55 replies to this topic

[l33tworks]

I just don't get it. Why not try your hardest to make it feel like you are piloting big machines, even go out of your way, eg,depth of field, small terrain features etc, instead of actually go the other way on purpose?

MWO never had a good sense of scale to begin with, but the more and more time passes the worse it gets. Look at the new Forest colony for example. Why have trees the size of skyscrapers? Why have rocks and terrain that make it look like you are a tiny person going for a stroll in the woods? I get that there are really massive trees on earth, close to that size, and these are "alien" planets so anything is possible, but the argument could be made why cant alien planets also have maybe smaller natural features, smaller trees, normal sized creatures not skyscraper bones like in viridian bog etc?.

Small trees are present in MWO, smaller than your mech, and they look like regular trees, but then right next to them are trees 100x as big. It looks odd. Terrain usually have uniform sized trees, not a bit of everything. It really makes my brain very hard to get a sense of scale when everything is just randomly scaled.

Just pretend your mech is person sized next time you play in any of the new maps, honestly it feels somewhat natural that you are person sized.
The movement of enemy mechs against the environment is also incredibly fast for the scale. you could easily pretend you are watching human sized objects moving and interacting. Watching videos of people doing parkour, they don't move as fast as mechs do in this game.

For example, this could easily be a family picture of my cousin hiking in the woods when he was 12 and chubby.

Edited by l33tworks, 16 September 2015 - 05:28 PM.

[1453 R]

'Mechs are not Jaegers. Some of them are actually not much more than two storeys tall. Even the biggest of them wasn't more'n...hmm, was it fourteen meters? Eh, someone will correct me.

These are big bad warbots, yes, but we're not talking Voltron here. I would not want to face down a Kaiju in a BattleMech, that is fer damn sure.

[LordKnightFandragon]

Yeah, its why I look at that 09 MW5 video and have instant daydreams of what coulda been. Scale is perfect, models are perfect, it just really made you dream of how amazing the game coulda been. Then MWO ends up being the result.

[Brody319]

Alien planets

[l33tworks]

1453 R, on 16 September 2015 - 05:34 PM, said:

'Mechs are not Jaegers. Some of them are actually not much more than two storeys tall. Even the biggest of them wasn't more'n...hmm, was it fourteen meters? Eh, someone will correct me.

These are big bad warbots, yes, but we're not talking Voltron here. I would not want to face down a Kaiju in a BattleMech, that is fer damn sure.

Yea but thats going of some Battletech rulebook and its absolutely ridiculous to follow that logic that an atlas is 8 feet and you could high five it if you wanted to or give it a wedgee. MWO doesn't have to follow stuff like that.

I go off what I see, if you look at the cockpit of a mech, for example an Atlas, and imagine the entire cockpit equipment inside and the human pilot has to fit in the left eye, then extrapolate how small the cockpit is compared to the rest of the mech, then the entire mech would be huge. if you think of a car, its ALL cockpit, and they are about 4 meters long, so you cant say a mech is 8 meters tall, its ridiculous and as I said unnecessary to be followed.

Edited by l33tworks, 16 September 2015 - 05:43 PM.

[Alek Ituin]

Sequoioideae would like to have a word with you, OP.

[Clint Steel]

I agree they are not great at scale, though those trees are pretty much redwood size.



http://previews.agef...0-00047-115.jpg

Edited by Clint Steel, 16 September 2015 - 05:46 PM.

[Thuriel]

What about Living Legends scale? Looks nice.

[bad arcade kitty]

because flat maps without covers would make the game into a hilarious snipe fest

[Andi Nagasia]

Just remember

for Scale,

But how Big Exactly is a 100Ton Atlas

13.0Meters, or 42.65feet, or 3.93Stories,

how tall is the Average Pine Tree?
(its actually 50-80 Feet)(LinkHere)

so a Pine tree can EASILY tower over an Atlas,
Edit-

Edited by Andi Nagasia, 16 September 2015 - 05:51 PM.

[Nauht]

Mechs are usually 12m tall. Last i checked even trees on Earth can grow bigger than that.

[aniviron]

1453 R, on 16 September 2015 - 05:34 PM, said:

'Mechs are not Jaegers. Some of them are actually not much more than two storeys tall. Even the biggest of them wasn't more'n...hmm, was it fourteen meters? Eh, someone will correct me.

These are big bad warbots, yes, but we're not talking Voltron here. I would not want to face down a Kaiju in a BattleMech, that is fer damn sure.

The Atlas in MWO is 18m. No, it's not nearly as big as some mecha, but it's still pretty damn huge. Much bigger than the scale of most structures in MWO implies. Canonically, Atlases are about 13-14m if I remember- but scales were adjusted for balance and sense reasons in MWO (canonically, the Direwolf is 12m, and the Firemoth is 11...)

But the scale isn't the only problem. The gravity in MWO has been tripled roughly (for a thorough look at the subject, there is a great video here) which has the effect of making everything seem more human-scaled.

The mech animations are also significantly too fast for the speed at which the mechs move. Again, they're set up so that they take strides about as rapidly as a human would, but for something as large as a mech, they would have to take steps far less often to move at the speed they do because of their stride length (with some exceptions for very small very fast mechs like the Locust). It's also a little weird to think of something that weighs that much moving in quick rapid motions instead of taking longer strides. Look at the stride of the Summoner in this MW2 video. You can see that it accelerates to top speed for a while, and the strides are slower and longer, and don't look like a guy jogging. MWO used to have animations more like that, but they were sped up back in beta.

Finally, I think the movement of the game contributes quite a bit. Mechs move like wheeled vehicles- they slow gradually as they go up slopes, but can use momentum to carry them over ridges, tiny obstructions that rise to less than ankle height block them, as though the mech were rolling and unable to step over it, and movement is always perfectly smooth and level, the cockpit and point of aim do not move as the stride cycles.

Edited by aniviron, 16 September 2015 - 06:06 PM.

[l33tworks]

Andi Nagasia, on 16 September 2015 - 05:48 PM, said:

Just remember

for Scale,

But how Big Exactly is a 100Ton Atlas

13.0Meters, or 42.65feet, or 3.93Stories,

how tall is the Average Pine Tree?
(its actually 50-80 Feet)(LinkHere)

so a Pine tree can EASILY tower over an Atlas,
Edit-

Just lol at an Atlas being 13m. Do you have any idea how small that is? use your head man, are you saying if you parked to two 7 series BMWs in front of each other they would almost be a long as an atlas is tall?

x2 = Atlas?

Yes the car is 5.212Metres long.

Edited by l33tworks, 16 September 2015 - 06:30 PM.

[Torric]

Part of it may be engine related, they usually have to wall off part of the map for performance reasons which leads to BIG objects (mountains, hills, cliffs, walls...).

But yeah, design could definitely be improved to better represent the size of mechs. I recall a tweet from the Infinity - Quest for earth guys about MWO, they were appalled by the style of the maps and the filters and colours used

[l33tworks]

I agree anivirion about the gravity, Its way too high. I made a post about it before Beta was even out on these forums just based on the beta teaser videos. It would help to turn it down down, would have been a good nerf to poptarts as well because they would hand in the air longer. As it stands the movement of the mechs if way to fast paced in general.



The sense of scale here is excellent. Why cant the whole game be like this?

Just if you think the guy is almost 2m tall, and he barely makes it to ANKLE height of the atlas, you see how ridiculous it is to say an Atlas or Direwolf of ANY mech is only ~12m.

[Rushmoar]

I think some of the scale issues result form the assets designed to get better performance because it's an online game. Plus some of the detail is not needed. The grass on Forest Colony looks like it must be 3 meters tall. So the grass makes me feel like I'm sitting in a cockpit only 15 ft off the ground. So why even put in the grass.

[Andi Nagasia]

l33tworks, on 16 September 2015 - 06:17 PM, said:

Just lol at an Atlas being 13m. Do you have any idea how small that is? use your head man, are you saying if you parked to two 7 series BMWs in front of each other they would almost be a long as an atlas is tall?

x2 = Atlas?

if thats how tall Lore and several BT sources says it is, that thats how tall it is,
Who are we to Say that BT Scaling is wrong? do we even have the Right to Say that it is?
you think and feel you Know Better, lets see you Make this Game with bigger robots,
but remember the game you make Wont be BT, because in BT an Atlas is 13m tall!

[Nauht]

l33tworks, on 16 September 2015 - 06:26 PM, said:

I agree anivirion about the gravity, Its way too high. I made a post about it before Beta was even out on these forums just based on the beta teaser videos. It would help to turn it down down, would have been a good nerf to poptarts as well because they would hand in the air longer. As it stands the movement of the mechs if way to fast paced in general.



The sense of scale here is excellent. Why cant the whole game be like this?

Just if you think the guy is almost 2m tall, and he barely makes it to ANKLE height of the atlas, you see how ridiculous it is to say an Atlas or Direwolf of ANY mech is only ~12m.

No that vid scale is ridiculous.

Given the weight of armour, internals, one leg alone would be over 60t.

Consider that an Abrams tank is already 60t... there's no way an Atlas of that size in the vid is 100 tonnes with ordnance, armour, engine, internals.

[bad arcade kitty]

calm down, may be their tons and/or meters are not equal ours

l33tworks, on 16 September 2015 - 06:26 PM, said:

working cockpit screens!!

also poor atlas, dropped to its death, atlai don't even have jj

[MoonUnitBeta]

I'm not seeing the issue.

"uh ohhhhhhhh it's not like real liiiiiiife guuuuiiiiiisssseeeeee. I'm incapable of using my imaginaaaaatiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn."

I think it's visually interesting - it's not your typical Crytek Palm/Fern forest, or Alpine forest for that matter.
PGI is getting better at adding the smaller greebly bits. But anything you add is going to reduce performance and you need to figure out better ways to reduce it's footprint. I'm sure PGI can get carried away with adding everything we need to draw relations to, but I feel like it would be dull, graphics heavy, and there might be so much stuff that turning down graphics settings would give those people an advantage.

Sure, scale is important, but when people are arguing about tree size not being realistic, I can't help but feel the whole point behind an art style sail silently over their head.