Nope...anything big will appear to be small when viewed form a long way off. So how small or big something will look depends on how far you are from it. Use your imagination some. You will enjoy the game more if you do.

The Mole, yes the planets are very small. It's because FL is more of an arcade/adventure game and doesn't have a realistic scale.

Everything is scaled down alot compared to ships/stations/etc, like planets, stars, distances. It just how the game is unfortunatly.

-Stregone

Well, don't get me wrong, I think FL still captures the feel and atmosphere of space very nicely. Feels more realistic than any other space-sim, actually.

It just kinda reminds me of this space-sim I played a while back... I forget what it was called, but the planets in that game were REALLY small. I mean you could actually go through the atmosphere and destroy cities on the surface very unrealistically.

Still, Freelancer is nowhere that scaled-down...

Well, if the planets were to scale, and the distances between them were to scale, and they were in motion all the time. Navagation between them could take days (real time) depending on where they were in their orbit.

Also assuming that the reason there are docking rings on planets is so that only authorized ships can pass thru the planetary defenses, it could take quite a while to orbit a planet to get to the docking ring.

I'm sure it was done to improve the pacing of the game.

Yes, the planets are VERY small compared to ship/size ratio. The main reason is because I dont think the game engine is capable of anything bigger. Iv'e worked with engines especially the UnrealED engine used to power UT2k3, and it is definatley limited in size. What's probably happening when you enter a jump gate is the engine is loading a new map (system). Each system is a new map, you cant travel from system to system just by pure flight.

But yea, I think it would be totally amazing to have real sized planets. It would like totally blow your socks off the sheer size. Of course since everything would be scaled up you would need a tremendous amount of speed to travel to each system. You would need to go the speed of light essentailly. And even as Katana said that could take days, week, or YEARS to complete a single mission in real time.

But it is possible to do still there would just require alot of loading and you'd have to load millions and millions of maps. I dont think people realise how big our universe really is.

Edited by - foolhardy on 03-03-2003 16:18:28

Edited by - foolhardy on 03-03-2003 16:19:41

Hey, but what if they WOULD have made everything to scale... Meaning it would take literally days to travel between planets and between other areas...

Meaning you would have to save during a travel and get back to it later so you wouldn't have to be glued to the monitor that whole time... Dang, the game would take damn near forever to finish!!

Just a thought... Still, it's better the way they did it.

BTW, call me "Mole" not "The Mole." Saves time.

I dont think that would be good, wating is no fun. I'd MUCH rather be doing what I am doing in Freelancer right now than wating 3 days to do a convoy mission argggg.

LOL, I guess that's what real life could be for if we could really fly through space these days...

Guess it'll still be awhile. Just hope I'll be alive to see the start of it... Space colonization that is.

didnt we already have this conversation?

Of course they're scaled down, as are distances, but that's OK as far as I'm concerned. While it does seem a little odd that you can go around a planet in about two minutes, it would be ridiculously boring to do anything else. I figure the planets are scaled down by about 1000:1, and distances even moreso. However, the only size issue I really have is with space stations/capships. These things are supposed to be massive; large enough to hold several ships at once, and several thousand people as well. One of the few sims to really get this sense of scale right was Freespace 2, too bad really.

There are only 10 kinds of people in the world:
those who understand binary, and those who don't.

We already had this discussion and the thread was closed.

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It would not necessarily take any longer. They could have simply increased the lane-speed to compensate for the larger distances.

Make the planets larger, distances longer and increase the speed of the lanes accordingly so it still takes the same time to travell a certain lane.


Edited by - Thundercat on 03-03-2003 16:45:55

Try i-war 2, there is a demo for it. The planets and distances are to proportion as far as I can tell (the map even shows the orbits of the planets around the sun(s) and orbits of moons around planets, though they don't actualy move ). When you are in orbit of a planet it will be absolutly HUGE, as it should unless its a tiny planet or moon. FL planets are the size of a very large asteroid or small moon.

-Stregone