Astronaut & Voxel Size

[MacThule]

I understand that Schema is German, so meters is what we're working with, but in this situation I feel like it's a terribly inconvenient measurement for voxels Starmade. Mainly because of astronaut size. 2-block-tall astrotoons look ridiculous because the 1-meter minimum resolution of their voxel universe.

Computers are huge, like mainframes. They're waist-high.
We swim in chairs, like 6-year-olds.
If you make a small control panel in your cockpit, you can barely see over it.
Everywhere we go, against every background our toons look tiny, like elves.

It wouldn't be an issue if they were 3-5 blocks tall. Why are they so short then? "Because 2 meters." Great, very consistent, but it affects the game... poorly. It looks silly. And for no real cause at all. Some have suggested implementing smaller scale voxels, which was soundly rejected, probably because it would be a technical nightmar. My thought is that maybe we should just look into changing the size we say the voxels are, and make our astronauts bigger.

What if default toons were set to 3 or 4 blocks high instead of 2 and change the description to say that voxels in StarMade are all actually 1/2 meter in size?

What if there were a server setting where admins could adjust the height of player toons?

Then voxels could be 1m each, or 1/2m each, or even 1/3m (1ft) each. This would allow for much more detail in creations without them looking like they were built for a race of giants. It could also allow for more detailed skins, I guess, although by default the game could probably just stretch the existing skin.

 

[kiddan]

I wouldn't mind characters being a little higher. Not so high that you can't fit through a 2x2 door, just high enough that you don't feel like a child every time you try to look or a railing or table...

 

[Sachys]

Then voxels could be 1m each, or 1/2m each, or even 1/3m (1ft) each. This would allow for much more detail in creations without them looking like they were built for a race of giants.

SLABS! O_____o~

I understand that Schema is German, so meters is what we're working with

METRES! -_____-

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;D
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Also, without a mass of retexturing it would look pretty weird, and (if rolled out as standard) would require huge mass / block increases and cause additional strains on servers no doubt.

 

[jstenholt]

Yeah, nah.

I have no problem with cartoony. Starmade looks like a voxel game and also it is a voxel game.

 

[Nauvran]

so what you're saying is you dont like any voxel standard voxel games?
And it kinda sounds more like the camera is placed wrong in Dave

 

[MacThule]

so what you're saying is you dont like any voxel standard voxel games?

Eh? Not at all; there's a... very, very big difference between saying "I think that an undersized toon looks silly" or noting that it is at the root of a variety of accommodation requests (fitting, non-voxel chairs, smaller voxels, etc) and saying "I don't like the game. Because short toon." I just think it's something that would look better and allow for more detailed cockpits and bridges that don't make you feel like you've wandered into Zentradi space. Not like that's a big 'problem,' but I have seen some of the more art-oriented builders make some really beautiful, oversized fighters with nice-looking cockpits with elegant command chairs that are "8 meters" tall. Not very useful, but everything built to size tends to be very abstract (again, hence people begging for command chairs that won't make their toons look like little people).

And yeah, the cam is definitely placed mid-torso, which definitely contributes to my issue with Dave. But also the toons are just plain undersized due to nothing more than a very arbitrary adherence to round-number measurement of the voxels. It's not the fault of voxels or something inherent to voxel games, it's the fault of an inflexible voxel-toon size relationship. And no big deal, really. Just something I think could stand improvement in terms of options.

 

[Neon_42]

I think this is a good suggestion. Much of the lovely detail that people craft into ships feels way too big due to the player size.

 

[OfficialCoding]

Seed of andromeda the blocks are 1/4 the player's height, and that works great
[doublepost=1535426449,1535425645][/doublepost]

I think this is a good suggestion. Much of the lovely detail that people craft into ships feels way too big due to the player size.

Yes, and building drones with interiors is impossible because the meter

 

[kurosawa]

resizing the blocks or the pawn would be very nice, but stick to metric

 

[MacThule]

resizing the blocks or the pawn would be very nice, but stick to metric

For consistency, probably best. Agreed. No reason voxels couldn't be 0.5m except that it looks a little messy on paper. What matters is that it would probably look better in-game, which is more important than how the data looks on paper.

 

[Crashmaster]

Decreasing voxel size relative to the player character would increase block count per entity and negatively affect performance, no?
For that reason, I'm out.

 

[JinM]

Sounds cool on paper, but yields a pretty easy result: The biggest possible objects are suddenly 8 times smaller.

Why 8 times and not 2 times? Performance. If you just divide a one meter block into 50 cm blocks, then you need...right! Eight! And the biggest objects in Starmade are allways bound to what our PCs can handle.

But wouldn't that be okay anyway? Well, depends on what level of detail you can deliver on astronaut gameplay. Starmade is designed around macro gameplay though, so it wouldn't make sense to increase the block detail where we (/the devs) don't want to have a lot of gameplay anyway.

If we had the depth of astronaut gameplay like there is in Empyrion, then I would really like a smaller block scale.

about ingame functions (=user interaction objects)
On the other hand it's allways questionalbe how many functions a normal player is able to put into his builds, even with an advanced astronaut gameplay like in Emp. I mean the ammount of functions (levers, fabricators, interaction objects in general), is what actually determines the block scale you want for your game. The smallest usual room is around 5x5, 3 blocks high. And with the gameplay Starmade can provide, we barely reach 5 functions that we want to access in one room. But with a 5x5x3 room we allready can put in 15 (3 times as usually used!) functions on each wall. Take away windows and doors and furniture, then we still have 5 functions for each wall, yielding us an overkill of 20 possible user interaction objects for just one room.

Like for example door open+close, lightswitch, window shutters, plus one random room dependend function (medical room: activate medbay, factory room: activate machine, shipyard control: push out ship, hangar: open doors).

Providing a smaller block scale for the ammount of functions we can access in one room, would not help us here. Because we allready have enough space to put in all the functions we want for a room on a one meter block scale.

 

[Kraengis]

Nah, size is fine. If blocks were 0.5m instead of 1m it would take 8 more time to build anything. And for most ships exterior the amount of details is enough.

Your suggestion concern interiors, for that we need instead way, way more decor blocks with specific shapes like the console.
Adding them is easy since it doesn't touch the existing grid/infrastructure. Beside, changing the grid now will render obsolete ALL ships that were made up to now and not just the systems, everything.

 

[Edymnion]

so what you're saying is you dont like any voxel standard voxel games?
And it kinda sounds more like the camera is placed wrong in Dave

Isn't that a known issue, that first person mode sticks the camera in Dave's chest instead of in his head?

 

[Sachys]

Isn't that a known issue, that first person mode sticks the camera in Dave's chest instead of in his head?

To be fair, if you stuck the camera in Dave's head, you would only see this:


Its all Dave thinks about!

 

[NTIMESc]

I don't think the idea is to change the block size, but rather to make the astronaut fit the existing blocks.

Computers are huge, like mainframes. They're waist-high.
We swim in chairs, like 6-year-olds.
If you make a small control panel in your cockpit, you can barely see over it.
Everywhere we go, against every background our toons look tiny, like elves.

Does anyone disagree with that description, or think that it is a desirable aesthetic?

Rather than proposing specific solutions, I would simply suggest that the relative scale between the astronaut and the textures and models be adjusted to something closer to what people on earth experience.

 

[OfficialCoding]

Nah, size is fine. If blocks were 0.5m instead of 1m it would take 8 more time to build anything. And for most ships exterior the amount of details is enough.

Your suggestion concern interiors, for that we need instead way, way more decor blocks with specific shapes like the console.
Adding them is easy since it doesn't touch the existing grid/infrastructure. Beside, changing the grid now will render obsolete ALL ships that were made up to now and not just the systems, everything.

Yes that is the problem and I realized it seconds before reading this. But hey Power 2.0 rendered most ships obsolete, so I guess we could do it again. I think it would be worth it.

Now that I think about it though, there could be something for existing entities. if you have a single meter tall block, it would get divided into 4 half meter blocks upon updating. That way the builds would not be ruined, but we would still get the smaller block size.

 

[Bladeriker]

Yes that is the problem and I realized it seconds before reading this. But hey Power 2.0 rendered most ships obsolete, so I guess we could do it again. I think it would be worth it.

Except, that neither the power update nor the weapons updates invalidated all shells, as this form of update would cause 100% of all shells/ships/stations/planets/asteroids to be redesigned form the ground up. Which would be akin to starting over from the beginning.

 

[MacThule]

this form of update would cause 100% of all shells/ships/stations/planets/asteroids to be redesigned form the ground up.

How so?

Shells least of all, I would think, since this would only affect interior decor and door size.

EDIT: Nevermind - you meant splitting the voxels into smaller sizes. I am not in support of that; sounds like a big coding job, trouble for performance, and yeah - total redesign. I thought you meant the OP idea of just tweaking the toon size.

 

[Sachys]

the OP idea of just tweaking the toon size.

which could end up the same thing as splitting voxels.

think on it:

a 500m long ship suddenly becomes 250m long and its reasonable 2m high interior now only fits Daves legs, meaning a large portion of the ship needs to be refitted / rethought. Many systems (probably built system first if a new ship under 2.0) will need to be done from scratch.

this ultimately would cause people to double the size of their current standard builds to get something comfortable, and just as with splitting voxels, increasing server demands, strain and probably system requirements.

so either way its the same end result.

Edit: though I;m sure somebody will reply along the lines of "but these ones go up to ELEVEN!"