Scale Megathread

Ok, see, that helps. Our perception is not always the same as you guys, and that does help to understand the frustration. There are a million issues, big and small, and while this has come up a number of times, it certainly wasn't above issues like, say, orbital, interplanetary, getting naval working better, continuing to iterate on pathing, getting client and server performance better, etc.

It's a big issue, but it's not an alpha one necessarily. Reason being is it's a lot of work, but it doesn't necessarily change our overall approach to making the game. We just want to make sure we don't do a change like this until we're sure we can do it ONCE. Which means we have a lot of other issues and discussions to work through before we try and tackle it. If we change the scale, and I think we largely feel that scale is a bit off on a planet - what looked fine on a flat concept didn't look quite right on a curved surface - we want to make sure we do it a single time to address the biggest concerns, both internally, and from the community.

This.
Because months of work basically means : too late

And this, my friends, is why you shouldn't make assumptions about what we say, and don't assume the worst possible scenario whenever we say something. Don't go postal and attack us. Just ask for clarification.

but if about Months of work, how can this be done before final release ? Beta is about to start and final release is planned for december.

Because we are clever mammals, and if we make a determination that it has to be addressed, it will. And "months" means "person months", like it does for any project that involves numerous people.

I was frustrated. The game is so much of fun, and it could just be AWESOME with this scale issue being tweaked.

I'm not saying that you should do it because we've dreamed of it, but for many, it was something that was going to be addressed "for sure" at some point.

We are all aware of what still need to be done (and it's already worry me enough , but honestly, I have some experience in development and wasn't expecting that change to be so difficult or time consuming. In my mind, it was something that could be tweaked over time, on every release, like the mex placements or the biomes look.

It's not even just been offhand. I asked a direct question about it in the previous livestream and the issue got sort of... brushed under the carpet with Jon saying he thinks there's plenty of communication already.

We just don't see Developers interacting with the community very much anymore Garat, other than dropping in for either damage control when someone posts about 'unfair business practices' or to throw the backers a quick bone to keep them sweet.

There are several large threads, this one included, that have topped over 200 posts without a Dev posting in once... or posting it and then leaving it without any updates or recognition; just being left there to spiral out of control, most laying within the Backer and Alpha Subforums.

I can't presume to speak for everyone, but there is a feeling throughout those two sub forums when I look through the posts and threads. It's one of the backers being something to be tolerated by the Devs, rather than embraced. We know you're busy, we know you're working hard, we know you're making a game thats pushing boundaries and that's not easy to do... but the backers haven't had anything to do... even anything to really talk about for weeks, maybe even months. I can't post the specifics here in General Discussion, but the past few backer exclusives have been lacking the substantiality of your earlier efforts.

The iterative process may be a wonderful system to work under, but it's awful at letting the backers feel involved. Again, I can't speak for everyone, but when I gave you my money I was expecting a lot more back-and-forth, for the backers to really get juicy information and generally have more of an 'involved' kinda feeling. The Backers are being swept along in your wake, without any idea what you're doing, why you're doing it and no real idea where we're going.

Though I don't condone the exact method of how doud is expressing himself, I can't say that I'm entirely unsurprised that someone on the forums has "snapped", and I can definitely sympathise with his, and many others' position.

Most of what is being discussed is not alpha material though. All they could do for those is to drop in and say "good discussion".

What exactly do you believe they should be doing more than they are now, given where they are in development? Their current position in the development cycle is simply churning through getting the base capabilities in, which doesn't really leave much room for input. This will ramp up once orbital is released (see the latest livestream), and again once balancing starts. I see them commenting in discussions about specific features, posting in the modding forums and the posts in the backers forums, and this is all far more than I've seen in other forums.

I don't pretend to tell them that they should be doing anything more than they already are; they're the experts. I'm only relating what I'm seeing emerge raevn, and how I personally feel. If Uber want's to value my input or not that's entirely their decision. Imagined or not, I can't comment as to a definitive solution to the problem, for either side.

Edit: I'm not actually disagreeing with you by the way, I'm well aware that the Devs can be found commenting on the forum here and there. What I haven't seen is devs getting actively involved in a discussion.

Should be "this game is so much fun, it WILL be AWESOME with this scale issue being tweaked".

I think the fan community get that at the moment, big things like getting major features enabled, optimisation, AI, etc needs time now, and tweaks (and this is a tweak) can happen later. You don't worry about your car radio being a bit glitchy when it's doesn't have functioning headlights. Important stuff, but it's not urgent priority stuff.

Uber have been great at taking fan thoughts on board. Personally I agree that scale needs thinking about, this will tie in with having planets, moons, asteroids, orbital layers etc sorted properly so that one scale can be worked up that works across the different parts of the game so that it all meshes together smoothly.

You want a simple example? Have you tried writing an essay in Word and formatting as you go along? You end up with it all having to be re-done at the end anyway as all the formatting clashes with itself and doesn't allow you to add new stuff or remove old stuff.

yea the game is already awesome. I'm not worried about scale at all ... just choose bigger planet sized when you seed i guess? Seems like a relatively easy mod to just go in and adjust later on anyway.

the game is already really fun, just really raw and unpolished so far. Beta is going to be amazing

We don't ignore the low level priority of this request.
But we also don't ignore that it's not a low hanging fruit and it probably need more than simple tweaks be done. That was something most of us were assuming (that's why this thread was opened now and not during the beta), and that has been confirmed now.

Changing the scale is not something that can be done one week before the release. It's, for me, something that has to start in alpha stage because it at the start of many other processes.

Now, we know that it's already too late and too much work, but I'm still a bit bitter that this hasn't been discussed by and with the developers months ago, when changing it was still possible.

Actually, I'm quite disappointed by the fact that the scale seemed to to be huge concern in the beginning :
The concept arts that looked very good, the unit scale comparison in the first few weeks, to end up with the current result.
Somehow all this was lost in the process, and I feel that it would have been avoided easily.

It probably was discussed internally by Uber, but sometimes, I feel like they are missing some perspective on their work. It's probably due to the hard work they are doing in such short timing (when you've spend 3 weeks to make the pathfinding works, I can understand how happy you can be and miss the fact that tanks shouldn't really move like that and it's weird), I can understand that, I just hope it won't bite them in the end.

Edit: I should learn to read before I post. But stop with the whining guys. Doesn't help anyone.

This where i do not understand the approach and why this could not be handled from the very beginning :
knowing that you're going from traditional flat maps to planets (curve surfaces), you must have realized quite soon that, as you say "what looked fine on a flat concept didn't look quite right on a curved surface". You take 3d models, put them on a planet and realize that scale does not look right as it does on flat maps. Then at this point you could decide to scale down units even before starting to work on animations and all other unit stuff. As far as i can remember, the original set of units was ready even before alpha started. It looks a little bit weird to originally work on a flat map in order to decide what the scale will be when you know it will all happen on curve surfaces. Especially when you know that if you chose the wrong scale, you will have to redo everything that has been done on units and that's a lot of work.

Is it wrong to assume that if you had worked on this on the smallest planet, then it would have been ok on larger planets ?

Because as I had mentioned in this thread (and which now got deleted in the great forum purge of 2013 (kidding, it was an accident in migration, happens ) there are other concerns about unit scales then just does it look good?

Scale decides which zoom levels are useful and at which levels you need icons. A smaller scale in regards to unitsize/unitspeed/weapon range (ie longer range to small units) means you need to play out zoomed more relatively and you can end up with supcom icon wars.

Feature size is fixed to the smallest intended planet size. You can't make features just bigger else they won't fit on the planet anymore. That is obvious I guess. Now the unit and building size (and their speed and range) effectively determines how large a planet feels during a game. So an units size actually determines the smallest (still usable) planet size as well. Take both of them and you'll end up with a minimum planet size for normal matches.

Yes you could scale units down in regards to features, in effect it would also increase the minimum useful planet size though as those are strictly in relation to each other.


In the end, what a lot of people in this thread demand is to play on larger planets (as those would allow larger feature sizes) and make small planets impossible. (Shrinking units or increasing feature and planet size is mathematically the same, although computationally one will end up faster ofc..)

Personally I'm totally happy with the current scale of the game and I play almost only on small planets due to their better gameplay at the moment.


A far better improvement imo would be to bind certain features to planet sizes (a tech they've now added in the last weeks it seems). Those snow covered mountains should probably be bigger and only appear on larger scale planets while other smaller features should be more predominant on small planets. This would help with the disconnect some people seem to get in regards to the scale, help make large planets look better and different then small ones and still allow small planets to be played upon. And to top it all off, it would be much less work then having to redo the scale, anim, stats, etc. of everything.

Because I like seeing units (no the messy small units were not really recognizable in supcom...) during normal gameplay.

(And really, popularity through a forum poll is always a bad measure to see how good an idea is. We got 150 self selected responds to this in this thread out of what.. 20k, 30k backers?)

If there was a poll I'd vote smallcpu as president. Nice post.

I responded a while ago and said we are looking at this. How is that no communication? Yes I have been ignoring this thread since then simply because this is not an issue we are working on at the moment.

Personally I would like to change the scale of the units versus the terrain. That decision was made in my head a while ago. Not everyone agrees it's a good idea and it's going to take a fair amount of time away from the art team to change some of this stuff.

Overall I was very happy with the scale of the game that we released in the scale renders. That is the scale that Steve wants to have in the game and I agree. That's also the current scale of the units. Unfortunately to do the way planets work it doesn't look quite as intended. I think it's possibly due to the way they curve away from the camera.

Uniform scale is a possible solution but it's NOT A GOOD one for a variety of reasons I don't want all of the units built at different scales and then randomly scaled. So to do this properly we are going to do a rescale pass which does take quite a bit of work.

I was about to say Whoah Whoah Whoah, who needs a lolcat? when reading through all I'd missed in a day, and by darn what an escalation! but seeing Neutrino's post made me go, "ah I knew it, much less tragic then everyone imagined" so yeah. I also agree there's no real aproach to variable landmark sizes which the last livesteam helped me understand, I saw how the planet's generation was tweaked to perfection, a little size change and everything could go off the rails again, so imagine a landmark with variable size.
However smaller units trees and such would work on any planet. and would help to restore the contrast between a landmark and a unit.
There need not be concerned for icon wars. Alls thats needed is to play closer than before. the pop-in distance can be left as it is as really currently it is way too soon, you can still ID everything fine when they pop in and then some.

and as an extra detail the icons could be smaller. they really are quite big. but if I'm reading into Uber's game correctly, I imagine there's more to come for strategic icons they are not done. I'll leave it at that, but let it be said: I called it.

BTW just to to be clear the current icon system is a first pass abomination. It gets the job done, but barely and certainly isn't up to the level I would like to see. It's just I don't find it useful to constantly post that over and over again. Maybe I should but it get wearying. So one more time, THE GAME ISN'T FINISHED! lol