milod - you MIGHT be right on the design issues, though I have not seen anything inplementent as smooth and good as FL. THere are times, when I am slightly annoyed with the size of the suns especially, and that you can look at a system, and see the planets lit on each side and the sun in the middle, and the sun is like a 10th of a planet, and only the halo is big.

But then again I tell myself - forget it... I would spend ages in tradelanes, I would look at black universe, I would have boring nebulas... I love FL for what it is, a SciFi game, where the "Fi" stands for "Fiction"

Best Regards
Christian "Bargib" Koerner
Editor in Chief, The Lancers Reactor

Planets are too small? Did you visit Fuji? Thats a damn whopper! =)

Edited by - CaptainMurdock on 28-02-2003 10:57:13

Amen Gib

The planets are fine as they are IMO.

If I would get to choose (which i don't) is that the planet size would be far more huger! But flying around would be alot faster.. I should be as in Elite 2. I loved when you manually could land your ship on the planet. =) And if you headed down to fast you end up like a blazing pile of metal (which of course give the local inhabitants a lovely view)

But anyway I had hoped it would be many trading ports on one planet, as in Elite 2. But then again, it is far more easier to go into tradingposts at the planet.

I loved Elite 2 for many reasons, and one of the greatest is that you could be attacked at the landing platform by police or something else. And the only way to escape was hitting the afterburner and head for space with dozens of policeships behind! =))



A blast from the past[! Always remember old enemies.

Wait til you see Fuji....

everything is realisticly scaled. if you didnt notice but this takes place in the future. the 80 max speed doesnt really mean 80 mph or kph. it could be something else. i mean seriously if your ships when 80 mph or kph you would fall right back to the planet. notice those 20k things. that doesnt mean km THAT prolly is another new form of measurement or k as in thousands.

-I trade for a living, rouges piss me off, come get me, catch me if you can, i will leave you in the dust, or you'll die trying, take your pick.- #Part of the traders protection pact# @Heretic Inc. We trade because we own.@

Yeah they are about the right size!

I haven't tried this yet in the demo, but can you fly around a planet?

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everything is realisticly scaled. if you didnt notice but this takes place in the future. the 80 max speed doesnt really mean 80 mph or kph. it could be something else. i mean seriously if your ships when 80 mph or kph you would fall right back to the planet. notice those 20k things. that doesnt mean km THAT prolly is another new form of measurement or k as in thousands.

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No, that doesn't work either. The displayed numbers don't matter, you can gauge velocity by comparing with known references. We know how big people are - about two meters tall, or somewhat less. People stand next to ships on the landing platform, now we know how big ships are: less than ten meters tall, less than twenty meters long. Ships fly through docking rings, and fly around space stations, now we can figure out approximately how big those are by comparison - about one thousand meters across at most. Now, with a little trigonometry and some guesswork about the camera field of view based on edge distortion, we could calculate some upper and lower bounds on how fast the ships are moving. You don't need to take out a sliderule, your brain does all this for you automatically. It's how you are able to catch a ball when one is thrown to you, or how you can drive a car through busy traffic.

Or we could just look at the screenshots and realize that the planets are unrealistically small and close together because the game designers thought it would be more fun if you could fly around them and get from one to the next in a few seconds instead of a few hours. Which is as good a reason as any.

It's kind of like when you are playing a CRPG. When you kill a giant ant, do you ever wonder why it leaves behind two potions and a suit of rusty chain mail? Same reason the planets are unrealistically small in Freelancer: it's just a game. In reality, there are no giant ants, and we can't fly from Earth to Jupiter in thirty seconds. But what fun would that be, right?

--milo
www.starshatter.com

Sure you can awdougherty.
Just be careful not to enter the atmosphere cause you'll burn up.
Even on cruise it takes a while, planets are big enough.

Thanks for the answer, that's really cool.

um did you ever notice that the farther up you go the smaller something looks? thats still how it works in freelancer. i mean for one yes you can go higher the farther out in space you go IF your judging from the surface of the planet.but really dude ask the people who made fl. plus all planets are nto the same size. earth-like planets dont have to be as big as earth.and plus the reason why those planets are closer to that white dwarf is that dwarfs produce much less energy and heat and stuff than our sun does sot he plabnet has to be closer to support life.......and really we shouldnt be arguing. for one i'm baseing this on visual and stuff. (my visuals are pretty acurate, why do you think the 1 of the eye doctors hate me when i am the 4th doctor to subscribe contacts. 4 outta 5 people agree with that). i'm guessing you had either no life or nothing else better to do so you had to measure something. heres a thought. get into the atmosphere of the planet and look down like u would. does the planet fill up the whole screen? yes. now move farther away from it like say from ft bush. now does the planet fill up the screen? no. its all about distance.

-I trade for a living, rouges piss me off, come get me, catch me if you can, i will leave you in the dust, or you'll die trying, take your pick.- #Part of the traders protection pact# @Heretic Inc. We trade because we own.@

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um did you ever notice that the farther up you go the smaller something looks? thats still how it works in freelancer.

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Yes, of course. That is true of every 3D game. But it is equally as true of a baseball as it is true of a planet. The farther away you are from something, the smaller it appears to be. That doesn't tell you anything about the size, unless you know the focal length of the camera, and the distance to the object.

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i mean for one yes you can go higher the farther out in space you go IF your judging from the surface of the planet.but really dude ask the people who made fl. plus all planets are nto the same size. earth-like planets dont have to be as big as earth. and plus the reason why those planets are closer to that white dwarf is that dwarfs produce much less energy and heat and stuff than our sun does sot he plabnet has to be closer to support life.

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According to the official website, Manhattan is almost exactly the same size as Earth (although the escape velocity they have listed is too high by a factor of 1000). So if all of the celestial objects are indeed to scale as you claim, then the entire New York system would be not much larger than the orbit of Earth's moon. And the space ships must be several thousands of meters long.

Based on everything we know about star formation, terrestrial planets can not exist in the life belt of a white dwarf star. White dwarves are small and dim, but still can be very hot - the surface temp is initially more than 20 times hotter than the sun, slowly cooling over billions of years until they "go out".

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for one i'm baseing this on visual and stuff. (my visuals are pretty acurate, why do you think the 1 of the eye doctors hate me when i am the 4th doctor to subscribe contacts. 4 outta 5 people agree with that). i'm guessing you had either no life or nothing else better to do so you had to measure something.

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Well, sorry, but you're guessing wrong. As I said above, you don't have to measure anything, it is obvious just by comparing the sizes and speeds of the objects in the game. It's just a matter of understanding 3D rendering techniques and knowing what to look for.

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and really we shouldnt be arguing.

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Now that I can agree with. Arguing about this is pointless. The planets are the size that Digital Anvil wanted them to be. Whatever size that is.


--milo
www.starshatter.com

maybe da made a mistake for the earth size thing? as in earth they mean some kinda colony or something. or maybe when u land and dock theres technology that shrinks just ur ship. i dunno.

-I trade for a living, rouges piss me off, come get me, catch me if you can, i will leave you in the dust, or you'll die trying, take your pick.- #Part of the traders protection pact# @Heretic Inc. We trade because we own.@