Quake scale and perspective is weird

[Gambit]

I'm still getting to grips with mapping for Quake. I'm trying to make things feel "real world" in scale, but it's all way off when I play it in game. Spaces feel too small to move around in, and doors are too tall compared to the player's eyeline. Playing with the FOV helps a bit, but doesn't really fix it.

I googled about it and found some historical threads about this in various places. Consensus seems to be "Don't make real-world scale for Quake, it doesn't work."

Fair enough, I guess!

However, what if I were making a different kind of experience? Say an exploratory walking simulator? Could I get away with building in real-world scale, or would it be too frustrating for players?

And why is Quake's scaling and perspective so weird in the first place!?

 

[stickflip]

And why is Quake's scaling and perspective so weird in the first place!?

I failed two math classes in high school and then proceeded to cheat in summer school, but I think all my math here is correct.

I'm going to use Ranger's Quake 3 bio as the point of reference, where he's canonically listed as 6'5" tall, or about 1.98m tall. Ranger's model in Quake 1 is 48u tall. With this information, we can say that 48u=1.98m.

While running in a straight line in Quake 1, Ranger moves at 320u/s. (Always run setting on.) 320u/s=13.2m/s. 13.2m/s=47.52km/h; for us American chads, this is ~29.5mph. That's faster than you're legally allowed to drive in school zones here in Texas. Now, imagine running around your house, your school, or your workplace at that speed.

In Quake 1, Ranger can jump a maximum height of 43u high. 43u=1.77m, or ~5'9". His feet are 1.77m off the ground, making the top of his head reach 3.75m (or ~12'4") away from the ground. This doesn't even account for his bounding box being taller than what his model shows.

These reasons are why real-world proportions don't work from a gameplay perspective. Ranger moves way too quickly and can jump too high to be able to easily navigate real-world proportioned environments in a way that'd feel good to the player. They'd be smacking their head on many ceilings, and running full speed into numerous walls and doorways.

Therefore, scale is made much larger to accommodate the fact that Ranger is secretly an Olympian.

 

[Gambit]

@stickflip Ah great, thanks for the reply. That makes a lot of sense, I hadn't really considered that the scale is essentially a function of Ranger's size and speed. It's pretty clear that trying to build anything vaguely "real" doesn't quite work.

I was hoping to use the Quake engine to make a kind of exploratory game with more detailed architecture, slower paced and without the focus on fast combat. I now realise I'm trying to make the engine do something it's not really suited to, and it would be better to use a modern engine that works with real world scale. For Quake based stuff, it's clearly better to embrace the engine for what it's good at.

 

[Berubaretto]

However, what if I were making a different kind of experience? Say an exploratory walking simulator? Could I get away with building in real-world scale, or would it be too frustrating for players?

I think 99% of the Quake players won't mind buildings in a quake map aren't real-world scale. Otherwise just turn to other engines instead, like Goldsrc or Source engine stuff.

 

[Gambit]

I'm going to use Ranger's Quake 3 bio as the point of reference, where he's canonically listed as 6'5" tall, or about 1.98m tall. Ranger's model in Quake 1 is 48u tall. With this information, we can say that 48u=1.98m.

Hmmm, that's actually pretty weird. 48 Quake units is not very tall when you eyeball it in game, and it "feels" much shorter than ~2m when you're moving through a door or space that's the minimum clearance height (which is 56-64units, right?)

It's no wonder the work I was doing on this medieval inn (see atachment) felt so wrong! For example, the front door space is both too short when viewed from a distance, but too tall when standing right next to it! It's 84u, which would make it 3.47m, which is clearly nonsense. When ranger stands next to it, there's no way it feels that tall, but when he's only a short distance away, the door feels about the right height of a standard human door. I guess this perspective disparity also explains why monsters look so tiny in the distance, even when in reality they may only be, say, 10 metres away.

I'm not sure if I'll finish this medieval inn in Quake. While it's never going to look/play the way I'd like, perhaps it's good enough. It's been an interesting experiment anyway, and a valuable lesson in the art of level design (ie, how NOT to do it!) Maybe I'll need to learn Unreal or Unity to make the kind of real-world exploratory experience I was aiming for -- which I was trying to avoid as I simply don't have the time required to invest in those complex engines. Building in Quake is so much easier after all. Perhaps I could embrace Quake's quirks and build something that's close enough to what I want while respecting the engine's foibles...

EDIT: If we use Ranger's height as his bounding box (56u), the perspective/scale starts to make a bit more sense, but it's still odd. Referencing: https://book.leveldesignbook.com/process/blockout/metrics/quake -- "1 Quake unit (u) = 1 inch, but not really. There is no consistent scale."

 

[Gambit]

A little more to add: 1 unit in Quake is apparently 1/8 of a foot, (8 units = 1 foot) according to John Carmack from back in the day. I found some info about it here: https://communityforums.atmeta.com/t5/VR-Experiences/QUAKE-DK2-Support/td-p/209367/page/8

There's also a note from Spike here about x/y scale being greater than the z scale: https://forums.insideqc.com/viewtopic.php?p=58839&sid=3b80cacc6de7d202cde32b7a0f01be33#p58839

Also, back in the day, pixels weren't square either, they were rectangles in the ratio 5:6 (1.2 times taller than wide).

It would be possible then to build real-world scale stuff in Quake if you calculate all the above into equation.

But it wouldn't feel like Quake.

 

[DrMelon]

Additional to everything posted above, the feeling of navigating and looking around a space will be heavily influenced by the Field of View, also! The field of view for an actual human being very high when compared to playing an FPS on a monitor - as the FOV is usually adjusted to allow for a comfortable "window" into the projected space (otherwise, you get some pretty strange distortions at high FOV angles).
It would be interesting to take the spaces you've mapped out and look around them in VR - they might suddenly feel more realistic again!