Geometric Inconsistency was AC2 was RE: [MUD-Dev] Total...

[Martin Bassie]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 10:21:28AM -0800, Marc Fielding wrote:
> [Amanda Walker]
 
>> Oh, geez.  Not just fighting.  The scale is often wrong overall.
>> My first impression of DAOC was that I was playing miniature golf
>> or visiting Disneyland.  Don't get me wrong--gorgeous art, but
>> the terrain was way out of scale with the characters and
>> buildings.  EQ, AC & AC2 have less of the problem, though they
>> still suffer from the "short jog up to the top of the mountain"
>> problem.  AO is fairly reasonable.
 
> I've always been curious about this. Aren't scales (X units per
> "foot") locked down early in development? It's not just
> MMOGs. Many other games seem to have this issue to some extent. Is
> it a result of poor communication between level builders and
> characters modelers? Poor specifications? Varying builder/modeler
> skillsets?B

I'd say it mostly seems to be a combination of these, although I'd
expect an attempt to make the world seem "impressive" may also play
a part. Huge planes and fantastic buildings are a convenient way of
overwhelming people, and it's easy to slip up and get the scale
"just wrong". Even if it's all documented and locked down in the
design specs, you could still see some of these inconsistencies -
different tools and human error can easily cause this.

You'll see that 'sequel' games and newer games released by
established MMOG publishers will suffer less from these problems,
although I doubt that they'll be alltogether eliminated.

An old example:

  When I first looked at EQ, there was one thing that really irked
  me.  It wasn't so much the oversized game world, but more the
  sloppy way in which the textures were stretched to what appeared
  to be 1.5 "normal" size. If you can remember the way the doors
  looked, you should have no problem relating to this. The building
  geometry was out of tune with the geographic geometry and the
  model geometry, creating an environment I could only experience as
  "odd". I've only seen bits and pieces of EQ2 and SWG, but they
  appear to have a better relationship between terrain, structures
  and models.

That's one thing I believe we had done correctly in Underlight (tiny
as it may be :). The rooms/terrain scales seem to be mostly in synch
with the avatars.

-Martin

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