Ambrosia Garden Archive
    • Tiny Question about Tiny ships


      Why so small?

      Why then?
      Some TCs like Arpia2 and I think Acheron too, use good size ships but it seems many more use very small ships. CTC, StarWars, Star Trek(RIP). I think I played EV and the other one when the updates came out and the ships were small there too. I think I could almost understand the older games because of the game Engine but the new games I do not. So what's up?

      Thanks

    • Scale.
      I, for one, would rather the fighters launched by the carriers that I design be about the right size against the ships that launch them.

    • @rmx256, on Jun 29 2008, 03:33 AM, said in Tiny Question about Tiny ships:

      Scale.
      I, for one, would rather the fighters launched by the carriers that I design be about the right size against the ships that launch them.

      ^ This

      Its a problem with top-down perspective games without zoom, especially with sprites. Scale is difficult to maintain without making some things really tiny to the point where people have trouble seeing them, or too big so that they eat up a whole screen and get in the way of other stuff.

    • This reminds me of that topic about the size of Rebel Vipers in relation to Rebel Dragons way back before Beta. I think it was actually pipeline who said something about, "yeah, we could make the missiles invisible, the fighters pixels, the carriers take up the entire screen, and the planets take up the whole system! Seriously guys, we wanted to make the game realistic, but not so realistic that it sucked."

      That said, I agree that especially given the resolution of the day, the ship sizes in stock Nova are pretty good.

    • Yeah. I personally like flying Vipers, after doing some serious tweaking, and I want to be able to see my ship.

    • Colosseum used small ships because there were only small ships. Fighters can only get so big and still be fighters.

    • My response to your tiny question, and some of the other things mentioned in this topic, can be found in my not-so-tiny topic here.

    • @mrxak, on Jul 3 2008, 09:42 AM, said in Tiny Question about Tiny ships:

      My response to your tiny question, and some of the other things mentioned in this topic, can be found in my not-so-tiny topic here.

      Thanks for the suggestion, but from what I have read it doesn't have much to do with this topic at all. I asked Why a TC builder uses small ships in their build and got different responses (...or perhaps because there are so few responses, the same ones 🙂 )
      Yours has become a discussion of why ships should be a certain size, which is not the same thing.

    • @joshtigerheart, on Jul 2 2008, 08:58 PM, said in Tiny Question about Tiny ships:

      Colosseum used small ships because there were only small ships. Fighters can only get so big and still be fighters.

      Since all your ships are fighters, you could easily make the ships larger. The scale would be the same.

    • Ah, but then we'd be forced to have medium and capital ships follow the same scale, and that's not going to cut it for CTC-M and CTC-C. In CTC-C, the average capital ships is going to be about the same size as a Raven, as per Josh's request, so having larger fighters could make things look rather goofy. Besides, we're used to seeing fighters that are about 20-30 pixels in diameter; having fighters any bigger than that would strike the player as being comical.

    • Additionally, the sizes for the fighters were determined before I decided to cut out medium and capital ships in the interest of being able to remain enthusiastic enough about Colosseum to finish it. I got in a pretty deep rut there for awhile.