Mav wrote:Which is why you ignore my 2nd argument, even though I clearly stated that my second was a stronger one?
And your second argument is the one about guessing the unit dimension from the explosion speed? That's even more whacky!
Mav wrote:If you ask me though, Cavedog chose that as an arbitrary unit set and has more to due with internal coding than actual speed.
Wrong. The meter/second shown by F1 is not related to any internal units.
For instance F1 on the arm commander says it go at 14.4m/s, while the FBI reads MaxVelocity=1.2; and while I measured it going at 39pixel/seconds, which would be 2 500 000 internal units / seconds.
Cavedog meters are pretty close to the [] linear units used in Cavedog BOS though.
Mav wrote:I'm pretty sure that the Peewee was supposed to be human sized.
You only say that because your mind sees a human shaped body.
If you had actually played a bit of TA, you'd think differently.
The majority of tilesets are alien (crystal/desert/mars/moon/metal/...) but the green tilset features trees that we can relate too. TA trees are just a little bigger than peewees. That's not precise because trees can range from child sized christmas tree to giant sequoia, but meh, the average pine tree being like 15-45 m tall, that already gives the idea of the smallest TA units being several metter tall/long.
Core Contingency introduced the urban tileset, with wrecked buildings, roads, bridges, lampposts, trucks and cars. It's hard to guess the size of the buildings because they don't have windows, but the little trucks and cars are very similar to our 20th century ones, and gives a very precise feeling of scale. And peewees are way bigger than cars. After playing a few hours on Trout's Farm, you get the idea that Peewee are more on the scale of Armored Core mecchas than human sized power armor.
Some TA units and buildings have little windshields drawn on their texture. It was hard to really seem in TA, but if you opened them in 3do builder, inferring TA unit size from these little windows on the texture, it made TA units look larger than today's biggest ground vehicles. Something like as big as the heavy Battle Tech units.
Lastely, like I said, the F1 shows unit speed in m/s, and from there you can deduce how big is a meter. From there, I calculated the Peewee being 9.7 meter tall. And that is consistent with how tall it appears next to tree, building, and cars.
Of course, TA is a game, and toy soldier or RTS usually compress relative scaling differences, rendering any precise measure meaningless. When you buy toys, every item has to be hand sized: It wouldn't be practical if the solider were 1 millimeter long, nor if the carrier was bigger than the bedroom. And in RTS, they often take the shorcut of making one unit take exactly one tile, be it a lone footman, a tank, or a battle ship. The smaller unit would be drawn with lots of free space in the tile, while the largest orc and tank would be drawn slightly overflowing in the next tile, so you can still see the tank is bigger than the footman, but not to scale: it'll be 10% bigger, not x10 as big.
But one of TA achievment was to grow out of that tile system constraint. Unit movement were free of tiles, and blocking/collisions used a footprint system, were each unit would declare in a tag how big it is. While the pathfinding forced them to limit the number of footprints in use for live units, it still allowed more freedom in the scales.
So there was nothing that forced Cavedog to make trees about as tall as Peewees. They could have made tree take 5x5 footprints, and tower far above peewees. They could have made tree take 1x1 footprint, a quarter of a peewee. The scaling of trees and cars was deliberate, Cavedog had the freedom to make them any size. If they choose this scale for trees and cars, it gives a clear indication of how big the TA units were meant to be next to them. Or maybe they made trees this size just so a peewee could hide just barely under a tree. But that doesn't hold for cars. For game mechanics, cars are a bit too small, they're like tiny wrecks, hard to click upon, too small to provide cover. However they just feel at the right size compared to the roads and rest of scenery. And the futuristic war metal robots strolling around that scenery happen to be several stories tall.
