This is for my space sim. I''ve got some really huge ships in my game, but they''re just not awe-inspiring. Does anyone watch Andromeda or Babylon 5? Do you remember the World Ship, 20 worlds connected to each other with a star in the middle which powered it, or the Death Cloud? They were big and scary. It doesn''t need to be that big(especially since I don''t think I could render it) but I really need an idea or two. I still do like the idea of having to fly into something, but simply making the ships bigger and bigger doesn''t seem to work very well.

Dont know why my post from earlier didnt show... Basically to make something seem big everything else must be AT THE VERY LEAST 1/4th its size. Having all big ships will result in the feeling of normality and make your zone seem smaller. Look at Dark Space. Some of their ships are ATLEAST 100 times the size of the newbie ships and it gets the point of hugeness across WELL

Textures are *very* important for indicating size. Use too low-resolution a texture, or don''t scale it well enough, and you make the ship look small.

And the AP is right; you need smaller ships to lend a sense of scale. Take Star Wars. In the beginning of A New Hope, we first see the rebel ship up-close, we can see fine details. This is something your textures will need to do, to convey size.

Then, AFTER we see that ship, we see the Star Destroyer, an enormous thing. The camera is still close to it, so we can see the fine details, which helps in indicating its size. If the camera was far away, both ships would look pretty small, regardless of the obvious size difference between them.

Later in the movie, and especially Empire Strikes Back, we get far-away views of several Star Destroyers close together. The image alone does not convey their size, but we were introduced to the ships from a better perspective, so we are now familiar with thinking of them as huge.

Important Note! In real life, you would NOT realize how big any spacecraft is, even if it''s miles across, until you get close enough to it to see the fine details, like a docking bay with regular ships in it. So you can''t expect to do better than that in your game.

~CGameProgrammer( );

And if you get close to the object and its textures look very pixelated, the mind tells you you''re "too close", further creating the illusion that the object is small (like a camera lens that gets too close to a small object and it gets blurry).

Thank you for the advice everyone, on Sunday I had the same trouble as the ap above. Sorry I double posted. What I can''t figure out is why I double posted, both times I posted I received a 500 error and usually when that happens my message doesn''t get posted at all.

Another thing I remember from Return of the Jedi, I believe there was one shot where we see the Imperial Fleet, consisting of Star Destroyers and the Super Star Destroyer and then the camera moves so we see the Death Star and the fleet in the same shot which made you realize how tiny the Star Destroyers were in relation to the Death Star.

What really got me thinking about all this was that the largest thing I had was 5 kilometers wide. I got curious and went through the Freespace 2 files and found out the largest ships in that game are 6 kilometers long; I was very upset and sad.

Why don''t you post a screenshot of your program showing the ship? Just hit Alt+PrintScreen and paste the image into an image editor (MSPaint or whatever). Also, the size of the ship is totally irrelevant because it''s all relative. You can have your entire game universe take place within a 10-unit-wide cube, with ships being 0.001 units wide, or within a 1000-unit-wide cube, with ships being 0.1 units wide. It makes no difference.

~CGameProgrammer( );