Koniving, on 07 September 2013 - 09:12 AM, said:
Far as grass goes, with a larger environment, you'd have to have more panels of grass. For a smaller environment but giving the gigantic illusion, you'd have to shorten the length of the grass but those same size panels would cover more.
Think of it this way. If your panels cover 2 meters, tax you 400 polygons, and you have 2000 meters to cover.. That's 400,000 polygons just in grass and 1,000 panels.
But if you scaled it to be 1 meter = 5 meters, then 2000 meters = 400 meters, then 2 real meters covers 10 fake meters, then you need 40 panels and 16,000. I'm sure I botched that math somewhere but I have to take a shower for work. Ask SCJazz about his slowing time idea, but be ready to spend hours listening to him loop back and forth.
I once heard (back in Closed Beta I believe) that PGI used some generic CryEngine stuff, some models that come for free with the SDK itself. Perhaps the cause of mechs having "realistic" size in game is that PGI wanted to use some of the SDK assets without rescaling them? I'm not into 3D modelling myself, so don't know how true can it be. As far as I understood you, levels of detail are coded so in the engine that you can't just have a 25 meters shadow, but make it 5 times less detailed than 5 meters shadow and expect it to put same strain on the hardware... is it so?
Still I don't understand how can we expect better hitbox fidelity if it depends not on the model size, but on polygon count. Whatever are the sizes of the polygons, hitbox will still have fewer polygons than visual model, and so there will be a possibility of mismatch, and this mismatch will be the same relative to the model size.
Time compression is very strange idea. I don't see how it can do anything but confusing people. We can alter sizes and keep the time scale and change speeds proportionally to sizes (i. e. be it 10 meters Commando running at 30 m/s or 1 meter Commando running at 3 m/s, they both cover 3 x their height per second), but slowing time sounds like cheating. What is it, our speedometer shows us that Commando runs at 30 m/s (108 kph), while it only really runs at 22.5 m/s and covers 2.25 x his height per second? It can be easily disclosed by in-game testing.