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[jitspoe]

This may or may not come as a surprise to some of you, but the scale in Paintball2 is off.  By a lot.  According to id, 1 foot is 8 units.  This is a bit short and would make the players 7 feet tall.  It works OK for quick approximations, though, since there is a grid size of 8.  In reality, a player would be closer to 6 feet tall.  That makes 1 foot about 9.33 units, since the player bounding box is 56 units tall.  According to my quick google search, the average male American height is more like 5.8 feet tall, making 1 foot about 9.66 units.  This works OK.  We can just round that off to 9.6 and have 1 inch be 0.8 units.

Now, think about the size of things used in maps.  Barrels (oil drums), for example, are typically 64 units tall and 48 units in diameter.  That would make them over 6 1/2 feet tall and 5 feet wide.  That's bigger than some of those inflatable cylinders that can cover standing players.   In reality, you can crouch and shoot over a barrel.  They're only about 32 inches high.  That's about 26 units tall.

Here's a shot for better reference:


You could fit a pile of real barrels inside of one Paintball2 barrel.  26 units is kind of hard to work with, though, and real barrels do vary in size.  I think 32 units is probably a good height.  Then you can just scale the texture to 0.5, align the brush on a 32 unit grid, and be done with it.

Next up is ladders.  I'm just reusing a reference shot from SkateR's in-progress map:

Believe it or not, that 16 unit thick metal part of the ladder is realistically about the width the whole ladder should be.  That's about 1.67 feet wide.  SkateR's current ladder (along with ladders in many other maps) looks to be 96 units wide.  That's easy math.  If 1 foot is 9.6 units, the ladder is 10 feet wide.  The thing that keeps it from looking too crazy is the fact that the rungs are about 10 inches thick.

These are just a couple examples of disproportionate things in maps, and any mappers out there might want to take them into consideration when developing future maps.  It would be cool to work on making things a little more believable.

[Eiii]

Personally, I like the look of the ladders and barrels and such. Tiny barrels would not work well gameplay-wise, and would be kinda ugly in my opinion.

[Boozie]

Even though the barrels are real size in dp, it helps greatly with clan tactics

the ladders do look over sized in most maps, and should be fixed, but not as slim as a real one

[IAMTITAN]

I really do wish people would make maps the right size.  Can't blame them though, it's tough working with small items in BSP.

I hate the barrels the way they are now.  Large obstacles, in my, possibly incorrect, observations, speed up the pace of a game.  If players were forced to stop and crouch every once in a while, maybe rounds wouldn't be so fast.  I can only take so many maps where the only strategy is rush.

*Edit: Looking at the picture of the paintballer crouching behind the barrels had me thinking.  From where does the viewpoint of the player come?  Is the camera centered on the model's head?


**Edit: Would it be possible to make the actual players larger? It's hard to make maps the right size right now as the players are pretty small.  Would future maps suffer from being too large or too low a framerate?

[Smokey]

Can i ask who iamtitan is?


Thanks.


As for the scale issue, skater uses Worldcraft, and i always had scale problems in wc too.

[SkateR]

My scale is fine.

[Eiii]

IAMTITAN, could you explain how making the barrels smaller would slow down gameplay? I really don't see how it would.
The barrels would offer less cover individually, but if you build a wall out of smaller barrels there would just be more barrels.

[jitspoe]

there would just be more barrels.

That's the thing.  You can realistically scale things and just have more of them.

IAMTITAN: I couldn't scale the player model up, otherwise it wouldn't fit through the doors and various other things in the map.