Player Features and Ideas Discussion

An aspect of this game that I think could use attention is the way ships are presented on-screen; specifically, the size of the ships as a function of the camera drone's field or angle of view. Immersion suffers when every vessel looks like a small toy due to both the large field of view and lack of any perspective distortion which should be present when viewing such large vehicles.

According to EVElopedia and the measurements displayed when viewing models in the game, the ships in Eve are large. Frigates are roughly the size of a modern airliner. As an example comparison, the Punisher is listed at 67 m long; the Boeing 787-10 wide-body airliner is listed at 68.3 m long. I'm fairly certain that anyone who has traveled via a wide-body airliner would consider them to be fairly sizable craft. Moving up from frigates the ships become very large. The ubiquitous Dominix is listed at 894 m long; in the real world, the longest self-propelled object made on Earth was the Seawise Giant, a Japanese-built oil supertanker listed at 458.45 m long. A Dominix dwarfs even such a large vessel, yet when viewed in Eve the Dominix looks like a small (lumpy) toy. There is no sense of size because the camera drone's field of view is enormous. I think that means that the math involved in calculating angle of view demands that the camera drone's lens must be very large (perhaps hundreds of meters for a battleship) but I'm not a skillful mathematician.

My proposal is simple: adjust the camera drones so that they present ships in a way that conveys their size.