What is the best way to develope a uniform scale for your levels? Do you just start making models, and scale them relative to eachother, or is there a more accurate way to do it?

Thanks in advance,
Raddaddy

Set a map scale by saying how many quants equal a foot (or a meter). In my 3D game, 8 quants make one foot for the outdoor worlds and 32 quants make one inch in the indoor worlds (384 quants make a foot for comparison). So, if a building has 5 floors spaced 12 feet apart, 60 feet tall, you'd have it as 480 quants tall for my 3D game's outdoor worlds (or 23040 quants for the indoor worlds). My 2D game uses a screwier scale, but with a reason for it, but rather than quants, it's coordinate units as I call them. I define a coordinate unit as the distance travelled at 1 mph for a tenth of a second (after one frame in my 2D animations), which is 11/75 of a foot.

For a player 5 feet, 10 inches tall, the typical size for an adult human, you'd have the character 46 2/3 quants tall. It's nothing more than simple multiplication.

Ok, first of all, I thought 16quants actually equaled a foot, or an inch, or something...

Also, why have different scales for indoor and outdoor environments? That would create confusion for me.

Finally, how do you measure how large something is, in quants? I have never seen a measuring tool in MED or WED, and there is no way Im counting how many pixles my mouse moves to make the model .

Thanks again,
Raddaddy

Awsome Ulillillia, nice to know somebody has my back. Thanks for the detailed answer, will use the formulas posted to figure out distance. However, I feel there should be a tool that calculates distance for you between two vertecies.

For example, you select one side of a triangle, and the program calculates the length of that line, between the two vertecies, using that formula.

In pro fabrication programs, such as Autodesk Inventor (along the same lines as AutoCAD), the scaling system is so much more robust than in any game engine Ive ever seen. You can constrain, measure, and do all sorts of calculations based on position and other measurements. I am sure you could do it in Gamestudio, but you would never reach the accuracy you do in Inventor, simply because you have to do it by hand. I understand that they are two seperate programs used for seperate things(kinda), but I feel it would be a helpful feature in game design.

Again, thanks for the answer, Ill apply this as soon as the Design Doc is finished .

Raddaddy

I've mentioned several times of being able to use more common measurement units. Rather than just quants, one could configure something in the preferences to set the map scale as needed.

As a side note, about 16384 quants diameter is a medium-sized level. 32768 is large, 65536 is huge, and 131072 is gigantic. My 3D game's levels are based on the 262144 size which, after working out the numbers, is a bit over 6 miles diameter. Levels can, theoretically, go as far out as 2,097,152 quants from the origin meaning close to about 9860 square miles of land (and with other tricks, you can exceed this; assumes that 8 quants makes 1 foot).