[Trivial Psychic]

I mean, have it act like modern machine guns, where every 3rd or whatever round is a tracer.  Therefore, in the game, you'd see small projectiles for the Avenger's fire, with some bright tracer shots mixed in.

[Kestrellius]

Hmmm. Interesting idea.

If you really wanted to run with it you could even do smoke trails. It makes slightly less sense in space than an atmosphere, I think, especially if it's a railgun, but...yeah, no, it still works, because the burning tracers would create gas.

[CT27]

Give the Prometheus a slight buff so there's a real reason to pick it over the Avenger.

[BirdofPrey]

Since people have said the in-game text lies to you about the Avenger vs. Prometheus, I think if there's ever a 're-do' of FS1 like this, Prometheus stats (shield damage, maybe range, etc.) should be buffed so it actually is better than the Avenger.

It's not that it says the Prometheus has better shield damage it's that it says it does more damage in general, both shield and hull, and the banshee claims to do more than the Prometheus.

Frankly, it would be kind of dull if each new weapon was straight up better than the last as the descriptors for each suggest.

People in this forum though have said the Avenger is actually better than the Prometheus and there's virtually no reason to take the Prometheus.  Shouldn't the Prometheus have at least one advantage over the Avenger?

I didn't say the Prometheus shouldn't have some advantage over the Avenger, I am just arguing that it would pretty uninteresting if it were just straight up better.

I'd rather see a change where one of them is better, or at least good enough in most situations, but the other weapons excel in specific situations, that make them more worth taking if you are expecting it.

Much like the fighters, none of them are strictly better than the others, it's situational, weapons should be somewhat situational rather than just a clear, linear progression where the newest gun is the best.

[General Battuta]

Like in FreeSpace 2 Blue!

[rubixcube]

Somewhat random thought, anyone else think the Lucifer should be 'bigger'?

[X3N0-Life-Form]

Bigger as in physically larger, or bigger as in more guns ?

[jr2]

Well, it's supposed to be a Super Destroyer.  Canonically, it's 2,777m in length, compared with the largest (now decommissioned) seagoing vessel (that I could Google), the Seawise Giant, clocking in at 458m (also known as Happy Giant; Jahre Viking; Knock Nevis, post-name "Mont").

I don't think the Lucifer's massive size (or any capship in FS/FS2, for that matter) seems accurately represented.  Just look at these, then imagine something more than 5 times larger:

For scale:

[rubixcube]

The Lucifer is long but quite skinny, so its internal volume is actually lower than the Demon. Scaling it up to 4-5km in length would make it more threatening

[Lorric]

I'll just raise my hand for keeping the Lucifer the way it is. It inspired dread in me so it did its job.

[FrikgFeek]

Freespace sizes are accurately represented, it's just that by default your FOV is rather huge. You can lower it through the -fov flag which will make big ships look properly big at the cost of combat awareness.

[jr2]

Need a way to toggle FOV on the fly, bindable to a key.

[StarSlayer]

Moar Carthage

[Kie99]

Obligatory Freespace ship size post

[Spoon]

Freespace sizes are accurately represented, it's just that by default your FOV is rather huge. You can lower it through the -fov flag which will make big ships look properly big at the cost of combat awareness.

For most (proper PC) first person shooters, I'd say that 75 degrees is pretty small. For me, 75 degrees is like borderline motion sickness inducing for a FPS. 90 degrees or bust. Thankfully Freespace doesn't really do the motion sickness thing, being in space and all that.
But yeah, lowering FoV in FS2 definitely has a direct relation to perception of scale. Take these two screenshots for example, the first one taken with a FoV of 75 and the second with 55. From exactly the same distance:


(Yes, I know that's WoD and not FS2. I had WoD open in FRED as I was making this post so it was more convenient for me)

There's of course also the fact that sense of scale is hard to really get right in space, due to the lack of objects to compare with. No landscape with tree's and humans and such. Put an Orion in say, a level of Half life 2 and suddenly you can get an actual sense of how bloody massive the thing actually is.

Also, according to the wiki, there is supposedly some perspective distortion happening at the default 75 FoV at the edges.

[FrikgFeek]

That's because -fov 0.75 in Freespace isn't the same as setting FOV to 75 in other games. Most games have a direct correlation between their FOV settting and the actual Field of View in degrees. In Freespace the default 0.75 FOV is actually something else. It's the vertical angle of view, in radians, multiplied by 1.39626348. for some reason.

First, you'd have to convert 0.75 radians to degrees which would be ~43 degrees.
Next you multiply that by 1.39626348 to get ~60 AoV. How this converts to FoV depends on your monitor's aspect ratio, but let's assume you're using a 16:9 widescreen one. Multiply 60 by (16/9) and you get 106.666...

The default Freespace FOV for a 16:9 monitor is actually ~107 degrees, which is quite high and this is why it causes "fisheye" distortions and makes big ships less impressive.

For a 16:9 monitor you need to divide whatever FOV you actually want by 142.2222 to get the number you need to use with the -fov flag. So if you want a 90 degree FOV you need to use -fov 0.6328.

On an old school 4:3 monitor the default FoV would be only 80, something that's much more natural.


Also you couldn't fit a full sized Orion into HL2, it's too big for the Hammer editor. The largest hammer can do is ~0.8km in height, width, and lenght while the Orion is 2030m long. You could obviously fit the model in but you couldn't make it big enough to illustrate the difference between the player , a tree, and that thing.

[General Battuta]

If ships would scatter scale accurate corpses everywhere then we'd have great size referents!!!

[Spoon]

That's because -fov 0.75 in Freespace isn't the same as setting FOV to 75 in other games. Most games have a direct correlation between their FOV settting and the actual Field of View in degrees. In Freespace the default 0.75 FOV is actually something else. It's the vertical angle of view, in radians, multiplied by 1.39626348. for some reason.

First, you'd have to convert 0.75 radians to degrees which would be ~43 degrees.
Next you multiply that by 1.39626348 to get ~60 AoV. How this converts to FoV depends on your monitor's aspect ratio, but let's assume you're using a 16:9 widescreen one. Multiply 60 by (16/9) and you get 106.666...

The default Freespace FOV for a 16:9 monitor is actually ~107 degrees, which is quite high and this is why it causes "fisheye" distortions and makes big ships less impressive.

For a 16:9 monitor you need to divide whatever FOV you actually want by 142.2222 to get the number you need to use with the -fov flag. So if you want a 90 degree FOV you need to use -fov 0.6328.

On an old school 4:3 monitor the default FoV would be only 80, something that's much more natural.

Yeah, it's really weird. Another reminder we're dealing with an engine written in 1999 I guess 
I'm just thinking on how to get this information more widespread known to all the players. The fisheye effect is there, but its so much harder to notice in a space game with no good points of visual reference. So a lot of players are going to end up playing on a too wide of a FoV by default and then feel the scales for the ships are off. (incidently, I've been using default FoV for a long time myself, but my screens are 16:10). I feel ideally the scp should make the default to say 0.65 (so 85 fov on 16:10 and 94 fov on 16:9) or have it listed as a note on the launchers that FoV should probably be adjusted for a better experience. Or something.

Also you couldn't fit a full sized Orion into HL2, it's too big for the Hammer editor. The largest hammer can do is ~0.8km in height, width, and lenght while the Orion is 2030m long. You could obviously fit the model in but you couldn't make it big enough to illustrate the difference between the player , a tree, and that thing.

Haha, didn't know that (I don't actually know **** about the HL2 engine and editor), my example is now ruined.

[Spoon]

Also this is totally offtopic and I apolgize for hijacking the thread with dumb FoV poopoo.
I'll make a new thread about that in the SCP forums.

[Kestrellius]

This is something of a problem for just about all video games (well, I guess it doesn't apply to things like isometric games or RTSs, but other than that...). Things always seem smaller than they are, because we're dealing with a monitor that doesn't take up our whole field of vision. I feel like there must be a solution (other than VR), but I don't know what it is.

I really want to see a better Lucifer model, myself. Maybe using the HTL Cain/Lilith design language, for the arms? It's times like this I wish I wasn't terrible at modeling.