Outerra’s got some nice procedural cloud systems in the works at the moment, still don’t cast shadow yet, makes things look a bit odd.
It’s a crazy large amount of work without much in the way of gameplay application, but does look pretty sweet and gets that sense of scale across.
Another approach would be to put some artificial indicator into the game, likely as a HUD component. For example, put 1km high lines on the surface of the planet. Or 10km high lines. I haven’t thought this through to the point of knowing what a good scale indicator would be, but the general idea is to not rely on natural features but to introduce artificial ones. Perhaps a 10km grid across a planet’s surface or some such thing.
The goal would be to introduce it not just to establish scale, but to help with navigation or other tasks that rely on having some sense of scale.
Perhaps something as simple as a 10km x 10km square projected onto the planet surface directly in front of the ship. Or onto the planet where the player happens to be looking.
Also, 30m Helion is as long as this building is tall. Well, 15 feet short of it.
So, the building installation on the volcanic moon looks way smaller than it is. It’s actually absolutely massive. So, maybe some human sized windows would drive in the scale.
Clouds, structures, trees … very limiting when designing alien world and not needed to convey scale, I would say.
What is needed is ingame time and a roaster of objects as “bookmarks”.
Why is everything in “”? Because you don’t need to put in what I wrote, just something comparable in size. People don’t need to know how big it is in real live. You can give numbers, some people understand them and it would help them while learning.
If that’s in, then just play the game. It think those people that played 50 hours in the prototype have a pretty good sense of scale of some of the planets now, even without all those bookmarks.
@Alkan2, you ask what it is that you can comprehend the scale of earth? Try looking at Mars, Europa, Saturn those are real planets and I would guestimate that you can’t “see” the scale there “correctly” as you can with Earth. Earth is special because we lived our whole lives on here. We know the size of rivers, of mountains of clouds of continents. A lot of us travelled from one side of the continent to the other at a constant speed (car). Experience you don’t have with other planets, let alone virtual ones.
You can see what 30m looks like compared to an airplane in this diagram. The length takes into account the pole too, so the main body’s ship is actually a little but smaller ( 20-25m ? ).
I’ve spent a lot of time on Google Earth, looking out of plane windows, looking at distances on the map relative to the surface of the earth, seeing both coasts of Costa Rica from an airplane, so I do have a strong intuitive sense of the scale of things.
That might have something to do with it for me.
It is still pretty big at about 25m from tail to cockpit (that’s about what it looks like to me). The cockpit itself looks like it could hold a large SUV if it was hollowed out.
On earth. That’s what I’m saying. That only works on earth. There’s nothing magical the devs can do to make you use that experience, all they can do is “copy” Earth and then all you would have achieved is that your sense of scale would work on that planet, but only on that one.
There are two ways to build perception of scale:
That’s why Sci-Fi media uses windows on their CGI ships all the time. You know how big a deck at least needs to be so a human can stand. Windows are usually at most as high as a deck, bang reference to the “human bookmark”.
I think a mixture of both is important.
An example how you would “get” the sense of scale on the cratered planet from the prototype:
Now add more stuff we already know about like windows, cars, streets and houses or more alien stuff like dust tornadoes or fungus forests to allow for more “bookmarks” and the process would get easier
That’s basically what I mean, though. I.e. the installation on the volcanic moon made it feel like the moon was small until you realize that the installation itself is as big as a city. But based on the objects there, it feels like it’s more like the size of a large building until you get comparison.
I’m literally just saying that more reference (especially windows, which I did mention) would really drive scale in, hence the title of the thread.
The other point was just that the mountains on the earth-like planet appear to be much larger than the himalayas, which gives the illusion that the planet itself is smaller.
Yeah…
Google: olympus mons.
Makes our mt everest a baby!
Low gravity ROCKS literally…
Except this moon is the size of Earth.
To drive in the scale of the mountains, perhaps snow at a lower altitude would also help.
Also, Olympus mons rises up very gradually.
Scale is very hard to do sometimes, but there are little subtle cues that the brain picks up on that aren’t easy to consciously disseminate. Atmospheric perspective might be one of the other big things - mountains look absolutely massive when there is atmospheric perspective more strongly around the base, but then the summit is rising up to a higher, thinner altitude:
For side by side:
I’m just trying to say that reality looks different in a way that makes the scale apparent unconsciously. I don’t have to know that mount everest is the tallest mountain to know that it looks absolutely massive here.
It would be worthwhile to do a long, careful comparison of Mt. Everest in the picture and the mountains in the short video of the tech demo. The snowy portion making up most of the mountain also drives in the scale effectively for Mt. Everest.
I’m just trying to do an analysis and get a hand with that, essentially, so that we all get a better grasp on what makes scale apparent. It’s also good for artists too - I’m working on that skill myself, which is part of my interest in creating this topic.
Edit: these mountains actually dwaft the himalayas. Traveling at 1.6 km/s you barely see the pane of the window move along a small portion of the mountain in a second when going straight. So, definitely if the snow covered a significantly larger portion of the mountain it would look closer to its real size. At the very least, if the greenery didn’t go up so high.
Also, since they’re so massive, the atmospheric rendering could totally be made thicker around the base so that the effect that is barely visible in the wikipedia picture would be significantly more pronounced.
We use realistic scales, so it sounds less of an issue of ‘simulating ways to make things feel more to scale’ and more of a: we haven’t had the time or budget to implement smaller detailed tiling features that contribute to the existing realism.
I’m curious about the mountains in the prototype. Are they Earth-like mountains? Why do they look so pronounced from outside the atmosphere?
This video (by @TARS, I think?) shows the great effect that a few trees can give to the perception of scale. Once he passes that first peak you clearly see how massive those mountains are:
Kinda figured.
Well, I’m happy as is because the game is so awesome already as something to fly around and play with and you’re building something insanely awesome in that world.
So, with time and money you’ll be able to increase the graphical quality substantially, which will come later.
I mean, this is the only game that’s made me go “Wow, I’m going to buy a new computer for this.”
Edit: had another thought on what it could be - a lack of atmospheric scattered lighting, making the dark sides of the mountains too thick, dark and pronounced. It’s sort of like the moon has scales that are really hard to judge because there is no atmosphere, so massive craters look smaller than they actually are.
No idea, really. I’m honestly just trying to find cheap ways of making it more apparent. Lol. More pronounced textures, maybe.
Edit 3: lastly, anyone who has questions can be lead to this thread, which I can edit after we figure out some of the optical illusions.
Funny story: Something about the shape of the Hellion is TOTALLY screwing with your (and my) sense of scale. Just mocked it up as being ~30 meters (including pole) and the cockpit is spot on. Maybe even a tad cramped for a ship that sized.
Quick mock-up to check the aprox cockpit size.
Thought it would end up being a lot larger than this too. Weird. Maybe it’s in the way it tapers and how far it’s separated away from the main hull?
Whatever the reason, the cockpit looks bigger than it should do compared with the rest of the ship when I’m looking at it. Fallible human brain for the loss.
Good thing it’s a placeholder! 
That helps quite a bit.
I can’t wait to see what you guys pull off post KS.
My game? /snickers
Update: I just flew in an airplane over a crapload of mountains. I realized what was wrong almost immediately: atmospheric perspective, clearly. I could blur my vision (with one eye shut, so no depth perception) while in the plane, and the landscape still looked absolutely gigantic without the detail.
The reason was definitely atmospheric perspective.
The atmosphere has this effect of having a very intense distortion effect at low altitude, and gradually tapers off as the altitude increases.
Go to exactly 1:36:56 where you’re at 21 km. That’s right around 70k feet from this video:
Of course the camera is exaggerating the curvature, however, it should be noted that everything looks flattened and compressed, like the real atmosphere is a compressed-to-the-ground version of the Infinity atmosphere.
When you hit around 10.5 km in the Infinity video, that’s the cruising altitude for an airplane, which should be representative of the pictures you see.
There’s a massive difference, and it’s the atmosphere. Basically it’s way thicker near the ground, and that’s why things just haven’t been looking to scale.
Here, for instance, you can’t appreciate scale because the air is thinner:
You can’t appreciate the scale because the air is clear. Your examples all have lots of particulates in the air. The greater the distance, the greater the mass of particulates that the light must pass through. It’s fairly easy to find images from satellites that show various places around the planet at sea level where there is no haze at all. The sense of scale is lost.
In the following picture, there’s haze to the left of the mountains and clear to the right. I don’t know about you, but I get no sense of scale from the desert region.
So what you’re asking for is more atmospheric haze, which is one of the oldest techniques in computer graphics terrain scene generation for eliciting a sense of scale.
