Having a realistic scale doesn't have to mean a slower paced game. Just adjust the max velocity of the ships. Trade lanes could still drop you off right next to a space station so that you could trade/whatever.

Realistically scaled planets with orbiting space stations was implemented in Frontier, which was released in 1993. There were about 100 billion planets in the Frontier universe. These were generated according to some formula (same every time) and while almost 100.0% of them contained absolutely nothing, this was accomplished 10 years ago in assembler by one person.

Frontier had a much slower pace than FL, my point is that by creating non realistic propulsion systems, this can be avoided while still being able to enjoy a "real scale" universe, if this is something you like.

By "we", you mean board veterans?

Perhaps you did, perhaps you didn't but that's irrelevant. New members, and there are a growing host of them, may just want to discuss issues you've previously discussed too, not trusting that the Elders, in their wisdom, have uttered every last word on a topic.

This is going to happen a lot once FL is out, so vets need to just relax and either take part in or ignore repeated threads, IMHO.

"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."

That's where the capabilites of the engine itself become a factor, in order to do that the developers would need to create LOTS of maps and the loading time could be significant. Besides there's just not enough development resources to create such a universe. it took them 4 years just to create this one.

Edited by - foolhardy on 03-03-2003 17:01:28

Why would it take more development resources? They'd just have to move stuff around and make things bigger(its very easy to scale a 3d object), not create any new content or code. It was simply a design decision to make it the way it is.

-Stregone

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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).

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If that is important to you, you should give Starshatter a try - the planets and moons are realistically scaled and all orbit and rotate on their axes in real time. Even the ships and space stations are in orbit around the nearest planet or moon.

Regarding increasing the size of the solar systems in Freelancer: what would be the point? If you increase the speed of the ships to keep travel times similar (by the way, this would mean that the tradelanes and cruise engines would all be faster than light), space would "feel" just as small as it does right now. It would look a little bigger, because distant planets would appear as tiny dots of light, but I doubt the payoff would be worth the effort. Freelancer is just not that kind of game.

--milo
www.starshatter.com

I'll have to check that out

I beg to differ. It would definitly feel much more expansive if a nearby planet wasn't twice (actualy probably alot more) the size of a full moon. On a good day you can see mars with the naked eye, but its still a freakin' dot. Also, when you rush up to a planet in a trade lane it would keep getting bigger! And when you are sitting there in 'orbit' you will completely and utterly dwarfed by it.

Anyways, I was replying to the person who said freelancer ahd the most accurate proportions and etc. Which is not true at all

-Stregone

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I beg to differ. It would definitly feel much more expansive if a nearby planet wasn't twice (actualy probably alot more) the size of a full moon. On a good day you can see mars with the naked eye, but its still a freakin' dot.

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Even with a good telescope, it's not much more than a dot. Saturn and Jupiter are large enough that you can make out some surface detail with a backyard telescope on a dark, clear night. But Mars and Venus are just tiny pinkish disks.

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Also, when you rush up to a planet in a trade lane it would keep getting bigger! And when you are sitting there in 'orbit' you will completely and utterly dwarfed by it.

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Only if there is sufficient graphical detail in the texture maps. There are two main cues that your brain uses to gauge size in a simulation, surface detail and relative motion (parallax). PC graphics cards have limited texture memory, so Freelancer keeps you far enough away from the planets so that you don't notice the individual texels in the texture maps. Otherwise, you would see something like this: http://www.3000ad.com/pics/bcm/photo299.jpg which isn't really a convincing representation of enormous size.

The other main visual cue for size is relative motion. If the tradelanes and cruise engines are scaled up so that travel times remain similar, you will still be able to scoot around a planet in a minute or two, and the planets will still feel smallish. The tradelanes would really look kind of weird. For 99% of the trip, the destination would be a tiny dot. Then in the last couple of seconds, the planet would rapidly expand to fill the display (sort of like the superfast motion you see in Star Wars movies when ships come out of hyperspace).

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Anyways, I was replying to the person who said freelancer ahd the most accurate proportions and etc. Which is not true at all.

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Of course. No argument there.

--milo
www.starshatter.com

Amen to what have been said... Freelancer is a game, a SciFi game!

For more parts to this discussion head to Erasers link!

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

Thats a pretty old game. Look at something newer like i-war 2. here's some screenies I happened to have collecting dust on my HD.

semi upclose to a planet, pretty good texture:
Click here

Center of a multistar system, I beleive a trinary, with a gas giant in the foreground(pretty distant still).
Click here

And a good ol' yellow sun, pretty close up
Click here

In i-war, while you are LDS'ing to a distant place you see the sun(s) creep by, and if you happen to pass near any planets they zip by, and when you get to your destination it does pretty much just pop out of nowhere, but thats what it would look like approaching a planet at FTL speeds. But it all gives a feeling of massiveness and it doesn't have any ill effects like you describe. It was done in i-war 2 and it works very well, if you ask me.

-Stregone