Why doesn't GalCiv display planets to accurate scale?

especially if you needed to use a microscope to see the ships .....

A little self evident frankly.

And why cant i see each of my colonists to scale. whats wrong with this?!?!?


cool graphics though. can i borrow those for my kids' science projects?

Depends if the place he pinched them from has copyright

Beats me, I've wondered about it myself. To me, it would be alot cooler to have it on scale. To me it seems cheesy to have a small fighter the size of earth. Plus, if you made a massive ship it would be more dramatic to see a starship the size of earth lumbering towards your homeworld. The only problem would be having a way to compensate for the game's checker-like grid. To have a sun the size of a sector would have to be octogonal, or decagonal. Then you'd have to find a cool way to use stars. Perhaps a dyson sphere...

Waay off topic from this post, but wouldn't it be cool to attempt to conquer other galaxies once you conquer your own? Seeing how small we are makes me space out.

PS: Pluto isn't considered a planet to scientists anymore...but I still consider it a planet. (Don't turn this into a pluto debate, pleease!)

Here's a video example that goes to the largest know suns.

Link

A bigger problem would be that due to gravitation, your home planet might leave his way around the sun and crash with this monster of a ship.

Can't await Antares going BOOM! Though Rigel burns a lot hotter and might actually go critical sooner. Time to put some popcorn into the microwave

Does this game have a supernova event btw? Oops, half the galaxy vaporized, the rest slowly dying to gamma radiation.

The question here is about "fair use," a copyright principle that's under steady attack by those pernicious enemies of progress, the MPAA, RIAA, and SPA. For a moderately brief discussion of how messy this question is these days, see this page at EFF.

Maybe GC3 could have a look-but-don't-touch layer? I should finally have an adequate graphics card soon and I have little doubt I'll spend some time just touring the eye candy once my machine can generate it. I'd do the same from time to time with a "just for looks" view.

Where is W cephei or Mu cephei?
What about VY Canis Majoris? (which is the largest star known to human kind)
Antares is a joke comared to VY Canis Majoris.

Just kidding. It really gives an insight into size relationships. We are but a speck of sand in this and us blowing away wouldnt make any difference in the great expance which is our universe.

Did you know?
VY Canis Majoris is the largest star known to human kind. Also, it is scheduled to die somewhere between 3150 AD and 3400 AD in a supernova and turn into a black hole. Only in its case it would be a Mega supernova. Its not close enough to make any difference to us. But would make one heck of a fireworks show.  It'll burn brighter then the moon probably for 900 years before fading and turning into a black hole probably. Means visible in the daytime.

-Scot

Another thing that comes naturally with scale is distance. Even if sized to subpixel we would never get to see more than one planet on the screen at once

At that scale, you can call the mapsize "Epic"

you can also check out the wikipedia commons for images for personal or academic use.

copyrighted materials can generally be used for academic purposes without need to worry about copyright infringement: these sets of laws are collectively referred to as "fair use." as long as you 1) don't make a profit and 2) don't reprint an entire book, you should be pretty safe.



oops, beat me to it   



this topic has come up before. the Devs have suggesting checking out their upcomming release, Sins of a Solar Empire, if you want scale.

never mind thats ok, i'll stick with a volcano.

Well, let's see.
If you started a throughgoing re-scalling to get everything to scale, you could start with getting the stars to scale within the galactic map. If that were the case, at maximum zoom, a large star would occupy about 1-4 pixels at 1600x1200.
Let's be practical here. The reason that various elements of the game are not at true scale is so that we can SEE those elemnts, ENJOY their artwork, and =ahem= PLAY the game. Nothing could illustrate this necessity better than the visual exapmles provided by the OP.

drrider

Wait! I didn't 'click' on who had started this thread! Now I feel (appriopriately) like a real idiot.

(For those who don't know, 'Draginol' is another on-line alias of Brad Wardell, GalCiv's creator.)

drrider

LOL so it is. trying to get us to do your job for you, Brad?

or perhaps this is some kind of teaser for that elusive second expansion that i haven't been able to learn anything about...

Well, i still want all of my people to scale.

Please, no The Sims: GalCiv Edition!

Ah, yes, a game of conquering the galaxy where you have to worry about the dating lives of all ten trillion of your citizens. Maybe by the time there are ten trillion humans your descendants might be able to finish a game. That sounds like fun....Not!

And why isn't the game in 3D either? Not only are the planets not to scale, but they all fall along the same axial plane. There's no Y-axis! I'm freaking out...

I also think that each planet you colonize should play out like a game of civilization, or Simworld or something. And every invasion should be an entire first person shooter campain.

Actually, I thought the great compromise renamed it TOOFKAP (The Orbiting Object Formerly Known As Pluto!)

Ya got me there, but it could be constructed out in space far away from earth.



I have also wanted galciv to be more tactical. Form up ranks and personally play a role in the battlefield. No more fighting from a billion light years away.

"The Orbiting Object Formerly Known As Pluto!"

The name is still Pluto - it's just not considered a planet. I think they recategorized it as a "dwarf planet" or something odd like that.

It's because they found a new object larger than Pluto that would classify as a planet.

And for some strange reason which I cannot phantom, they don't want any more new planets in our solar system.

Seriously, what happened to the coolness of discovering new planets? Now it seems something to be avoided .

Anyways, back on topic:

Yeah, most games have to deal with scale at some point or another. A realistic scale usually just isn't any fun.

I remember playing Transport Tycoon, and you had to deal with ships vs road vehicles vs aircraft - if it were completely realistic, the differences in speed would make the game practically unplayable. Think about it: The distance an aircraft can cover in mere hours takes a road vehicle days or a ship weeks. The speeds were therefore fudged - enough, in fact, that a fast but subsonic train was actually faster than a supersonic aircraft, lol.

When talking about a space based game in Galactic Civilizations, we're talking vast differences in scale. Not just the size of the various objects, but the distance between them as well.Distances in our galaxy are vast.

So, yeah, it's a tradeoff of realism vs playability. Make the scale too realistic, and it's just not going to be fun anymore.

And an off-topic note about image quality - what in the world happened to those pics? It looks like somebody converted the file between several different lossy file formats before they finally saved it .

That's not Draginol's fault, though - looks like they were that way to begin with. I couldn't find the original images.