🚀 go-pugleaf

Trimble Bracegirdle writes:
>Diablo, Baulders Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights 1st...etc...Fallout 
>...etc..Pillars Of Eternity ..etc..
>Almost entirely because I can't get into the small characters display style.
>I'm constantly aware that I can't see them or what there doing properly.
>
>I've been roaming around looking at many titles & I'm puzzled why the
>characters are all shown about the same (little) size.
>Is there some graphic 'standard' these games are designed to ?

Well, that's what isometric means, same size.  Things don't change in
size as they move about the scene.  But that's not what you mean.

There's no standardized size for characters.  The closest you come is the
Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale) where unsuprisingly
the characters are all the the same size.  However Planescape: Torment
is a notable exception, it's an Infnity Engine game with significantly
larger characters.

The reason why all these games have choosen to have relaltively small
characters is because they're trying to fit a lot on to the screen at
once.  These games feature feature a party of characters and/or lots of
enemies.  They also feature ranged combat and going for a more tactical
combat experience than just mindlessly hacking and slashing monsters.
(Yes, even Diablo.)  This requires that combat take place in a big enough
space to allow characters room to maneuver and to make ranged combat
meaningful.  If the characters are too big, then either the player is
going to end up being attacked by offscreen enemies he can't see or the
engagement distance would have to shrink.

Taken to extremes, if characters filled half the screen the game would
be limited to a single character fighting everything at melee range.
The tactical considations in combat would be pretty limitted.  The player
wouldn't even see the enemies until they were just about in melee range.
If characters were a single pixel then engagement distances could
be huge.  You could model something like modern military combat, where
long range snipers can shoot targets over a kilometer away.  You could
have thousands of characters, both party members and enemies, involved
in a single engagement.

					Ross Ridge

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
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