AC2 was RE: [MUD-Dev] Total Annilation of Downtime

[Koster]

From: Marc Fielding
> [Amanda Walker]
 
>> Oh, geez.  Not just fighting.  The scale is often wrong overall.
>> My first impression of DAOC was that I was playing miniature golf
>> or visiting Disneyland.  Don't get me wrong--gorgeous art, but
>> the terrain was way out of scale with the characters and
>> buildings.  EQ, AC & AC2 have less of the problem, though they
>> still suffer from the "short jog up to the top of the mountain"
>> problem.  AO is fairly reasonable.

> I've always been curious about this. Aren't scales (X units per
> "foot") locked down early in development? It's not just
> MMOGs. Many other games seem to have this issue to some extent. Is
> it a result of poor communication between level builders and
> characters modelers? Poor specifications? Varying builder/modeler
> skillsets?

There's more to it than that. For example, in your typical 1st
person 3d engine, you'll see that objects built to correct scale
actually look too small--this is a result of a combination of a
number of factors such as field of view, screen resolution, fisheye
on the camera, and so on. Zoom out to 3rd person and look at your
character beside the object, and it looks fine, but looking down on
it it will look like a noticeably smaller object than it really is.

This sort of thing basically ends up making it a pain in the butt to
get correct-feeling scale on items.

Then there's the issue of having terrain that is unrealistically
scaled, with buildings that are realistically scaled (or even
outsized) co-existing.  It's very unlikely that you'll have
realistically sized terrain, because the maps just aren't big
enough. So maps tend to have highly compressed terrain (and
mountains tend to be reduced to hills). Then again, a 100m elevation
distance in a game with a 512m clip plane looks HUGE to the player.

-Raph

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