Ship Scale

from GalCiv2 Forums
I noticed in the preview screenshots that ships with large hulls are enormus compared to medium hulled ships. I found a screenshot:

http://ve3d.ign.com/images/19807/PC/Galactic-Civilizations-II-Dark-Avatar

Now, in the actual game, huge hulled ships look the same size as small ships. Any reasons?
4,237 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Hmmm... it didn't show. If you want to see the screen, go to voodoo extreme's poll for best strategy game. You will see it.

Kryo, I really wish you would make the pic poster easier to use.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I've noticed this scale difference too. It's quite frustrating to have a new hull type that doesn't look appreciably different from its predecessors in the combat viewer... oftentimes my tiny hulls have looked bulkier and bigger than my small hull, and measure up quite nicely to the mediums! I'd love if the numbers were just tweaked a bit to get some dramatic ship scales into the combat viewer.
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Kryo, I really wish you would make the pic poster easier to use.
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If you want to put an image in your post, you need to have the actual URL of the image itself, not a webpage with the image on it. If that's all you have, use a link instead.


In any case, if you're using the DA templates, most of those use the "brick" hull, which (if the way scaling is handled wasn't changed from DL) will result in all of them scaling to cargo hull size in combat. This is because the game scaled ships based on the filename of the hull model, so it'll only scale if you use a "real" hull rather than the brick.
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Wait, what!? Most of my ships are based off the bricks, so that's really disappointing.

Man, that's a pain. If having the hull types scale properly isn't possible, though, would it be possible to have some kind of measuring stick or (even better) a side by side comparison with another hull? I like to have my ships look like they have reasonable scales attached to them, and there's no practical way to ensure that ships look right side by side outside of trial and error.

Maybe it would even be possible to scale the base hull, since those unadorned hulls can have wierd scaling issues as well.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Dude, remember the DA preview pics? It shows huge hulls dwarfing small size hulls.

Well, it looks like Stardock has screwed us once again...

Etrius
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
so it'll only scale if you use a "real" hull rather than the brick.
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Whats a real hull?
Reply #7 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Well, it looks like Stardock has screwed us once again...
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Don't go nuts, here. Saying that Stardock has "screwed us" over cosmetic tweaks that were never advertised as a feature of Dark Avatar is way, way over the top.

"Real" hulls are the stock ship hulls that could (potentially) stand on their own without much tweaking, but that you usually deck out with all sorts of jewelry pieces. The brick hulls are just tiny, untextured blocks with four attachment points.

Anyways, I'm kind of hoping that the scaling values could be offloaded into the xml files or something like that. I know that I'd load to see dramatic scale differences in the ships I design... the built in scale differences from using the different "real" hulls is not very dramatic at all.