Scale Megathread

Man, imagine a first person shooter with planets on this scale. Imagine looking up and seeing an asteroid fill the sky.

which is why a robust engine and high modability is a must.

an engine that can handle small units leaves doors open. notably for some mods I've thought up.

"Quoting for reference, not for argument"

After messing around with the camera and altering the view to be at an angle instead of straight down... I think the straight down view really messes up the scale of the game.

The pictures in the quote are a good example of what happens when you change the camera angle and in the current game, doing that makes the units all look just a bit smaller. I guess when looking down vertically, all the units seem big on the surface, viewing them from a slight angle on the side does make them seem smaller and I can't seem to generate a statement that explains why.

Viewing the buildings from the side definitely make them seem size appropriate compared to the units at least...
However.. compared to the mountains and plateaus that exist in the game, the buildings do seem a little to large.

Wait, you can do that?

GIVE TO ME NOW

Default keys:
Ctrl+m to switch between 2 camera modes.

In the second mode:
F moves the camera closer to the ground(or even through the ground if you want that)
R moves the camera away from the ground.
Hold middle mouse button to look around.
WASD for camera movement.

Since this was bumped, I feel that since Neutrino said that he was in favor of reducing the scale of the units back in July (even though it is a lot of work) it should be done here pretty quick. The amount of work required would only increase with added units, no? Might as well do it before adding more units!

I hear this argument quite a bit in this thread but I don't think its that much rework that gets generated when you have more units built into the system. It may seem like a bit but judging from the unit designs if you have the full unit roster set and dried in finalization.. then reworking them all 1 at a time to a different scale becomes factory line work. and easier. Compared to doing it mid way where a design that isn't set in scale is then reduced midway in design as well as follow up units that match that same upgrade class or same design shape.

I'm just saying it might be easier to repaint a picture that is complete to a different scale sized picture then have a half finished picture and then be told to repaint it to half its size.

Aside from the acknowledgement that it would be something they would like to revisit,
I don't think there was any confirmation that it will be addressed.

No matter how you put it, doing a model twice is more work than doing it once.


As for whether it is going to happen or not, I will be rather disappointed if it didn't.

Too true.

I will be bitterly disappointed if it doesn't happen. Still, I am totally prepared for disappointment; it certainly doesn't look like it is going to be done for release.We are what, a little over a month left before the latest possible referenced release date of 'December'? I keep opening the patch notes every week expecting THIS to be the week where the major changes begin to kick in; new UI, scale (if it gets done), new units, graphics, animations (holy crap the orbital launcher system is UGLY at the moment)... and it never is that week. Either these next 5 weeks are going to be inhumanly exciting, or PA's launch will be somewhat wet.

I guess the scale situation could be saved for me by totally reworking the navy (if the entire unit pallet was out of question). Every person I have shown the game go so far has had a similar response, especially concerning the battle cruiser: "Why can it only shoot twice/three times its own length?!" It just looks ridiculous.
Admittedly this wouldn't fix the issues most people have (unit to terrain height comparisons), but I can almost put up with that on the premiss that hey, maybe the units just ARE that big. I cant stomach a battle cruisers huge cannons shooting such a short distance though. Or, I guess, Uber could just rework the battle cruiser and stick Ant turrets on instead of the current ones...

I guess mods might be able to fix this should it not be fixed for vanilla!
At least we have a decent population of players who prefer a smaller unit scale and would be able to find games with said mod!

I just hope that pathfinding will allow for terrain to be properly used.

The idea of shrinking the scale is insane. Suddenly you can't make out icons because there are too many in too small a space. Suddenly terrain means less because choke points are harder to form with smaller units. Now you need more terrain to compensate, so the screen is more cluttered and the frame rate lower.

And what has been gained?

The last thing the game needs is smaller units.

It's clustered for icon legibility because the icons are kinda big too....?

Scale is both size of units and speed of units though.

Also the icons could use a stacking feature. One similar to the one where you select multiple units and their images stack in your lower left hand corner.

Besides that, if they could tweak the scale a bit, and by a bit I mean not more than 10% plus or minus across the discreptencies, then it might look better, but it will never be scale because trees aren't visible from space and the largest manmade structures look like pixels.

They could make it better, not high on my priorities, but they can't "fix" it, and it technically does "make sense" the same way Kerbal Space Program makes sense having a slightly small though massive planet and a scaled gravity-per-mass compared to real life.

Just steal the SUP COM 2 implementation, which was perfect.

I am going to sound like a bottomless silo of **** for asking this, but I can't but vaguely remember it. Isn't that the system where the Strategic Icons had hair-lines going to where the unit was that the icon showed?

I am almost certain that was what ONE of the sup coms did lol.

Anyway, this game has a LOT of units. Doxes galore (or as some people prefer, doxen). They need to stack somehow. A number somewhere would make it really nice too, as a number saves a player a few seconds of counting to 50 (50 unit waves of doxes/doxen are quite common).

If you selected a group of units and got them to do something, SUPCOM 2 would stick the number of units into a selectable circle which would follow the group. If they were spread out the circle would be in the approximate centre. As the number of units changed the number in the circle would change. If you wanted to reselect the same group you could just click on the number circle. If you told some of the group to do something else it'd remove them from the circle number and group.

It was a fantastic bit of UI.

I haven't touched SupCom 2 in years, but what you're describing sounds really neat and possibly very useful.
Can you weigh in on the UI threads please? Photos/Vids would be amazing if you've got them.


Actually I'm wondering if @GoogleFrog knows if Zero-K has anything "smart" like this too?

I hated that and I'm glad us in the Beta group got GPG to make that optional, it was one of those things that sounded great on paper, but the reality was that it was annoying as heck. The thing is that if you wanted to split up a "group" and tried to box select half of them you couldn't eve touch the "group" Icon at all with that selection bot otherwise it would select the whole "group", it forced you to zoom in until the icon disappeared in order to properly select the number of units you wanted.

Mike