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I am literally facing this problem for the first time in my life and I am immediately realizing just how many games get scale intentionally wrong because it feels better

I remember a discussion that was referenced about how when Valve was making a level during the development phase of HL2, it was an ice breaker ship, and it was just so cramped, combat and movement was just not viable. I think that's around the time they switched from Half Life graphics to HL2's.

i've played a few versions of that ship, i think they only finally cut it sometime in 2002 (certainly they were gonna show it at e3 2002). cramped as hell for sure. fine for some game but not that game

a lot of folks think this is strictly a third person camera accommodation but it isn't (though that is always a factor when you make that type of game), and it also isn't just about movement speed or pace or anything to do with what type of game you're making, it's "3d space on flat screen" problems

It's a rectilinear projection issue - the 3d geo is projected to 2d preserving straight lines at the expense of everything else vs the human eye emphasizing what we're looking at, making a fisheye bulge of lines in peripheral vision. Curious if realistic scale w/ Panini projection would feel good.

It doesn't, it feels very weird

the same reason it's hard to get a good photo of a group of people in a small room even though it's easy to have full awareness of them as a person who is present there

Can you say more about your experience with this realistic scaling? What is happening?

also has absolutely nothing to do with visual style. doesn't matter how realistic you're going

There must be a more technical term but I call it "subjective fov". we don't normally realize how, optically, we have a massive fov, enhanced by the fact that our brain accumulates information over time. But we can also selectively zoom in on things.

Seems like this problem wouldn't happen (to an extent) in 1st person VR, but now I'm curious about 3rd person VR

yeah the realistic scale feels like a dollhouse with the overhead camera

defs, but even first person you gotta do this. only exception is kinda vr

I made dumb decisions earlier on with my game and both: - Made everything 'realistic' sizes, and - Stupidly made the grid metric I am slowly undoing my mistakes

Was fascinating when I went from 'real' door sizes to oversized. At first they felt obscenely large, but now I'm used to it and look at the old versions they look comically small.