[Sandwich]

I'd like to bring up - yes, again - the issue of apparent size in FS2. The zoom-adjustment workaround, IMHO, simply doesn't cut it.

The issue is the depth of field that the FS2 engine renders at. It's too shallow. When I'm sitting in a fighter at the tip of an Orion's nose, looking backwards along its length, it needs to appear about (complete guess) 2x as long (deep, relative to the screen) as it currently does. The actual field of vision is actually good I think - you have the correct angle of view on the sides. But the adjustment of the depth of field would not affect the angle, it would affect the rate of apparent size increase as the object gets closer.

Not sure how this would work programmatically, but mess with the "perspective" adjustment tool in MAX when viewing a scene through a camera.

This is what it looks like - the Myrmidon is 20 meters long by 21 meters wide by 11 meters high, and the Merkava MBT is 9x3.75x2.6m (LWH). FS2 currently seems to use either a lens size of 50mm or so, which gives us a horizontal FOV angle of 40 degrees, as shown here...



...or a lens size closer to 85mm, which gives us a FOV of 24 degrees, as you can see here:



Nice toy tank.

But for the reported size of ships, a lens size of 28mm, which gives a FOV of ~65 degrees, seems to be perfect:



Any chance this could be adjusted properly?



.....please??

(Here's the MAX scene in case you want to check it out)

[Setekh]

That's insightful, Mike - that would increase sense of scale even more. The only thing I'm afraid of is that things will look too huge - given that though this may be more realistic, how large would an Orion look in that picture? A Colossus? Yes, much bigger, but we seem to fly past them really quickly. It's a nitpick really, I can't find anything genuinely wrong with your idea.

Except... just to clear up some terms. Depth of field is the range of space behind and in front of the focal point of a lens that is in focus - ie. things outside the depth of field are out of focus. FS doesn't render a depth of field - everything is in focus (the only game I know that does render with DOF is Halo 2). I think what you mean is just perspective.

[Sticks]

The latest Tomb Raider game also does Depth of Field effects

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Setekh
That's insightful, Mike - that would increase sense of scale even more. The only thing I'm afraid of is that things will look too huge - given that though this may be more realistic, how large would an Orion look in that picture? A Colossus? Yes, much bigger, but we seem to fly past them really quickly. It's a nitpick really, I can't find anything genuinely wrong with your idea.

We should fly past them quickly - especially at +/- 100 meters per second! But the thing is, at 100m/s, we should seem to be moving a _lot_ quicker than we do - go ahead, try surface-skimming at 100m/s one day. It's like driving a car. A.... slow car.

Originally posted by Setekh
Except... just to clear up some terms. Depth of field is the range of space behind and in front of the focal point of a lens that is in focus - ie. things outside the depth of field are out of focus. FS doesn't render a depth of field - everything is in focus (the only game I know that does render with DOF is Halo 2). I think what you mean is just perspective.

Yeah. That. Could've sworn there was some sort of "Depth of..." term for that, though...


EDIT: Depth of Perspective!!!!!!!111222

Anyway...

[Fineus]

I'm with Sandwich on this one - FS2 ships never felt vast. Sure they look big compared with other FS2 ships. But when you get up close you don't feel dwarfed at all. It needs sorting

[Flipside]

It would be great to have this, but I think the problem lays also with the captital ship models. I really want to get that 'strafing the Star Destroyer' feeling, where it really does feel like you are practically flying through a 'city in space' with guns.

[Fineus]

MMm, if you ask me the scale of every damn model in the game is off - but sorting it would mean re-modelling and texturing everything. I imagine one of the reasons that ships are "smaller" is that the original engine couldn't handle a larger poly count, and larger models would look undetailed.

[Flipside]

Possibly just halving the size of every fighter in game would be a step in the right direction, but it would still be a lot of hard work

[KARMA]

consider that SW ship sizes are in average 1/2 of fs2 ships....

[Fineus]

Exactly, and if you read the Rogue Squadrom books - when they were in their X-Wings and a Corvette showed up, they were in serious trouble and those things were "big"! Star Destroyers were huge bases in space that were damn hard to take out for your generic squadron of fighters.

FS2 corvettes on the other hand carry none of the imposing size that they should... destroyers like the Bastion and the Aquitaine certainly don't have any of the Star Destroyers "presence" in space.

[mikhael]

I don't really think that has much to do with the size of the cap ship models though. Its just the screwy perspective the game uses. Admittedly, fighter models are entirely too huge. Have you ever looked at the cockpit of a Herc? Its practically the size of a modern fighter by itself. When you see the intro to FS1 and we see the pilot in his Apollo, the cockpit doesn't look super gigantic. However, the listed sizes for the Apollo disagree. Her cockpit is the size of an SUV.

[KARMA]

I agree with mikhael
I suppose that did it that way to increase the field of view, and then have a wider view of the battleground.
In other games this is achieved, if you have a good system, by changing rendering resolution, but in fs2 the max res is 1024x768...
Then they discovered that things were rendered too small, fighters at their right scale were barely visible (w/o changing FOV it is very hard to even notice a TF at its right scale), and probably they decided to increase the size of the models instead of changing FOV.
these are only suppositions, obviously...
When I think about the feeling a Star destroyer gives in the films, when they are just 1.2 km, and the feeling the same ship give in fs2, well I can only thing there is something wrong, maybe on both sides.

[diamondgeezer]

My Hammerheads are 12 meters long, with a wingspan of 12m, as dictated by S:AAB blueprints. They're a bloody nightmare to see apart from any glowy bits. I've been considering just making everything bigger by 50% or so.

[Flipside]

I think the cockpits of aircraft are designed to provide the widest FOV possible anyway by acting as a lens? Still, if the fighters were smaller and able to interact with capships more (Fly under bridges, around towers, through pipes etc, you would 'feel' the size of the ships more.

[Sticks]

Well, as it stands, the current angle of view is around 80 degrees. In order to make effective use of smaller models, you would need a fov of about 30 or so in order to see them. Unfortunately this makes everything seem a little slower, because the higher the fov, the (apparently) quicker objects will recede away from the camera.

Also, past about 90 degrees fov you start to get fisheye distortion. So there are tradeoffs. Personally I'd like the fov to be smaller, but then people will complain that the game feels slow.

[diamondgeezer]

I one managed to hide my Ulysses in the gap between a Rakshasa's forward hulls. The silly bugger couldn't hit me for ****e

Oh, and this is in response to Flips post, if it seems OT initially...

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Sticks
Well, as it stands, the current angle of view is around 80 degrees. In order to make effective use of smaller models, you would need a fov of about 30 or so in order to see them. Unfortunately this makes everything seem a little slower, because the higher the fov, the (apparently) quicker objects will recede away from the camera.

Also, past about 90 degrees fov you start to get fisheye distortion. So there are tradeoffs. Personally I'd like the fov to be smaller, but then people will complain that the game feels slow.

No no no! It's not just the FOV - it's the perspective (*nods at Setekh*). Watch The Fellowship of the Ring; right after the 4 hobbits escape from Farmer Whatsisname and tumble down the hillside, Frodo yells at them to get off the road. Immediately before he does so, you see him staring down the road, and the perspective changes drastically. But notice that you can still see the same trees and such on the very sides of the screen at either end of the perspective change. The FOV doesn't change, but the perspective does.

THAT'S the kind of adjustment we need. Has anyone come across the code that governs that stuff?

[Sticks]

The way that camera move is accomplished is by rapidly moving the camera closer to the subject and at the same time zooming out in sync with the forward camera motion.

In that sequence, the fov DOES change. That's really the only setting a lens has aside from an aperature setting, which doesn't apply in this case, as that only affects the exposure of the film and the depth of field.

The perspective transformation equation takes 4 parameters:
[list=1]

• FOV Angle in Radians
• Screen Aspect Ratio
• Near Clipping Plane
• Far Clipping Plane
[/list=1]

As you can see, there is not a way to do what you describe aside from altering the FOV (not that a real lens could do anything else either). If we do alter the transformation matrix as you say, things will be stretched oddly along the player's Z axis.

[Flaser]

Changing the actual size or relevant size of ships won't solve anything.

The actual fact that capships look small from a considerable distance is realistic - watch some Gunbuster! - what is not is it reamains true even when you're close.

What we need is more detail - and as far as I know that's what the new SCP additions are about.

Still, the perpective should be corrected, and I don't mean the fov thing - it's like looking through a spyglass, and the effect is exactly the thing what a spyglass does!

It's the way things shrink, the current display is far to axonometric.

Check the difference between the last two pics of Sandwich - that spherical distortion is the actual thing IMHO that would give the right impression.

[Sticks]

Again, I will reiterate, because it doesn't seem to be taking.

The effect of looking through a spyglass is caused by the reduction in your viewing angle to something very small, like 5 or 10 degrees.

You contradict yourself by saying that spherical distortion would help and then claim that the current has too much diagonal and spherical distortion (axonometric).

FOV is the only adjustable parameter in a perspective equation, as well as the only one that alters the compression or expansion of the percieved Z axis.