First-person camera height

[VulcanTourist]

Is there a hotkey or combination for adjusting the first-person camera height?

[mirasstone]

First person, no I don´t think there is. Why you feeling to big or to small?

[VulcanTourist]

Originally posted by mirasstone:

First person, no I don´t think there is. Why you feeling to big or to small?

Much MUCH too short. Always have. I play in third person because of it, in spite of hating the muddy response in that mode.

[TwitchyJ]

I've mentioned in the past how the player character is too short for an average human.
Here's a screenshot as proof. In the screenshot I've textured some large blocks. Large blocks are 2m x 2m x 2m, and the texture I've used breaks that block down to 6 even squares (or 1.09 ft per square)

In the screenshot I am in space using auto level so I'm looking perfectly level with my feet on the block below me. You will notice that the character's viewpoint is nearly exactly on the top of the fourth square.
Some quick math,
4 squares X 1.09 ft = 4.37 ft for eye level, or 4 ft 4.44 inches.
Now add another roughly 4.5 inches from eye height to the top of the head (average human head is 9 inches and eye height is nearly perfectly half way).

You are left with the player character being right around 4 feet 9 inches tall (1.447 meters or 144.78 cm for the rest of the world).
WAY too short, IMO.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1927538242

And ^^ that is math, and the math don't lie. Unless humans have really shrunk in the future, we're way too short.

[Ogdibus]

Two meter blocks were a huge mistake.

[TwitchyJ]

Then if you look in third person you see the player is even shorter than my math shows above.
The player is nearly exactly 4 feet 4 inches tall.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1927605596

[TwitchyJ]

Originally posted by Ogdibus:

Two meter blocks were a huge mistake.

The size of the blocks is in no way the problem here. The size of the player is the problem. Player is too small (according to a normal human).

This being a game it's not meant to be exact. They could do better though.

It's not really a "bug" but it is does leave some to be desired as far as immersion goes.

[Colossal Sprout]

Originally posted by TwitchyJ:

Originally posted by Ogdibus:

Two meter blocks were a huge mistake.

The size of the blocks is in no way the problem here. The size of the player is the problem. Player is too small (according to a normal human).

This being a game it's not meant to be exact. They could do better though.

It's not really a "bug" but it is does leave some to be desired as far as immersion goes.

Totally agree with this, but it cuts both ways and there's some weird irony playing out with the regular (until recently) complaints about speed etc.

"Two meter blocks were a huge mistake"- if you take this to mean the arbitrary application of units, it's true and you're both right. If they were 'called' 2.5m cubes instead of 2m, things are still a bit off but slightly more accurate. Also speeds would measure 'faster' without actually changing. We'd now be at max speeds of nearly 90m/s instead of 70... player height would be 5'5" instead of 4'4", etc.

Everything in the game is too tightly scaled relative to player size and interactions etc, so changing the arbitrary value is probably the only way this problem could be solved.

Originally posted by Cenobite:

this character couldn't sit on a throne he just stands and drops it in the suit, must get sucked out into the vacuum of space or become a local ore deposit on the planets surface.

Would you really want 'working' toilets in zero G? Just stick with your catheter.

[TwitchyJ]

Originally posted by Colossal Sprout:

"Two meter blocks were a huge mistake"- if you take this to mean the arbitrary application of units, it's true and you're both right. If they were 'called' 2.5m cubes instead of 2m, things are still a bit off but slightly more accurate. Also speeds would measure 'faster' without actually changing. We'd now be at max speeds of nearly 90m/s instead of 70... player height would be 5'5" instead of 4'4", etc.

Everything in the game is too tightly scaled relative to player size and interactions etc, so changing the arbitrary value is probably the only way this problem could be solved.

Sure, they could call the large block 2.5 meters, as long as they also change the size on small blocks to read .625 meters. Otherwise they have to change the actual scale of small blocks since 4 x 0.5m ≠ 2.5 meters.
They then also have to change a few minor things like distance calculations in the game so that they match up to the new definition of the block sizes.

Either way, I specifically mentioned all this at one point I think a couple years ago now and it gathered no interest by the developers. They didn't seem bothered if we're a little small, which is understandable.

[Colossal Sprout]

Originally posted by TwitchyJ:

Originally posted by Colossal Sprout:

"Two meter blocks were a huge mistake"- if you take this to mean the arbitrary application of units, it's true and you're both right. If they were 'called' 2.5m cubes instead of 2m, things are still a bit off but slightly more accurate. Also speeds would measure 'faster' without actually changing. We'd now be at max speeds of nearly 90m/s instead of 70... player height would be 5'5" instead of 4'4", etc.

Everything in the game is too tightly scaled relative to player size and interactions etc, so changing the arbitrary value is probably the only way this problem could be solved.

Sure, they could call the large block 2.5 meters, as long as they also change the size on small blocks to read .625 meters. Otherwise they have to change the actual scale of small blocks since 4 x 0.5m ≠ 2.5 meters.
They then also have to change minor things like distance calculations in the game so that they equal the new definition of the block sizes.

Exactly. Unfortunately it then all gets a bit messy, I guess they chose 2m and 0.5m because it's so much more user-friendly. It's an 'ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' situation, they've made things difficult to resolve. It's simple enough to put right but comes at a price for the end user.

Originally posted by TwitchyJ:

Either way, I specifically mentioned all this at one point I think a couple years ago now and it gathered no interest by the developers. They didn't seem bothered if we're a little small, which is understandable.

Yeah I suppose they'll get far fewer complaints about size/scale than they would about awkward numeric values. Especially as they prefer displaying measurements rather than number of blocks. 2m/0.5m works well at a glance.

[Colossal Sprout]

Originally posted by Cenobite:

Also...

Was already mentioned. You make a habit of this.

[Ogdibus]

Originally posted by TwitchyJ:

Originally posted by Ogdibus:

Two meter blocks were a huge mistake.

The size of the blocks is in no way the problem here. The size of the player is the problem. Player is too small (according to a normal human).

This being a game it's not meant to be exact. They could do better though.

It's not really a "bug" but it is does leave some to be desired as far as immersion goes.

The size of the blocks is a problem because it doesn't accommodate a 2m player model, or architectural standards for either buildings or ships. The block size is very likely the reason for the reduced character size.

Two meter ceilings are too low, and four meter ceilings are too high. A normal ceiling is about 2.7 meters high. Even submarines have higher ceilings than 2m.

The default size of the character controller (the thing that contains the model, scripts, and collision geometry) is 2m high and 1m wide and deep. The physics are designed to work with this scale. Changing the game scale distorts things like the rate at which gravity accelerates you.

Regarding collision, a full sized character controller would have difficulty fitting into a 2m high room, and you can forget using thin blocks or gratings as floors. Even the scaled down model barely fits between a thin block and another block. Every npc model also needed to be adjusted if they wanted it to be able to navigate poi structures.

In addition to physics issues, most assets are made to the 2m character scale for convenience. Have you noticed that all of the furniture is too big for the character model? All the tool and weapon ground models are also too big.

Correcting the scale of each of these assets takes time, assuming they bother to do it. More time means more labor cost. There are some short-cuts to this, but they have their own complications.

The devs could have saved themselves some trouble if they had just considered the implications of their block dimensions before getting too far along to change it.

[VulcanTourist]

The camera position is adjustable for third-person ship travel. This ability should be extended to every other view and form of locomotion, including on-foot.

[piddlefoot]

The character is actually slightly smaller than 2m, you can place a thin block inside a 1 block gap tunnel and walk down it still.
That also allows for the character to fit within 3 of the small blocks.

If you try to scale everything 1 to 1 real world, you end up with a whole range of problems.
The biggest being the clients / players PC performance and servers.

Ok so we are a slightly small or shorter race in the future, but because of the good scaling in Empyrion, you hardly notice it, when your walking around a Trade Station or the like, the scale of everything around feels fine.

Empyrion has one of the best scaling in voxel builders, its pretty clever how they do it, gives us the ability to build structures bigger at less PC recourse cost.

I agree Vulcan, it should, and Im not sure why it hasnt been done that way, but there is probably a good reason we are unaware of, and it could be on the cards still also.
Might find alot of things like this, will end up in the polishing bag, being done around Beta.

There still doing core features to the game, pretty awesome run for an Indie game , now with a good foundation for the future.
The scale of the blocks though, is excellent.

At a scale of 2.5m blocks, as SE is, things start to look way out of scale, so, liek we saw in SE, over time, better 3d models were introduced, making things look to scale better, but they brought other issues, like a heap of extra polygons , ie , more work for our PCs, things are better when they are scaled for todays tech.

In 20 years when our PCs are 100 times more powerful than today, yea maybe 1 to 1 scale might be viable, but if you want any other features and an enjoyable story or adventure and anything dynamic to the game, then scaling is really a must.

[Ogdibus]

There is no technological reason for this particular scale inconsistency.

The main reason for intentional scale inconsistency is for the benefit of the player. Small objects can be difficult to see when they are realistically scaled. Rooms are easier to navigate when they are more spacious. Large instances are tedious to traverse, so they either get scaled down, or have "fast travel" options. It's usually a UX thing.

Technological limitations are only a factor when the are too many objects/geometry, or an object is too small for collision detection. The size of an object does not affect its performance cost.

This case is none of those. It's not even "creeping biggerism." They built a round hole based system in an engine for square pegs. Upon realizing it, they decided to cut the corners off of all their pegs, rather than to cut all of their holes into squares. It's a mistake fixed with improvisation, not a stroke of design genius.

[Ogdibus]

Think about what you are arguing. It doesn't make sense to say that the character model needs to be 4'9" for performance reasons, or that the large blocks need to be 2m for performance reasons. The toilet seats aren't chest high because of 64 bit cores. The chainsaw isn't as big as a motorcycle because Windows 10 can't handle any other size. Those are absurd claims.

The scale of an object doesn't correlate with it's complexity. I am not talking about scale in the common use sense. I am talking about scale within the context of the game engine. When I say "object" I'm referring to objects in the game engine context. Things like ships and voxel chunks are collections of many, often hundred or thousands of objects in a hierarchy. Those objects are in a consistent scale with each other, but changing the scale of those objects does not increase the number of objects in each hierarchy, nor does it change the amount of data that each object consists of. Your analogy isn't applicable to my point.

Everything I've described can be demonstrated. Everything I've described, I have seen demonstrated. Most of what I have described, I have personally implemented in some form. I'm not speculating. I've been working with and studying the Unity Engine for nearly a decade. I know what I'm taking about.