[Req] Universe in First Person Scale

[komeng]

Hi.

we know when otani enters first-person perspective everything becomes massive in scale.

Maybe just an absurd request, but I think it will be awesome if I'm flying inside skunk looking everything at 1:1 scale.

That is all, best regards

[UniTrader]

even though it seems like it there is no scaling there - you are that small. (or at least i think its the opposite - the Skunk docked on a Taranis looks quite weird when viewed from afar, because it seems too big imo - thats nothing a player can see ingame, i just played around with the Platforms a bit in the past)

[Aken_Bosch]

I don't think there's a change in scale, only a change in perspective and relative speeds...when you are in first person, you obviously move at walking speeds, and your point of view is extremely near your objects of reference...so that when you are walking around an open platform, for example, your field of reference is about 20-30 meters wide (very wide guess) and you can move around that relatively fast, while any object in the distance is at least hundreds if not thousands of meters away, so that when you strafe around for example, the parallax effect you perceive from the fast scrolling floor below you and the very far element of the station/ship you are on is very accentuated, and that is mostly what gives the sense of huge scale...

When you are on the Skunk instead, the nearest you can be to any object of reference is still several meters away from it (at least 3-5 meters from your seat to the most forward point of the ship), and when you strafe around your immediate surroundings are fixed relative to your point of view, so one can only perceive the parallax effect starting already from several meters away...and on top of that, the strafing and general speed of the Skunk is hugely superior to the first person one, enough to cover several hundreds meters in a matter of seconds, even a 7 km long behemoth like a Fulmekron will zip past you fast enough to seem much smaller than it really is

Another thing that I think can contribute a bit is the "space dust" effect...compared to the previous game, I found the specks flying around you when you move seem to be comparatively quite larger and to leave a bigger streak behind them...probably, if the space dust was smaller and thinner, and moving at a faster relative speed, anything "behind" it would give the brain the impression of being a lot bigger in comparison...

Of course those are all opinions and hypotesis of mine, I'll be happy to be contradicted by facts from anyone more informed than me (that is, everyone at all practically )

But if things stand this way, there would be no way to mod anything about it

[UniTrader]

just made some screens for comparision:

Platform while docked viewed from far above on a Rahanas (it is in the usual Place - Interiors are just always in foreground before everything else - nothing you will notice while playing. Also i have a mode active which removes the Skunk, but the Platform itself should be enough for size comparision)
the Skunk on roughly Platform Level a bit in front of the Rahanas in external view - notice how it is a bit smaller than the Platform itself, the same as when docked

[Tamina]

I agree on this matter since 2013 and tried to change it.
An Arawn looks like only 10times then your skunk but in external view the skunk has the size of a window on the Arawn.

As Aken said this is probably due to the huge space dust as a fix point for our brain and minimum distances to other objects.
We can't really move at the surface of a capital ship. We either get automatically turned away or the hitbox is too big.
We are (if at all) mostly moving a few kilometers away from other objects.

Maybe also the movement speed of the skunk and eveey other ship is problematic as it is large and with a keyboard you can hardly control this.

Everything sums up to a misfeeling of room, time and scale.

I wonder if a occulus rift would change that feeling. Or if we could view around freely in cockpit with our mouse and slightly automatically when turning or getting shot.

[Aken_Bosch]

I wonder if a occulus rift would change that feeling.

I can't talk about the Oculus Rift (of course), but I had the luck of trying the game with "normal" 3d (3D Vision), and I can surely confirm that the sense of scale benefits a lot from it...it's impossible to have a very comprehensive view of the whole world in 3d because there are some serious convergence issues, therefore I had to choose from a very near convergence for having the cockpit and all near objects correctly rendered, but loosing the feeling of depth for anything farther than that, or the exact opposite to perceive the depth of the universe outside the ship, but having the cockpit completely messed up in a really painful way for the eyes

But, alternating from one case to the other, I experienced two things: when the cockpit is rendered at the right depth and convergence, it gains a really noticeable sense of space, and I noticed for the first time that the entire cockpit area is quite roomy, a lot more than what appears in 2d, the windscreen is definitely some distance away from the pilot seat, and even Yisha and all her portion of cockpit is not as near as it seems, it really gives the impression of being in a quite large room with a wide glass bubble on the universe outside...

When the convergence is set for the far objects instead (and with the cockpit obviously disabled), the distances and relative sizes of objects compared one with the other are a lot more discernible, and mass traffic for example gives the impression (to me at least) of being a bit smaller relative to stations in the background, compared with the standard 2d rendering...big ships don't give the same impression while flying around, but I think this is still caused by the very fast speed of the Skunk in relation to their size...but when I parked myself very near one of the longest structures of the shipyard in Gemstone Manufacture, it really seemed something large and solid, going on for kilometers in the distance and still suspendend in the void, with the very large planet much more away in the background...it was definitely a view, a real pity that the game is not that much practical to play that way

To cut it short anyway (maybe a bit late to cut it short I recon ), yes, I think the sense of scale would benefit enormously from a correct implementation of Oculus Rift or any form of stereoscopic 3d

But I also think that as of now this discussion isn't really belonging to the S&M section anyway ...

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

Something I realised a few game versions ago was that my sense of perspective in space was being distorted by the reported distance of close objects. 'Zero KM' was/is set to about 30 m in front of the Skunk - a tiny distance in solar terms but pretty big in relation to nearby XS/S craft.

For example, something like a Consumer Compact Craft at 'zero km' can look really small compared to the Skunk's cockpit but now knowing it could be 30 m away helps understand it is bigger.

If the Skunk has problems getting close to large objects due to bump-mapping, maybe a similar incorrect sense of being closer that we actually are is occurring.

Having said that, I've not noticed issues with bump-mapping myself. The only time I can remember thinking there was an issue was when I couldn't strafe up as close to a surface as I thought I should be able to. In the end, it was only caused by the rear of the Skunk being much higher than the cockpit and actual models touching.

The fact that all vanilla, hostile weapons target the Skunk's cockpit rather than the centre of the ship mass is another issue making the game fell less-well modeled than it actually is!