Resizing of STO - Space

areikou

Ok so we've all come to the conclusion that the Defiant is too large, DS9 is too small, and fighter craft are either impossible to see or too big (Vesta vs Runabout anyone?).

So I had a thought.

Why not just increase the size of the largest ships to make them larger than the smaller craft. The Sovereign is supposed to weigh in at nearly 700 meters. Yet the Defiant is nearly as big as her saucer section. So why not just upscale the size of the ships that are meant to be big to give the ships a more grand feel? Could you imagine if the Odyssey was increased by 2x the size?? She would finally deserve that 6 turn rate!

Thoughts?

rdm1958

i use to not like small ships because they were so hard to see. then i learned to zoom in and out.

the trade off is if the ship is too big your playing field shrinks when zooming in too close to increase the size of your ship.

wunjee

There are a lot of things ingame that are scaled badly.

Bridges/ship interiors are too big/spacious. It's a starship. It's limited on space. The bridge shouldn't be a cathedral and corridors shouldn't be subway tunnels..

Several ships are scaled badly.

Akira should be nearly the length of an Excelsior. (464 meters)
Steamrunner should be roughly half the length of an Akira (240 meters)
Defiant should be 3/4 the length of a Steamrunner (~170 meters)
Nova should be about 25% larger in length then Defiant (~210 meters)
Intrepid should be about 40% larger in length then Steamrunner (~340 meters)

List goes on.

areikou

What they need is a Starship Art Initiative.

Step 1: Stop producing weak new ships.
Step 2: Fix the current ships. No new art needed, only tweaks are needed to make them the correct size and correct the details (Missing windows, etc).
Step 3: Profit

They could also do with a balance pass over every single ship. Rather than releasing 10 more ships with mediocre stats and shabby modeling, they should just fix what they have.

Some bridges should be that large, like the Odyssey I can see being massive. However, hallways should not be large enough to drive a Hummer H3 through.

wunjee

Sometimes I wish these guys were as meticulous about the ingame models and scaling of said models as Wargaming was with World of Tanks.

The Steamrunner model, while nice, is so full of texture problems (and the impulse engines being in the wrong place, despite them being modeled in the right place..) that it's almost a joke. Not to mention it's twice as big as it should be. And it was a $25.00 ship...It should be flawless..

Some problems that really shouldn't exist on a $25.00 ship.

1) Scaling problems.
2) Modeling errors
3) Texture problems:
Phaser strips differentiating in width
No floodlights on name/registry
Lifeboats overlapping equipment panels
Impulse engine textures not where they're modeled
"Aztecking" doesn't line up
Windows are really funky
No shuttlebay (Should be on the front of the saucer)
4) Camera rotates too far aft
5) Ship "Center of mass" pivot point too far aft

There's just no reason something you pay for should be this full of problems when the actual ILM renders are public and readily available..

nynik

I'm also of the mindset that we have a very poorly scaled game. Its thematic, I get that. But its quite subjective to the designer's point of view. This creates a problem because we're mostly dealing with iconic ships here, not generic assets.

Tumerboy/Taco has spoken about similar issues (concerning scale of space assets etc) before. Basically, if I am recalling it correctly, things get harder to code the larger they are. Specifically their accurate placement. Now I'm sure there are some similarities for ships in that regard, because frankly, in 2012, it just doesn't fly that they can not be adequately rendered at significantly diverse scales (EVE) and that people will significantly lose out by not being able to see shuttles zip around them while in a huge Sovereign (hey! thats why the game has UI brackets right?)

wunjee

If things get harder to code the bigger they are, scale them down.

Use the largest ships (Odyssey and Bortas) as templates and scale everything to them.

areikou

Yes but then you get Defiants the size of runabouts and can't see anything.

Check the Foundry one day, there's an asset in there called "Galaxy XLG" or something of the sort. It's literally a giant galaxy class, the size of a tactical cube. It works completely fine. I don't know why everything else can't. Unless they don't want things made too large and make their mistakes so freakin obvious.

wunjee

Probably laziness. I was a hardpointer on Bridge Commander models for a long, long time, and hardpointing large models could be a pain. Especially accurately. But it's far from impossible. I correctly hardpointed a properly scaled Executor-class Star Destroyer. If I could do that, they could properly scale these ships.

jexsamx

STO's starships (with the exception of the Defiant due to DS9 never consistently representing its size) are in correct scale to each other as per the most official measurements available.

Similarly, STO's small craft, shuttles and such, are similarly in scale to each other.

However, for playability purposes, small craft and starships are not in scale to each other. This is to aid in visibility. Fighter craft in this game are already terribly small and hard to spot; if you scaled up the bigger ships for accuracy, they'd be nearly impossible to see.

In short,

1. The ships are properly scaled already, where playability allows.
2. This is a bad idea.

centersolace

Over the past few months I have been compounding a list of all the size issues in STO. The document itself is on another computer, but here are some of the highlights:

1. The Defiant is too big. It should be about 1/6th the length of Galaxy class when in game it's closer to 1/3.

2. DS9 is actually too big. It's about 5 times it's actual size. Here's it compared to a Galaxy class.

3. Deep Space K-7 on the other hand is FIFTY TIMES it's actual size. It's about 350 meters making it smaller than a Excelsior.

4. Hilariously, Spacedock is actually too small. Canonically, it can contain eight Galaxy Class sized ships. When in game... a Galaxy class can't even fit through the doors. :P

5. Player Starbases are also to big. The windows don't line up to player ship windows. (No matter the ship)

wunjee

STO's starships (with the exception of the Defiant due to DS9 never consistently representing its size) are in correct scale to each other as per the most official measurements available.

No they aren't.

Akira's far too small, Steamrunner's far too big, Defiant's far too big, Sovereign's far too small, etc, etc. There are a lot of cases of wrongly-scaled Fed ships.

If there's no official size, go to the backstage. Don't just make something up. And that's what they've done for a lot of these ships. 244 meter long Steamrunner somehow turned into a 500 meter long ship, and 464 meter Akira is smaller then an Intrepid..

lancemeszaros

To be honest, I don't mind ship sizes being the way they are compared to each other because there are playability issues that need to be considered. What I do think should be done is a rescaling of the overall environment. My Prometheus is the same size as Earth's moon. This should not happen. Bridge Commander did this right, where planets actually looked like planets, and the Starbase was not only the right size but you could actually fly around inside of it. The overall environment is way to small for what it should be. Earth is the size of a moon and the moon is the size of a small asteroid.

centersolace

lancemeszaros wrote: »

To be honest, I don't mind ship sizes being the way they are compared to each other because there are playability issues that need to be considered. What I do think should be done is a rescaling of the overall environment. My Prometheus is the same size as Earth's moon. This should not happen. Bridge Commander did this right, where planets actually looked like planets, and the Starbase was not only the right size but you could actually fly around inside of it. The overall environment is way to small for what it should be. Earth is the size of a moon and the moon is the size of a small asteroid.

Very true, but resizing the ships would do wonders for setting this game apart from the rest of it's competition. Most space based games have ships more or less the same size, or sized based on power. But within the Star Trek verse, bigger ships aren't necessarily more powerful. Being a Galaxy class, and being one of the biggest kids on the block is really cool, but going in an itty-bitty Defiant and getting the same results is also really cool.

tebsu

would love to see that and fly with my defiant through the galaxy warp nacelles like an x-wing through the outer perimeter of the deathstar.

right now, we cannot say what is wrong and what not because we have to base where we can build on. therefor, we should start with the smallest ship that you can actually still see and say that this is the correct size. lets take the defiant. then we know from now on, that the defiant is correct and have to upscale/downscale everything else compared to her.

but then, it comes to planets and they have to be up scaled on a crazy level and with the current game engine, i dont know if this will still work on every computer. however, i would love it. would make the game twice as fun as its by now.

maxvitor

Even the television series had problems making everything to the proper scale, DS9 and the Enterprise D are actually roughly the same size, yet the Enterprise is always depicted as being smaller. The station had 3 Danube class shuttles that at the scale they were presented on the station would have been too big to fit in the Enterprise shuttle bays, if the scales of the ships were as they appear. License had to be taken with model scales to give the viewers something to look at during action sequences. When Voyager is docked at the station it looks to be the same size as the Enterprise despite the fact that Intrepid class ships a roughly the same size as Constitution class ships which are half the size of the Galaxy class.

There is the playability factor to consider in this game as well, an important part of the game is eye appeal, some of our ships are enormous and if everything is scaled accurately, zooming out to make the players ship visible would make everything else tiny in comparison. Without a target window showing a zoomed in view of the target ship, players would spend a lot of time dealing with tiny specs buzzing around them, without really seeing what they are shooting at while players in those specs would have to content with their own ships being nearly invisible in comparison to the ships around them, that would be a great deal less interesting to look at than what we have now.
I know the current state is not perfect, but I don't think rescaling ships is going to be an actual improvement, in fact it will only highlight what is missing from the game, target cameras, a bridge view, some kind of 3d radar view.

Myself, I make believe that everything I see is a computer magnification of the ships on screen and that the actual ship may be much smaller or much larger, that's one of the reasons why a ship passing me in sector space appears to be as big as a planet even though it's light years away.

wunjee

DS9 and the Enterprise D are actually roughly the same size, yet the Enterprise is always depicted as being smaller

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120503020535/startrek/images/6/66/Galaxy_class_docked_at_DS9.jpg

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20060820212447/stexpanded/images/5/51/Uss_venture_docked,_ds9.jpg

What?

The DS9 TM states that the station is 969.26 meters tall. That's about right, compared with the screenshots above.

If it's almost 1,000 meters tall, you can work out that it's roughly 1,400 meters in diameter.

That's a hell of a lot bigger then a Galaxy-class.

http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/nl/images/d/db/Voyager_leaves_Deep_Space_Nine.jpg

There we see Voyager moments after leaving the docking clamps. It looks to be about half the size of a Galaxy-class, which it rightfully should be.

A lot of the problems with the scaling in the show is that they were

1) Working with physical studio models in an era of limited computer assistance

2) On a tight timescale, trying to get episodes out quickly

We suffer from neither of the above.

baudl

centersolace wrote: »

Over the past few months I have been compounding a list of all the size issues in STO. The document itself is on another computer, but here are some of the highlights:

1. The Defiant is too big. It should be about 1/6th the length of Galaxy class when in game it's closer to 1/3.

2. DS9 is actually too big. It's about 5 times it's actual size. Here's it compared to a Galaxy class.

3. Deep Space K-7 on the other hand is FIFTY TIMES it's actual size. It's about 350 meters making it smaller than a Excelsior.

4. Hilariously, Spacedock is actually too small. Canonically, it can contain eight Galaxy Class sized ships. When in game... a Galaxy class can't even fit through the doors. :P

5. Player Starbases are also to big. The windows don't line up to player ship windows. (No matter the ship)

yeah the thinks you named really need adjustment...it looks so silly when in sherman system...the windows on K7 don't even match each other. K7 and DS9 need to be redone. K7 may be alot cooler if it was in it's TOS style...not the personell, just the furniture + some windows that correspond to the outside design.

i guess the ships are not scaled for the sake of gameplay, otherwise the defiant would really be unspottable small...but since PVP balancing is irrelevant at this point, i see no reason why it couldn't be done.

if the gameplay aspects in this game aren't up to Trek, plz cryptic atleast make the ships and environment as accurate as possible.

too big hallways/rooms (some of the newer bridges are already better, but still)

i sure hope once Neverwinter is released, cryptic will put some effort into updating the STO engine and grafics + some remodelling.

centersolace

wunjee wrote: »

A lot of the problems with the scaling in the show is that they were

1) Working with physical studio models in an era of limited computer assistance

2) On a tight timescale, trying to get episodes out quickly

We suffer from neither of the above.

baudl wrote: »

if the gameplay aspects in this game aren't up to Trek, plz cryptic atleast make the ships and environment as accurate as possible.

These.... oh so very much these.

jexsamx

wunjee wrote: »

No they aren't.

Yeah they are, for the most part.

Ship sizes in game. A bit outdated, but it's not like they've resized anything since then.

Graph showing each ship plotted along a line, where the line represents the correct scale for each ship, including a line that takes into account the "visibility skew" of shuttles.

As you can clearly see, the majority of ships as of this posting a very close to the line where they ought to be. The only exceptions are the Sabre, Akira, and Defiant. The last of which was so inconsistently shown that "official measurements" and the end-all be-all that is screen canon are at odds with each other constantly.

centersolace

jexsamx wrote: »

As you can clearly see, the majority of ships as of this posting a very close to the line where they ought to be. The only exceptions are the Sabre, Akira, and Defiant.

And the Jem'Hadar Bug, half the Kingon vessels....