Lore PA units too small ?

He's talking about in gameplay, not lore.

Always remember: These robots are a bit fuzzy about SI units. Why assume their meter is our meter?

The planets are big. The machines are huge, but maybe not as big as they would be relative to a full sized planet if you judged it by the art. The trees are big, but you notice how your units just move through them? That's because they're standing in for forests.

This game crosses a lot of scales and it has to be readable at all of them. Visually, instead of showing everything that's out there, we pick and choose and draw it a bit bigger, so you get a feel for what your machines are going through at their scale.

Are your dox running hundreds of miles to dodge bombs? Or are they dashing a few meters to the side? We make use of space differently at each scale, so we can afford to be a little bit handwavey about it.

We try to keep it fairly consistent but if you poke it hard enough you'll find the seams. That's what it takes not to have a game about dots moving around on perfectly flat spheres.

If we took things literally we'd have units the size of continents. From a game perspective it's good as is and arguably better if smaller. From a lore perspective I don't even know if dorm measurements have been given seeing how the meters are fuzzy and all.

Ah ha! I knew it. I even said that about trees being forests the other day.

Honestly, I'm with Tatsu on this, the units really are too big.

There's no real sense of scale in Planetary Annihilation. In Supreme Commander, battles and maps weren't just massive, they FELT massive.
It's hard to put it into exact words, but in PA, the game doesn't feel big, and it's mostly because the units are just too big. For example, a squad of 50 tanks shouldn't look like a big moving carpet, it should look like a tiny dot crawling across this huge landscape of a planet, not even visible from orbit.

I guess this has more to do with planet size than unit size, but unit size does play a part in it.

Thank you for your replay. I understand that size of every object in gameplay are not true, they represent the object of actual size for gameplay purpose.

But, what is the actual size of these robots ?

hmm, i'd say yes, i want bigger units. but just additional. some more of the large ones. for example an even bigger hover boat.
but just raising the size of all units.. nah. size is only interesting if there's something to compare. a unit only looks big if something small is besides it. and since i don't watch trees the smallest thing i ususally see besides other units is a Dox

Omg how can everyone be so oblivious to the fact it's relative

if you scale the trees down even smaller you've made the units look bigger and the poor excuse for a mountain we have that actually looks like a pebble turn into an actual mountain.

...Did you read my whole post? That was the entire point. I was saying it makes more sense to scale up most of the older CSG instead, since unit vs. CSG scale is currently one of the bigger issues with the scale problem in my opinion.

No, it would
1) increase the polycount significantly
2) have a minimal effect on perceived scale (since the trees are kind of seen as a homogeneous blob anyway)
3) not at all solve the problem of mountains looking like pebbles, since they're not in the same biome, and the mountains are so small units can practically sidestep around them (the mountains I posted are probably 3 or 4 times larger than a regular mountain in PA, I forget the exact scale difference).

dude I was talking about making the whole unit roster smaller. I assumed that I didn't need to respecify that.

I was adding top this making the TREES even smaller than the units (which were being made smaller themselves)

are we on the same page now?

Scaling up CSG means planets need to be bigger, which means more resource consumption.

Smaller units and trees make CSG and the planet bigger by comparison, much more worth it. ;P

I know you want to shrink the unit roster, but I figured you were just making an example of trees, which in my opinion is quite minor.

The only difference between what I'm suggesting and what you're suggesting is that you want to shrink the units, trees, and as a result of a smaller roster, the average map size would also shrink. In effect, this would make everything smaller except for the CSG elements.
I believe that we are better off just increasing the size of old CSG elements instead, since the new larger CSG brushes show that it works fine.

Doesn't work that way.

First, larger CSG elements does not translate to larger maps. I'm certain of that. In fact, what it means is you will have fewer CSG elements overall, which is better for performance. It also means each individual element has an actual impact on gameplay, instead of acting like small boulders as they used to do. And again, the new CSG elements are a good example; they are very large compared to the old ones, have a bigger and more interesting effect on gameplay, and don't make maps larger.

(again, the mountains in this image are probably about 4x larger than default)

And second, the only greater resource consumption would come from the resolution of the planet's base mesh and the navmesh, which could probably be configured as well (and again, I seriously doubt planet size would increase as a result of larger brushes). 'Bigger' does not mean more resource intensive, more detailed does.

EDIT: And as a reminder, scaling down trees means more detail. Scaling down units may also cause pathing issues unless the navmesh is scaled too, which completely negates any perf. concerns you could have about it.

The planets would have to be bigger, there's no way the CSG would fit on small planets without looking really awkward imho. :L

(Plus larger CSG means CSG must be more detailed.)

Look at that screenshot. It's smaller than most 1v1 planets, with much larger CSG. It looks fine.
Here's a planet of scale 350, made entirely of large CSG:

Relative detail between units and terrain is completely independent. If you scale down units, you would then want to zoom in further to see them; if the terrain remains the same size, it will look less detailed in comparison, in the exact same way it would if you just scaled the CSG up.

Didn't consider the last part- touche, however still personally disagree on the first bit, with units 4 times smaller maps become much larger. Consider a scale 200 would be visually huge compared to actual size.

Just give @cola_colin 's unit size mod a test, swear it'll change how you feel. =)

No because of the planets ground texture

generating bigger planets is much much harder.

so we'd benefit by shrinking everything but the CSG brushes enoumsly because we could then casually play on bigger planets.

this is a waste of my time I've already gone over all of this in the scale megathread

@squishypon3 's font is too small. Wait, no, everyone else's is too big. Hmm.

Nah it was supposed to be like whispering,haha. =)

Then your argument is just that the terrain's mega texture is too detailed? I can't say I agree, especially with perf. options for textures. If you want a lower resolution, you can lower your settings.
Texture detail and settings should be a non-issue here.