No, really... Somebody needs to watch DS9 before making complaints. It's perfectly fine the way it is.
No, really... YOU need to watch DS9 before making complaints, about MY complaints. DS9 happens to be my favorite of the 5 live-action shows, and i've seen the whole show several times over. I'd like to think I know what i'm talking about in regards to anything DS9.
I do not wanna re-open the DS9-is-too-large-files here, but certain objects in STO (other than planets) just have ridiculous sizes for absolutely NO reason:
*The crashed Bird-of-Prey in "Alpha": My Klingon character is almost as large as the entire front section of the ship! Awesome mission, but this was the ulimate immersion-killer :-/
Wrt these examples, I really do not see any reason for their apparently wrong sizes.
What REALLY annoys me is that the star texture outside the windows in the Fleet Starbase is so grainy and low res. It was just released, and it doesn't look that good.
Interiors - I know they've been blown way up because of the camera system, but I seriously think the camera should be adjusted and the interiors correctly scaled.
You know what the scale is? The TOS Constitution set had corridors 12 feet wide, not sure about TNG or DS9. I'm wondering at how it's scaled here. I know the bridges certainly seem too large, but the corridors don't seem that bad.
*actually, this kind of brings me around to another point, that maybe we shouldn't even have a sector space, and instead travel between star systems within our ship interiors, because we wouldn't be seeing all these other ships traveling around as anything other than streaks of light or blips on some sort of sensor display.
I always thought Sector Space wasn't "real", but the viewscreen showing us an abstraction and popping up items of interest, scaling them so they're visible. The "astrometrics display" help reinforce that perspective.
It appears that the Cryptic engine is very limited as to what you can do with it. I've read a lot of DEV posts saying you can't do this or that because of the Engine, where other MMO's i've played are able to do all the things that Cryptic Dev's say they can't do. Maybe it's time to look at designing a new one?
Cryptic's engine isn't limited. It can potentially do anything and everything possible with the realms of current video and audio technology and techniques. Notice I said potentially[/l]. The engine's current capability (or a naysayering saying limits) are present because that's the way the engine was designed and implemented. That's the reason why. Why we can't be on our bridge and be flying through sector space with our ship avatar. The engine wasn't designed for that. It's entirely possible for those capability to be added into the game with time and programmer time. Anything technologically possible can be added to the engine.
You need to look at the history of Cryptic's engine. Their initial engine was created for City of Heroes. It's a good decent engine and NcSoft has been slowing adding to it since Cryptic and City of Heroes went their separate ways.
Cryptic wanted to add a lot of new features but had neither the time nor manpower to implement them. When Cryptic for the contact for Mavel Comic MMORPG, that was their change to implement all the things they for their engine, but also their own database engine to make possible a truely MMORPG on one shard. (Current Relational Database Management Systems are a bottleneck for MMORPG shards with large numbers of players). Cryptic goals for their new engine was for a super hero MMORPG, but more in general for a human avatar type MMORPG. That's the state of the engine when STO development was started.
The other advantage of that Cryptic owns their own engine. They don't need to license it from anyone else. And with many development teams working on expanding the game base engine, every other team benefits from the work.
Yes, Alpha was trickery, similar to putting it into the backdrop. In reality, that planet can appear bigger because only half of it is made (the half facing you) and there is no collision.
All Engines have limitations. Our engine is actually very good overall, and we hear that everytime we hire someone from another company. Yes, there are limitations, but we are always adding to it, and improving on things. We will not be tossing it out and using something else.
Many of the limitations we work with, are due to the types of games we make. MMOs have special limitations over most single player games. Turns out, having to render 100's of characters at once, and sync data between all of them is a bit of a hindrance.
That's pretty much what they do in X3. The planets are huge. You can be looking at one directly in front of you (still a fair distance away), then look up and realize that it is also directly above you; they are just that big. However, if you were to fly around to the far side of one, you would find that it wasn't all there.
They get around the collisions thing by making it dangerous to enter the 'atmosphere'; basically, if you get too close to a planet the screen starts shaking and everything goes white. Presumably, if the player kept going they'd die; but it's alarming enough to make me want to turn around, so I've never found out.
Even with these though, X3 is a massive resource hog; and the planets play a large part in that.
I like how in the KDF episode, "Alphas" there was a blue gas giant in the background. It was larger than the screen could actually fit. I think that's how the planet should be scaled like,
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I always thought Sector Space wasn't "real", but the viewscreen showing us an abstraction and popping up items of interest, scaling them so they're visible. The "astrometrics display" help reinforce that perspective.
Turn on Astrometric View. Which is what is what you would see on bridge viewscreens or an astrometric lab aboard our starship. Ala Voyager, we get simulated mapping grids and generic shipping lanes displayed. The space station models, such as DS9 and K7 would make sense to appear that way. But once we turn off Astrometric View, it should be as if you are actually in outer space. So the DS9 and K7 models should be interpreted as part of their respective star systems. At least, I think that is how it should be.
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Comments
No, really... YOU need to watch DS9 before making complaints, about MY complaints. DS9 happens to be my favorite of the 5 live-action shows, and i've seen the whole show several times over. I'd like to think I know what i'm talking about in regards to anything DS9.
*Type-8 Shuttles on ground maps: A medium-sized character stands as high as the shuttle. In maps like Vulcan (Diplomatic Orders) or the shuttle bay-simulation on Bajor this just looks ridiculous.
**Size comparison with a type-6 shuttle (almost the same size):
***http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s7/7x15/lowerdecks162.jpg
***http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x54/TrueX-Ray/TNG%20Caption%20This/TNGCaption84e.jpg
*The crashed Bird-of-Prey in "Alpha": My Klingon character is almost as large as the entire front section of the ship! Awesome mission, but this was the ulimate immersion-killer :-/
Wrt these examples, I really do not see any reason for their apparently wrong sizes.
STOWiki admin.
You know what the scale is? The TOS Constitution set had corridors 12 feet wide, not sure about TNG or DS9. I'm wondering at how it's scaled here. I know the bridges certainly seem too large, but the corridors don't seem that bad.
I always thought Sector Space wasn't "real", but the viewscreen showing us an abstraction and popping up items of interest, scaling them so they're visible. The "astrometrics display" help reinforce that perspective.
Cryptic's engine isn't limited. It can potentially do anything and everything possible with the realms of current video and audio technology and techniques. Notice I said potentially[/l]. The engine's current capability (or a naysayering saying limits) are present because that's the way the engine was designed and implemented. That's the reason why. Why we can't be on our bridge and be flying through sector space with our ship avatar. The engine wasn't designed for that. It's entirely possible for those capability to be added into the game with time and programmer time. Anything technologically possible can be added to the engine.
You need to look at the history of Cryptic's engine. Their initial engine was created for City of Heroes. It's a good decent engine and NcSoft has been slowing adding to it since Cryptic and City of Heroes went their separate ways.
Cryptic wanted to add a lot of new features but had neither the time nor manpower to implement them. When Cryptic for the contact for Mavel Comic MMORPG, that was their change to implement all the things they for their engine, but also their own database engine to make possible a truely MMORPG on one shard. (Current Relational Database Management Systems are a bottleneck for MMORPG shards with large numbers of players). Cryptic goals for their new engine was for a super hero MMORPG, but more in general for a human avatar type MMORPG. That's the state of the engine when STO development was started.
The other advantage of that Cryptic owns their own engine. They don't need to license it from anyone else. And with many development teams working on expanding the game base engine, every other team benefits from the work.
That's pretty much what they do in X3. The planets are huge. You can be looking at one directly in front of you (still a fair distance away), then look up and realize that it is also directly above you; they are just that big. However, if you were to fly around to the far side of one, you would find that it wasn't all there.
They get around the collisions thing by making it dangerous to enter the 'atmosphere'; basically, if you get too close to a planet the screen starts shaking and everything goes white. Presumably, if the player kept going they'd die; but it's alarming enough to make me want to turn around, so I've never found out.
Even with these though, X3 is a massive resource hog; and the planets play a large part in that.
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