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Behold the flux of time-space!
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Poll Result
  Wouldn't scaled structures look cool?  
 
Yes, I'm tired of the 6m building producing the 22m units.
26%
 26%  [ 8 ]
Well, the entire population fitting in a building that's the same size as a single person is a bit odd.
6%
 6%  [ 2 ]
It's acceptable that units are always drawn on a larger scale than buildings.
10%
 10%  [ 3 ]
It's a function of parabolic space-time. The buildings are really 400 times larger on the inside than the exterior! Get in gear with the rest of us in non-euclidian reality.
23%
 23%  [ 7 ]
Scale is irrelevant. Quit whining.
23%
 23%  [ 7 ]
I never liked buildings anyway. Can we just have magical ice cream cones that point off the map, in the general direction the cities would be, instead?
10%
 10%  [ 3 ]
 
  Total Votes : 30  

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X-Fighter
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 7:20 pm    Post subject: Behold the flux of time-space! Reply with quote

It's a rather minor point, but a request:
The scale on most RTS games is absurd. You know what I mean:
Quote:
There is your short unit, he's 36 pixels height!
Beside him is your goliath unit, twice his height, a whopping 72 pixels height!
And near them is the gigantic super metropolis where they were trained and built, large enough to house 50,000 people, and towering over the terrain at a mighty 88 pixels height!

...
Now, I appreciate convienience and logistics associated with making buildings and factories so incredibly small, and I'm sure there's plenty of arguments to support it.

However, that doesn't change the fact that it looks kind of stupid. Either that, or most of these buildings have enormous underground complexes attatched, that all miraculously dissolve in an instant when the above ground fixture is destroyed.

I don't know how feasible/desirable it would be, but actually having cities and other structures with a scale that makes them look like, well, cities, instead of a Jr. High kid's diarama project, would be kind of cool.
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Lothar
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 8:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Except that you're not watching the actual combat, you're watching a computer terminal that's updating you on what's happening in the combat. Therefore, units are scaled appropriately so as to be easy to see and click on, rather than to be visually correct. It's like, in the fighter combat in "Top Gun"... you see these big red and green triangles that represent fighters. They're 10 miles apart, and the triangles are about 1/10 the length of separation -- that doesn't mean each fighter is a mile long. Drawing the things to scale would make the tracking system just about useless.

I don't hear you complaining about the green circles that show up around your guys, even though that looks equally stupid Wink Realism is overrated. Go for playability.
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X-Fighter
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 9:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The thing is, the little green circle doesn't have any gameplay implications. If it's a giant purple cube around the unit, they're still selected, same difference.

However, when your 50 million population city is attacked, and only 12 units can engage it in combat, because it's completely surrounded and nobody else can get close to it, that's absurd. If 50 million people can fit inside, how come only 12 people can fit around the perimeter?
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Fost
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 11:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is actually something I have always found 'personally challenging' ; I like stuff to just work, or at least look like it could work. So APCs that contain 10 men, physically can contain 10 men. Sometimes though gameplay dictates this to you, and I can't argue with that. I always start by making everything fit to scale, and then see what happens, so hopefully you won't have any worries on this score.
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Sorrow



Joined: 16 Jan 2004
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 24, 2004 6:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The buildings cant be to big and the units cant be to small, "realisum" is somthing these large comercial compony's that dont care about game play use to try make there games better, Moonpod should do whatever is practicle.
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icarus
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 24, 2004 8:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

a city only 88 pixels high it should take up the hole map with just 9 blocks and you could only see it on the oveland map (asuming there will be one)
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Bobacles



Joined: 17 Mar 2004
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 2:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Try thinking of units as a metaphor, for a unit.
That's not one guy out there, that's 50 highly trained commandos toting machine guns. That's not a tank, it's actually a unit of 10 tanks. The giant robot rampaging through your city, is still one giant robot.

Those 50,000 people buildings are only for 20 or 30. The rest of the space is for the thousands of worker robots.

The barracks don't really pump out people, they bring them in with invisible convoys from behind the front lines. You only really need to pay for their guns. Smile

The factories import tanks from Taiwan. Razz Okay, maybe they build tanks. But they'd have to be the easiest tank to mass produce in the world.
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X-Fighter
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 8:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Fost's reassurance(Yay!) not withstanding, bobacle is *almost* believable, until you try to convince me that the "hero unit" really has 50,000 "General Bob"s in it, and/or that he is, Shocked miraculously Shocked , the very last one to die when his unit takes damage, as is every other hero... Rolling Eyes

For a noteworthy accomplishment, in StarScape, the ship is designed to hold approximately 32 crew members(the 25 you rescue, the 5 you started with, yourself, and Rendon), 3 ships, spare parts, 3 really large piles of rocks, and that nifty inter-dimensional warp-driver-majig. Going on the scale of the stuff you have floating out in space(people, vehicles, rocks, warp core pieces), it would all realistically fit and work, including the fact that Aegis's various animations depict it as a relatively flat, flying-saucer kind of thing.

That is so cool. =) I like it.

I've just played way too many RTSes where structures came closer to looking like they were nothing more than children's playground models of real buildings. You can't help but feel kind of pathetic when your buildings come with doors that only come up to the knee of the guy that just came out of it, and it's very hard to live with yourself as a "champion of the people" when you obviously have to use child slave labor to get anyone short enough to cram through the armory door. Confused

Anywho, rock on Fost! Very Happy
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CidHighwindFF7



Joined: 31 Aug 2003
Posts: 104
Location: Mt. Savage, Maryland, USA



PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 6:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, you can have what you asked for, but Foot Soldiers would have to be 1x1 pixel. And cities would have to be several screens long. You can lose an entire army, simply by zooming out. You dont really want this, do you?

But a better method of getting what you want is, whenever units get too small, a brightly-colored set of boxes take their places, and a set of notation saying "So many troops ARE here, they are just small".
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Fost
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 6:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CidHighwindFF7 wrote:
You can lose an entire army, simply by zooming out. You dont really want this, do you?


Yes that is the major issue at hand, and it's especially relevant with this game. You don't want to have to run the game at 1600X1200 just to have a chance of seeing troopers. There will be some level of zoom of course, and you'll be wanting to move troopers about in squads rather than on the individual level. Or course a squad can be whittled down to one man/woman, and you don't want them getting killed just because you can't see them. We are just going to have to play with this once we have set the zoom levels correctly. Hud icons at max zoom out aren't such a bad idea, we'll have to see if it becomes a problem or not.
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 10:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The zoom concept and huds(if neccessary) is good. Very Happy

Another thought related to this is the "Lord of the Rings" films. You could clearly see individual soldiers in the battle scenes, and the cities, like at Minas Tirith. The soldiers were visible in some detail in shots where you could see the entire city, and when zoomed in, you could see the whole little costume they had worked up for them. The city also looked like people could really live there. Just a tought.
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Fost
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 10:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

X-Fighter wrote:
Another thought related to this is the "Lord of the Rings" films. You could clearly see individual soldiers in the battle scenes


I'd actually say this is a good example of the problems. Yeah, it looks really beautiful, but how would you select a squad from the masses? The nice low shots just above the throng of orcs have pretty extreme perspective, something we don't want to do, we are after all making games not films (although I'm sure the rest of the industry is moving towards making you feel like you are in a film rather than playing a game -It sells better good or bad).

Another issue is anti-aliasing, LOTR is prerendered so they have perfect anti-aliasing (and therefore have a far greater 'apparent resolution', whereas we can't even rely on graphics card being able to do it, let alone whether it is turned on or not..

Annoyingly, this wasn't a problem when using 2D sprites Sad It could be possible to have sprite based level of detail for troops at max zoom as long as we maintain a fixed viewpoint. Maybe it won't be as difficult as I think, perhaps if the zoom/pan controls are tranparent to then end user, it won't even be an issue Very Happy
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Weeble
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 10:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'd like to chip in that while the HUD is a nice compromise, I doubt it's going to look as nice as having mixed-scale units/buildings. I'm sure Fost will agree that while great art can't save a bad game, uninteresting art can cripple a good game, especially if you're relying on screen-shots to entice people to download.

I know a certain breed of geek that picks holes in Star Trek for various technical inconsistencies, complains that roleplaying games are unrealistic for their use of hit-points, and lambasts the Lord of the Rings films for failing to accurately include many of the relatively unimportant parts of the books. To these people I say, Realism is not a goal unto itself! Realism is an added nicety, but in computer games I consider it a very low priority compared to gameplay and aesthetic matters. Very often people complain about something not being realistic when that is not the source of their dissatisfaction. They only notice the lack of realism because the product is not sufficiently entertaining in much more important ways.
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Fost
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 25, 2004 10:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Weeble wrote:
I'm sure Fost will agree


Yes, totally, with all your points. I share the feeling of what people are talking about - it annoys the hell out of me when things don't look like they work (seriously, ask anyone who worked with me when I was lead on a project, I probably annoyed the hell out of them!), but I'll never compromise on something if it affects how the game plays.

Really low perspectives are a good example > they are used to show off the game and nothing else. I've seen a few RTS ads of late, that you would think are an advert for the next first person shooter! I actually fully understand why they are being marketed in that way > everyone has realised that games that let you win all the time and make you feel like you are the hero in a film(especially if there is a license behind them) sell big time.

If you take away graphics (maybe replace everything with spheres and cubes) you get down to the core gameplay of any game. I'm sure most people would agree that games haven't really moved forward on that score in the past year. Of course most people don't want to play this sort of thing (except people like me who love warning forever and rRootage Very Happy ) and that's because immersiveness/suspension of disbelief/realism whatever, all make it a better game. This is actually very important as it helps you care about what is going on. I just think it's being concentrated on to the detriment of everything else these days.

So yeah, that's a lot of drivel I've been talking: I could have just said: for me, gameplay is king, but believability is a close second!
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 02, 2004 7:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm mildly suprised that nobody ever voted for the magical icecream cone suggestion.
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