play around with the FOV and things like that. If something can be done about that background issue I mentioned earlier, a lower FOV would fix a lot of these problems.
One thing I just thought of that might help with the speeds is to make the little debris particles move past your ship faster. This might give a better appearance of moving at something like what the speed is supposed to be.
-
for the record, a f-18 fighter will fly past a carrier (american which is about 1.1KM on average in length) in less than 4 seconds at normal fly by speed, not too slow nor afterburner.
refrenced from a coworker of mine who was in the NAVY. so think, 6-8 seconds of flyby of a 2.4 kilometer ship.
keep in mind, in space, velocities are diffrent than on planets, so a F18 in space may just overshoot a 2.4 ship in less than that stated above.
lets remember, Freespace Physics not Nuetonian.
-
it's the way engines work on FS2's space ships.
Any 'realistic realistic' scale & speed optimized space sim will be rubbish to play.
-
Originally posted by deep_eyes
.... a carrier (american which is about 1.1KM on average in length)
yeah...sure. A Nimitz class carrier is about 330 m IIRC
more on topic: If you want a correct FOV you had to base it on how big your monitor is relative to your own FOV. I mean the angle the monitor takes up in your sight, when you sit in front of it, which I guess is between 30° and 45°. But that would be like flying in a fighter, which has only a small window facing forward, the size of your monitor, which wouldn't be much fun...wouldn't it ?
So, you always have to take compromises.
-
I just think the Colossus should look Colossal.
-
Exactly, case in point is X-Wing Alliance. More importantly the Executor class SSD. It's big. It feels big. It's the size of the Colossus. The Colossus looks large - but not anywhere near as vast and imposing as it should, neither does the Sathanas.
Why is this?
-
Originally posted by Col. Fishguts
yeah...sure. A Nimitz class carrier is about 330 m IIRC
You are correct, sir. A Nimitz is 330m, and an Enterprise is 335m.
-
Originally posted by Kalfireth
Exactly, case in point is X-Wing Alliance. More importantly the Executor class SSD. It's big. It feels big. It's the size of the Colossus. The Colossus looks large - but not anywhere near as vast and imposing as it should, neither does the Sathanas.
Why is this?
Too bad we can't copy the coding from that game. :doubt:
-
This is such a rehash discussion. Utilize the -fov param, it's there for precisely this particular issue.
As I stated in the previous thread, I'm not about to go and add a "* 20" after every time a distance or speed calculation is made. I doubt if I could even find them all.
What I would be willing to do, if it would be useful, would be to add a command line that would divide the displayed speed by 20 so that modelers could scale everything appropriately. Though, I'm not going to muck about with this if no one's going to take advantage of it.
-
Originally posted by Sticks
What I would be willing to do, if it would be useful, would be to add a command line that would divide the displayed speed by 20 so that modelers could scale everything appropriately. Though, I'm not going to muck about with this if no one's going to take advantage of it.
Dogfighting at snail-speed™. Whee!
-
Oh god no....
As for FOV - it's ok, but rather hard to get "right" at the moment.
-
I think it's more a question of relative angles, if you take two shots at the same FOV for a 1m shape then the same shape with the camera positioned at exactly the same relative point on a model 20x bigger, you will be able to see surfaces on the 1m model that are occluded in the 20m one,
This is an enhanced still from an old version of my Atlantis video on Sectorgame...
(http://www.aqsx85.dsl.pipex.com/images/Atlan1e.jpg)
You see how the front jet section is side on to the camera, whereas the section that the pipes feed into is facing slightly towards the camera? This is because in this version, the model was tiny, actually about 30x smaller than it should be, which exaggerates the effect a little, but you tell the model is small because of these angles, surely if the pipes are heading in my general direction, that front jet mount should be at the same angle?
I got as close as I could to the same image on a larger model, I use a landscape rendering program for this, so it's not an exact art, but this was the outcome....
(http://www.aqsx85.dsl.pipex.com/images/Atlan2e.jpg)
As you can see, the ship looks a lot 'straighter' here :)
I'm not a 3D Maths guru, and I'm not saying this is the be all and end all of the problem, but I think it is part of it :)
-
That's just a FOV problem flipside. In a video game, you generally assume that the point you are viewing from always has one and exactly one possible viewing position. However, in a render engine, you can have approximately the same image displayed with a variety of pan, zoom, FOV and camera position settings. That's why you have a more or less "straight" render, but you could produce the exact same image if everything was scaled up 10, 50, even 1000 times. By the same token, you can also almost always achieve the same exact image with a much smaller model, although limits on the precision of units can screw around with this in a lot of modeling programs. This really is, pure and simply, an issue of FOV that should not be under discussion again.
-
Got to be very careful with sizing things in FS2. Venom did that for OTT ships and the whole thing went to hell in my opinion. Fighters were falling like flies, the AI didn't know where it was, and there was alot of collisions and that sort of problem. Venom didn't regard it as much of a problem but when I went to balancing it was definately VERY tricky.
-
Maybe so Stratcomm, but I hadn't touched the camera at all, merely resized the model and moved the camera. If it shouldn't be under discussion again, why is there a thread about it?
Maybe someone can do something similar with some higher level software than mine, I'm willing to accept it as camera curve or the like, but why, with precisely the same camera, can I see more of the front of the main jet on the lower image, when the camera is actually slightly closer and further towards the back than the original? The only difference between the settings in the two images is the size of the model.
-
AHHHH!!!!!!
NO! NO! NO!
For heavens sake forget FOV it has nothing to do with the actual problem, it's like putting on a scope and pretending that everything is bigger.
Forget the VELOCITY / SIZE issue too.
Sandwich has already solved the quetion of as of what's the problem with FS ships:
The FS meter is 1/20 of what it's supposed to be.[/b]
One suggestion I heard earlier - and I immediately wrote off as STUPID was to increase all the speeds by 20 as well as the scales.
You said that wouldn't change anything?
WRONG!!!!
What everyone failed to realise so far - including me - is the fact that we're speaking about LINEAR SCALING
That's why the actual speeds and DISTANCES match.
However if I set a linear scale to 1/20 of the original all the ships will be (1/20)^3 = 1/8000 of their original size[/size].
This means the Collosus will look like a 10 meter big piece of brick!
-
It's not a stupid idea, just completely and utterly impractical, from a coding standpoint. Feel free to scale the models by 20 and adjust all the table velocities, though, and see what happens.
Actually, to be fair, adjusting just the physical models themselves is about 2 lines of code. However, then the problem lies in the AI, ship speeds, weapon speeds, particle sizes, collision detection, z-buffering, physics, beams...
I could go on, but won't, as I think everyone is getting the idea.;)
-
Sandwich always believed it be a coding issue - we just didn't know the extent of it.
Thanks for giving us the details Sticks.
BTW where could the problem actually come from?
Are the "models too small" or the way FS scales everything is to blame for the fault?
-
Flaser, if everything is linearly scaled up, then what's the point? You still get the exact same image if the camera is treated as part of the scaling. Don't believe me? Look at these two shots.
(http://www.duke.edu/~cek6/normalscale.jpg)
(http://www.duke.edu/~cek6/10xscale.jpg)
Ignore the ship, it was a failed experiment. Anyway, if you look closely at those two images, you will see that they are identical except for some mapping of the vasudan bits. Now, in the first picture each dimension is normal, in the second everything has been scaled up by 10 times. So, you are looking now at something 10 times as long, 10 times as tall, etc, from a distance precisely 10 times as far. That is your linear scaling. Now, lets look at a third picture.
(http://www.duke.edu/~cek6/smallfov.jpg)
This picture is notacibly different, but viewed from the exact same position as the first. In this shot, the FOV has been reduced from 45 degrees to 22.5 degrees. Obviously, if the range to target is the same, and the ship looks so much bigger, then your problem is solved. So, to make ships look more massive you are looking at changing the FOV, and that's why all the coders have been saying that it's already done.
-
I dunno. For a failed experiment, it looks damned snazzy.
-
My pleasure.
It's actually the way the file convertors scale things. So yeah, I guess you could say the models are too small, although everything else in the engine has been built on that principle.
That's why I suggested that I could add something that would change the way velocities are displayed. That way, modelers could scale up the size, and then edit the tables to make the ships twenty times as fast. In the code, the displayed velocity would be divided by twenty, thus making it appear that the velocities of things never changed.
That's really the only feasable solution, in my opinion.
-
Sticks, I really don't think it would change anything, other than introducing more reason to get close to existing limits again. If we call the units 1/20 meter and scale everything up to be "proper" size again, then it would still look the same from, lets say, 200 "meters" (displayed units) from the viewed target as it would have looked without scaling at 200 game units from the target. People forget when talking about scaling stuff up that if they will also be increasing the distance from which the objects are viewed. In truth, the problem lies in that Volition created the viewpoints with the intention that the player could see "around him" through his/her computer screen, and so a much larger visual field is presented in a small space than would exist if the computer screen was simply a "window" into the game world. Playing with FOV alone may not cut it for some people, but in truth that's how it works. A meter, viewed from one meter away, looks just as long (to a monoscopic eye) as a mile viewed from one mile away. It's all just geometry, and it works out the same no matter what units you use.
-
Yes, well, this is what I explained in the first thread, but no one believed me. So I figured that they could have their twenty times multiplier, and everyone could be happy.
But then you had to go and bust my master plan...:D
-
What can I say, I try ;)
-
It's good someone sees what is going on with that unit changing thing; I was about to go on a rant about that myself. :p :D
Anyway, the FOV setting actually does solve the whole scale problem, but it introduces the background problem as a side effect. I also tried it with a nebula mission a few hours ago and the poof bitmaps were also appearing too close to the player. As I said before, if there was some way to make the display distances of the background sphere and the nebula poofs dependent on the FOV setting (or let the user specify them individually), the problem would pretty much be solved.
Being able to specify some kind of multiplier on the speeds of the debris animations would also be a good idea. I think you all would agree that 100m/s looks and feels more like 5m/s or so; this could possibly fix that, which would indirectly lead to the distances seeming more believable.
-
I havn't read much of this, but I posted this elsware, and figured it would be relevent
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/proof1.jpg)
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/proof2.jpg)
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/proof3.jpg)
that herc is 13 meters wide 11 tall and 23 long, prety much the exact same as it is listed in model view
-
btw what are exactly the problems with fov?
just make a list of all the problems that happen when you reduce the FOV, from background to nebulaes, make sure the coders know about that and give em feedback.
FS2 has been built spcifically around a defined FOV, just let the coders work in adapting it the best possible to a FOV that make things look more realistic.
-
Ok, thanks for explaining that for me people, at least the bits I understood :)
As I said earlier, I'm not an expert at this side of things, but then you don't get to be an expert without asking questions ;)
Flipside :D
Edit : And fair enough Sticks, I know you guys are dedicated, but there are limits :lol:
-
*applauds to StratComm*
thanks for demonstrating what I was ranting about all the time ;)
-
Bob, can you do that same thing with a Seth and a Thoth? I think the Seth has the biggest cockpit of any fighter while the Thoth has the smallest, so it will be interesting to see how this shows up there.
-
Originally posted by Sandwich
Ok, I think I figured out the problem, with Kazan's help.
I took my test scene, which had models accurate to the meter, and scaled them down 20x. Then I took a 45 degree (~43mm) camera, and walla - the Deimos and Fenris looked exactly the same as they do in-game - same perspective, same apparent size, everything. (I'll post a screenie in a few minutes.)
So basically, FS2 renders "meters" as 20 times smaller than they should be. While this does not affect ship interaction or anything, it does affect the simulated FOV/lens diameter.
So I scaled the test models back up 20 times, and suddenly it was almost realistic. The problem was that the camera made things seem too close for the distance, like it was zoomed in. So I changed the camera to a 35mm (FOV 54), and finally, the 747 looked like I was standing there, in person, looking at it.
So now the question remains: is there any way in the code to deal with this 20x scaling issue? Because if we can do that all in the code, without having to reconvert any models, then that's 90% of the problem solved right there. The other 10% would be setting the default FS2 FOV to be 54 instead of 45.
-
Presumably every distance handler in the code would have to be altered - from ship sizes to lengths and such... or else it wouldnt work?
-
I believe I already answered that earlier on this page...
-
there's got to be a way to alter the projection matrix or something to increse the paralax effect
-
[pretending I understand that] Well, yes. Of course! [/:-P]
-
ok, there has to be a way to set the thing that makes suff further away look smaller and stuff closer look bigger do it's job in a more pronounced way, therefore makeing things look bigger by haveing the far away bits smaller and the near bits bigger
-
Do you have any thoughts on how, Bobboau?
-
And while you're at it, fix the units please. The meter used in FS2 is way off, methinks.
-
Originally posted by Unknown Target
And while you're at it, fix the units please. The meter used in FS2 is way off, methinks.
Not this again! :rolleyes:
Did you not even look at the picture Bob posted!
-
Realism in gameplay, not gameplay in realism.
Make it more realistic, but don't you DARE screw up the gameplay.
-
Originally posted by Bobboau
I havn't read much of this, but I posted this elsware, and figured it would be relevent
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/proof1.jpg)
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/proof2.jpg)
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/proof3.jpg)
that herc is 13 meters wide 11 tall and 23 long, prety much the exact same as it is listed in model view
Same as you, didn't read most of the topic, but:
with something that big, when I collide with it, I expect to see a few panels and nothing else. In FS2, I can collide with 4 of them at the same time and still see in front of me :doubt:
-
Hm...