Hi

Im doing a third-person aircraft game. The screenshot is from my old version where i just added some objects for testing (of sizes that simply looked right for me). Then i measured them.

Turns out what looked good to me was (object lenght in meters)

plane = 15

small house = 80

truck = 50

With realistic measurements actually being more like

plane = 15

small house = 10

truck = 6

So is this common in this perspective? That things look "too" small when they are away from the player? I mean when i change it to realistic sizes, the objects you are looking to shoot at (tanks, trucks etc on the ground) is hardly visible. I dont want to move the camera to far back (to make the plane seem smaller) since it makes aiming harder/less cool.

Any trick to this? Or should i simply scale down the plane (cheat, make plane 4m long or something) to get the feel i want?

Thanks!

Erik

It is quite common in games to not use realistic measures. A rule of thumb is, to measure your scene by the main character, in your case your plane. Define your plane and measure other objects by the size of your standard plane. This way you can get a suitable size of your plane first (how does it look from far away etc.) and then create other objects in realation to this (a house should be much larger, therfor the size is 5x plane etc). It could be useful to use the bounding box of your plane as measurement due to the non-compact form of a plane.

Agree with Ashaman73 that you don't need to sweat too much if the measures aren't accurate, but I wonder if the problem might be your field of view. Maybe your field of view is quite wide (which makes things look little) and you've positioned your aeroplane close to the camera to compensate.

If that's the case, then you've effectively done a dolly zoom (google it, watch youtube vids/gifs, they're cool!) on your aeroplane, distorting the background while keeping the aeroplane looking normal. The fix would be to narrow the field of view and move the camera further back from the focus point.

Edit: PS. Wide field of views give more of a sense of speed, so you might want to consider how important that is to you before narrowing the FOV too much.

cool guys, thanks

If the background has nothing to do with the game itself, you can scale until it looks nice.

Measuring is crucial in flight simulations in which fans demand realism, but airplane games often "fudge" the proportions because the average gamer playing them is looking for emotional experience more than realism. The average person is going to be too busy having fun to think about proportions. They are used to distortions in gaming anyway, so if they do notice something then it is typically no issue, but probably they won't care one way or another.