Its going to look weird, especially on giant ships and stations (these should not look near-ortho like the smaller stuff). AP and I aren't doing this, and then things will just look inconsistent too with the mods in them.

Well, maybe after an extreme size, like 3km or something would it make sense to then lock the viewportRatio and start shifting the camera instead

george moromisato 16 Jul 2019:

I don't intend to lock the viewportRatio.

But I think everything looks better if the camera appears to be (almost) infinitely far away. Otherwise, the actual sprite would have to change depending on whether it is above you (on the screen) or below you.

Here's what I've been doing:

  • For most ships and stations, if they are < 1/2 kilometer, I create the model at 1 = 10 meters and place the camera at the standard position (X=0 Y=-400 Z=800).
  • For stations larger than 1/2 kilometer, I create the models at 1 = 20 meters and place the camera at the standard position.
  • For stations larger than 2-3 kilometers, I break up the model into pieces and position as if the camera were at infinity (e.g., St. Kats Arcology).
wolfy 16 Jul 2019:

AP and I discussed this recently in some more depth and it seems ultimately what is being disagreed on is 'big things being ortho or not'

I (and AP) dont like the ortho (equal to infinite camera focal length, which in this case also equates to infinite camera distance. The farther the camera, the closer to ortho you get.) look for big things, and would be fine actually with a locked viewport ratio of say 0.2 or something. Not locking the viewport ratio was specifically to get the large ships to *not* be ortho. The reason is that large ships are big enough that you see they are an ortho projection relative to themselves, which when not top down anyways, looks bad since everything far away looks 'fat' and the whole scene starts looking more 'toylike' and 'ultra-zoomed in miniatures', and is worse than the ship to ship proportionality except when dealing with composite stations.

Being not ortho makes the individual ships look better, and sure the farther away ships look 'bigger' and stuff doesnt quite work right for giant stations, but giant stations are super rare and can probably be dealt with case by case, but the individual things look more pleasingly real than distorted by ortho projection

george moromisato 16 Jul 2019:

These are the times when I wish we had a 3D engine. Of course, then the models would be harder to create (and/or less detailed).

I think we're close. I start moving the camera (shrinking the model) at 0.5 km. You choose 1.6 km as the threshold (0.2 viewport ratio). I could probably live with that for ships.

That is, if the viewport ratio gets above 0.2, then it is OK to move the camera (or shrink the model) until we get back to 0.2.

wolfy 17 Jul 2019:

cool :3 - this will help with a bunch of the big 2-3km TSB stuff and the anaconda and IRSDN (ORE) (its all singular stations except sorta the VSS shipyard complex which is a bunch of singular stations, but still)