Better visual cues of speed and size in Kickstarter videos

If I’m not irradiated by cosmic background microwaves blue-shifted into ultra extreme gamma-rays within 10 seconds of launching the game, I’m rioting!

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I’m reviving this topic because it’s remarkably similar to something I was about to post, and because it’s relevant to the Kickstarter video and public perception of scale in the game.

I’ve seen lots of comments outside this community regarding the apparent scale (and how small it seems compared to what’s advertised) of planets and such, and I had the same impression at first until I looked at the speeds which these fighters were traveling. Obviously speed is needed in order to prevent an exorbitant amount of time being spent in transition from place to place. What I think is breaking the apparent scale is, in addition to visual cues (like clouds, trees, buildings, etc) is just how fast these ships are accelerating.

For example: in one demo, I’m watching the player go from 0 to ~250-300 m/s in a fraction of a second while on the ground. In real life, he’s going Mach 1 before you can even say the words “Mach 1”. I think an appropriate (and easy) fix for this, at least for now, would be to slow down the rate of acceleration while increasing the amount of available energy for afterburning.

Someone also mentioned a non-linear acceleration curve for the warp effect. This is fine, and necessary, so I can’t complain about that, but I think the same observation applies. Reducing the rate at which a ship accelerates (or in the case of warp, reducing the rate of change of acceleration (the jerk)) would serve to give players a better sense of scale without doing much, if any, damage to the time it takes to travel from place to place. Hell, make the top-speed faster even - just make it more time-consuming to get there.

You would somehow tend to feel there’s more momentum (from both mass and speed) involved if acceleration was delayed a bit, like you said. As it is it the Hellion just kicks forward from standstill when you max the conventional thruster, like a weightless grasshopper. 0:49

With warp there is too sharp a ddV in the first few seconds. 9:05-9:06 on this stream:

Either the acceleration changes, or (for the regular thrusters) the thruster and enviro FX (transonic cone etc) visuals change to match how sudden the acceleration is. The former’s probably better, although the latter help anyway.

Even a very slight delay at the very start of acceleration serves to convey the forces at work. @ 8:50 :

@ 1:48 :

Somehow I never noticed this thread until it was revived…

I disagree. Nobody has figured it out, but I suspect that we’ll see some great visualizations Think of how crazy people got over trying to visualize large data sets until people discovered all those fascinating visualizations we see today.

I would think that a spectrum of colors could be used, one for each order of magnitude, where some false color tinting on each object would show the distance. It would be a temporary ‘ranging’ indication so that you’d have an idea of whether that rock was right in front of your nose or 100,000km away. Include a cartesian or polar grid to add to the sense.

I’d like to be able to see that grid up all the time as a means of getting a sense of flying through “clouds in space”. It would certainly add to the sensation of speed. And the same color-order matchup could be used. If I’m moving at 10km/s, then I get the red grid. If I’m moving at 100,000km/s, I get the green grid. And so on, telling me that I’m really booking when I see that blue grid. When I hit ultraviolet, I just give up hope.

Colouring the world in pastels produces A SCALE. It in no way conveys how that scale is mapped onto the world of their experiences.

Yup. It does produce a scale. It is the scale that provides feedback to the player’s brain so that it can be trained to understand those vast distances. All that’s needed is time in the environment. Without the scale, it’s almost impossible to figure it out because there’s no feedback to the brain’s learning system.

I reckon people would learn quick enough. If fhe realistic visual cues are there at more “normal” speeds and after that it can just be some simple audio cue. Kind of like the whine of electric motors, or whatever. It would be a shame to denature how barren space actually is. Eventually you have relativistic effects (obviously time effect needs to be omitted for MP), so that takes care of the very upper bound.

People will get used to it, and especially quick if the phenomenon is tied to combat performance (ie judge things wrong and you die/lose). It’s unfamiliar territory, but nothing incompatible with the human brain. I don’t think that rules out aids like such an color-coded in-game assistance, but I do think many players will prefer to minimize that. A lot like minimizing HUD icons.
In WWII air combat sims you learn to know the performance envelope of your fav warbird, to the point that inevitably you barely need to look at your instruments anymore. Likewise in I:B.