Matrix Games Forums

Hello, I'm working on a carrier and everything seems fine, accept when the fighters I built launch from it they are extremely small, much smaller than they appear in missions where they just drop them in space.
Has anyone seen this before?
Thanks

It is a matter of scale. Your fighter has a scale parameter, and your carrier has a scale parameter. When viewed individually, everything seems OK. But together, things can seem out of whack. My solution to this is to use the same scale throughout the different designs, or use a multiple of the same number. (For me that number is 4.) This makes figuring relative size much easier.
I also set up very quick missions in SS with my new creation next to a stock ship of the same class. This helps me gauge relative size as well.

V/R

Oh, Ok that explains it. I had messed with the fighter scale setting, but it didn't seem to work, so it must be that the other ships are on a different scale. Thanks. (I was also sort of figuring it out by just guessing at the size difference and then checking in game, then adjusting....and so forth. Your suggestion seems a bit easier though

Yea, all of Milo's ships are scaled upwards from 'real' values. I believe fighters were upscaled by a factor of 3? Capships were a different amount, I believe.

This was mostly done to make ships visible for a decent while, instead of you just shooting at blinking dots.

Very true. In a real scale (say, meters), all but the very biggest objects (like planets) disappear very quickly with distance.

V/R

What that is very true, its also additionally to do with the viewport size. If you sit infront of your monitor and measure the angle at your eye from one edge to the other, I'd be surprised if you got much more than 40degrees - and if you cup your hands around your eyes so that you can only see the monitor and then look around you keeping your vision restricted, you'll notice that you're seeing a remarkably small section of the world compared to what you're used to.

Commonly to correct for this "tunnel vision" a bit, a kind of wide-angle lens is metaphorically put across your viewport, and so by cramming a larger image into a smaller one, everything shrinks even further.

From a modder's perspective, there is actually a simple solution. Drop everyone's weapon range - by forcing everyone to get in close you up the angular, and hence on screen size. You may also need to slow things down a bit too, so as to reduce the effectiveness of hit-n-run (boom and zoom) attacks. 50+km attack ranges sound cool, but they do tend to reduce things to dot or at best splodge blasting and the realism argument while good, fades when you consider that games should be *fun* :>

In my personal opinion, your weapon ranges should be rigged so that you can not just *see* the target, but see which way its facing before they're actually in range, so you rely less on following the pipper round when dogfighting.