Recommendations for Distance Scaling

I apologize if that isn't the right term. I've tried to look a bit onine but haven't found anything. Basically I'm looking for recommendations for what kind of scale my game world should have. Does it depend on the type of game? What might one use for a first person game, or a third person game, or an RTS? We typically associate 1 Unity unit with 1 meter, but trying to show, say, a 50 mile radius island with this (heck, 5 mile) sounds like a terrible idea. Any good resources to look at for this idea?

 

IIRC, You want to stay with the 1 unit : 1 meter scale 9 times out of 10, because as you scale up or down you lose precision. For large things you want to start employing some smoke and mirrors like chunking, streaming, or generating stuff deterministic-ly.

Kerbal Space Program solved the scaling problem in a creative way.

I remember reading about a racing game that had a world size that was effectively infinite, as the world was generated in a deterministic manner on the fly- there is no persistence in a world like that, but still, cool.

The minecraft style is kind of a hybrid of stuff that you want to stay persistent, products of deterministic random generation, and optimization methods that cull all the stuff that you don't really have to worry about- (places the player has never been, blocks that can be chunked and handled as 1 object, rather than 100 individual objects, ect.)

In addition to the technical challenge of just how you get all the stuff you want into memory, There's also the angle where things can be made to feel larger or smaller than they are. Dark Souls levels always have you climbing/descending and turning- that way you can put a lot in a condensed space, while not having it feel particularly cramped. (also shortcuts just involve chutes and ladders between upper and lower levels, so that's convenient.)

The old-school way is using the level design to hide what parts of the world are disappearing from existence and what parts are loading in- using gates, twisty hallways, and lots of freakishly long elevators.

How fast the player actually moves around, and what the player is doing while in traversal are good opportunities for building in the feeling of size- If there is only schlepping yourself around the countryside, you can't have destinations too far apart, or it will become rather dull and tedius. But take a few notes from BOTW, Far cry, ect, and you're gliding, riding, driving, sledding, climbing, throwing yourself through the environment- things can be farther apart, since more can happen on the way.

 

Journeys main character was 1m tall.

The link has several articles -- near the bottom is some stuff about Journey. Not about the scale, but it does mention that they used a 1m character for convenience.

http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2012/

 

I may have been unclear.

I'm looking for scales in the same sense that one builds a model "to scale," like a model car being 1:64 or something. Thing is, I'm planning to use "real" locations, in the sense that they're designed on a realistic global scale. But obviously things get scaled down in a game, walking one mile in a normal game is not going to take you an hour (which it would if you were moving according to a "real-world" scale). So I'm curious about typical ratios, or what people here might suggest for various genres of game.

Example: Skyrim is apparently 14 square miles . However, it's meant to represent an area ??? miles square. Thus, the "scale" of Skyrim is 14:???, or 1/ (???/14).

 

I don't think designers approach this from a numerical scale, they tweak it till it no longer "feels empty". Imho it mainly depends on how fast your character can move. You likely will have a better idea how fast that should be to fit genre and mechanics, and going from there you can measure e.g. the time it takes in Skyrim to walk from one point of interest to the next, and then get your distance between two POIs in your game by calculating it from character movement speed and time it should take. I think this is all about pacing and the actual distances don't matter much if you manage to solve the technical aspects.
When in doubt I'd suggest to make it smaller than you think it needs to be. Better to er on the side of the world "feeling stuffed", than "feeling empty".

 

I definitely am planning to look at it in terms of things like, how far apart are towns from one another, and then incorporate that aspect. I suppose I'm a bit worried though about representing the place on a realistic enough scale that it doesn't trivialize the size of a place.

Not currently planning anything open world, so it's not like I'm trying to have like 50 miles of open terrain. I think the biggest I'll ever get is something like Dragon Age Origins, in that there are these medium-to-small areas connected by an "overworld map."

 

I think it all depends on the feel of the game you're going for, and how long you want it to take to get across areas of your map.

I'm working on a real world game as well using wooden ships on the ocean. I chose my scale just based on experimentation. Currently I have the world shrunk to 14% of its real size, and have increased the speed of my sailing ships to 6x real speed compared to standard 1 unit = 1 meter (it turns out that a sailing ship moving 14 knots is MADDENING slow as far as a game is concerned).

When I shrunk the world further, I wasn't happy with how the English Channel appeared nothing more than a small river. When I went for an even larger size, I had to increase the speed of the ships much more than 6x to move reasonable distances, which made combat with cannons feel like trying to throw a football from one speed boat to another.

So I suggest trying several different scales, play test it yourself a bunch, get what you feel is a pretty good balance, and then get some feedback from other people. One thing to consider is the longer it takes for the player to move long distances, the more things you need to make available for the player to do along the way, or you risk the game feeling like some large empty world.

 

Uneven scale is pretty popular to use in games. If you get some landmarks from a city you recreate, and get the same relative direction right, it at least feels a little like the real thing. See the scaled-down Hong Kong in Sleeping Dogs, for instance.

There will be buildings which are an amalgam of the typical types of buildings in the real city, a few buildings you're sure are meant to be you-know-what, but they don't mention the name for copyright/trademark reasons etc. Get a few roads and bridges in approximately the same proportion and shorten everything between. It has the feeling of the real city, but it's not to any sort of scale if you measure it. The twists and turns and re-use of locations makes it feel bigger.

If you're going for a fantasy world you can dot the landscape with dungeons and other distractions, and ensure no path goes straight for very long. There's always the ever so popular "find the key item to unlock a new location" thing, with the game teasing that location's existence well in advance.

The tl;dr version: Map designers mostly go by gut-feelings and tester feedback