Sense of Scale

[MegaJohnny]

For a while now I've been a bit troubled by how big I feel I am in X:R. I can fly up to a station module or capital ship and feel like it's not all that big. But if I take a walk on the landing pad or go into external view I have a "woah" moment as I'm confronted with just how big the object actually is compared to the Skunk.

It's a problem I had in X3 too - I knew capital ships were kilometres long, but I never got a sense of how big it was unless I looked at the external view, when it really hit me.

What I want to know is, do you also have this problem? And is there any way to replicate that feeling of hugeness without having to use the external view?

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

Cockpit is the problem - it's placed in the front. Rest of the ship is behind you, and you basically ignore it all time.


IMO a perfect solution would be to put player's seat back, so you can see the WHOLE cockpit in front of you, not just the window and one monitor.
At the same time, something could be done with field-of-view.
Currently your screen is larger than most of the ship, which makes you forget about everything else but the cockpit. As if the rest of the ship didn't exist.

[CBJ]

It's a difficult problem to solve. The only way to really change the sense of scale in the game itself is to adjust the Field of View, but there are limits to how much you can do that without other side effects. The real limiting factor is the fact that you're viewing the universe through a small rectangular window, i.e. your monitor. Playing on a larger screen or sitting closer to the screen you have will probably have more effect on your perception of the scale than anything the FoV can achieve!

[UniTrader]

additionally Speed plays also a large role.. when you mod your Engines so they go almost 1c makes even the Clusters as whole look small ^^ but i doubt anyone would like to have slower Engines ^^

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

Playing on a larger screen or sitting closer to the screen you have will probably have more effect on your perception of the scale than anything the FoV can achieve!

This is probably quite significant but there is also the fact that in-game, we get a sense of scale from the size of objects and their stated distance away from the Skunk.

However, objects stated to be 0m from the Skunk appears to actually be upto about 30m away with in-game testing (sorry, I cannot find the post where I described this in more detail). Whilst that is not significant over several kms, everything close up seems artificially smaller by the in-game scale (which I hope would be a simple fix). E.g. mass traffic windows look too small if they were 0m away from Skunk since view is from the front but since they are probably ~30m away, mass traffic is not so small after all.


Edit: Typo.

[Wana]

It's true, recently, with the external view, i feel being in a big ship, when i'm near a capital ship. But in a ship i can walkthrough in less than 10 feets.

However, while i'm landed, it's another story.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

A good vehicle piloting optics system should IMO make you feel you are the ship even if that does make you feel bigger than you actually are while in control of it. I think the current cockpit(s) for the Skunk in X-Rebirth achieves this.

If there is any reported range disparity (e.g. 0m reported when actually 30m away) then perhaps this should be addressed - this range should tie in with actual weapons range IMO. Perhaps we will need a combat range mode as well as a navigational range mode - 30m buffer zone might be fine for navigation but for combat it could mean the difference between hitting and missing a target.

[AdánPasos]

I know what you mean Johnny, it happened to me as well, although I did not feel it with "negativity".

I not only used the external view to sometimes get to grasp and feel the real size of things but I even ejected "myself" as well.

I sometimes ejected and got close to one of my Mercury TS ships near the cabin and with the external camera I could amaze myself gazing at how realistically large even the small TS ships were.

This is one of the reasons I also wanted to be able to have an external view as well in Rebirth.

[bm01]

A bigger FoV would help.

With small FoVs (or console FoVs as I like to call them) it's hard to tell if something is far away or not, and it directly influences our ability to tell if things are big or not. Basically, perspective.

In real life we have two eyes that helps for depth perception. In video games we have image distortion that comes with, well, 3D on a 2D screen to put it simply, and which is related to the FoV.

If you're not sitting far away from your monitor, that distortion is actually helpful for another reason, less "motion sickness" (improper term but close symptoms). There been a lot of debate about it recently because of some FPS games with locked 65° FoV. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blZUao2jTGA is older than that debate and talks about those effects.

Anyway, that's not my point, I just meant it helps with depth perception, and depth perception helps with "size perception".

Thinking of it, extreme sport videos would look much less impressive without their 170° viewing angle.