Rim-World Scaling Problems: How BIG are they?

[Hans Lemurson]

I was trying to give an answer in this thread about how big an acre would be in-game, when I went on a massive tangent about how the distances actually scale to that of the whole planet.

My estimates are that the planet is around 1440 tiles in circumference (120 tiles from 31.72^oN pentagonal-tile to the equator).  Assuming a roughly earth-sized planet (~40,000 km circumference) this gives planet-tiles a width of about 27 Kilometers.  Walking speed for humans is around 5km/hour, so it should take about 5 hours to traverse a tile on an earth-sized planet.  Caravans however can traverse a flat tile in a single hour, which either implies that the RimWorld is vastly smaller than earth, or that its day-length is longer so that an "hour" (1/24th of a day) is more time than we are accustomed.  (Longer days would account for the ridiculously fast growing times, but raise even more questions about sleep schedules and food needs).

Even so, if we just shrink the planet so crossing a tile takes an hour at normal walking speed (assuming hours are earth-hours), this still gives us a 5 kilometer width to our tiles.  The "medium" map-size is 250x250 tiles, which implies a whopping 20 meters per tile.  Even so, that's still giving us a world smaller than the moon (about the size of pluto).

It gets worse.  Walking from edge-to-edge of my 250 tile map took almost exactly 2 hours.  This implies that a medium map is actually BIGGER than a planet-tile...but let's ignore that.  Maybe your pawns go double-time when on caravan.?  Or maybe your colony-map actually includes more than one planet-tile worth of area?  Dunno.  On-map though it takes a pawn about an hour to traverse ~125 tiles.

So...this boils down to several equally implausible scenarios.:

• 
  1 tile is 1 meter, and 1 rim-hour is 1 earth-hour:
  
  • A planet-tile is 125 meters wide
  • Pawns walk at 3cm/s
  • The world has a circumference of 180 kilometers.  (1/10th that of our moon, and at the lower limit for gravitational rounding.)
• 
  1 tile is 1 meter, and 1 rim-hour is 0.02 earth-hours (72 seconds)
  
  • Pawns walk at 1.5m/s
  • Planet is still tiny.
  • A year lasts 29 earth-hours, so you can literally watch the grass grow.
• 
  1 tile is 100 meters and 1 rim-hour is 1 earth-hour:
  
  • A planet-tile is 25,000 meters wide.
  • RimWorld is about 90% the size of earth.
  • Pawns walk at 7 meters/second (25 km/hour, sprinting speed, 5x walking speed)
  • ...Yo pawn's so fat that she fills 2-and-a-half acres of land!
• 
  1 tile is 10 meters, and 1 Rim-Hour is 0.5 Earth-Hours (30 minutes)
  
  • Planet-Tile is 2500 meters
  • Pawns walk at 2.5kph on-map, and 5kph as caravans
  • Rimworld is 3,600km in circumference (30% size of moon, 150% size of dwarf Ceres in asteroid belt)
  • 1 Rim-Year takes about 1 Earth-Month
  • Walls are 10 meters thick, Pawns are the size of elephants.
  • Agricultural yields are reasonable, though growth speed works on the assumption that 9 pregnant women can make a single baby in a month.
  
  I think the only way to resolve this is to assume that some physical constants are different in the RimWorld universe.  Higher gravity so that tiny planets can have atmospheres?  That would certainly give faster orbits too.

[Brutetal]

Nice man.
Good job calculating those things.
But sadly I think one of the main answers will be "because gameplay". I don't think Tynan had all those things in mind when he put them down. It just "feels right" from a gameplay perspective.
Even though it seems ridicilous from the physical point of view

[Listy]

I was trying to give an answer in this thread about how big an acre would be in-game, when I went on a massive tangent about how the distances actually scale to that of the whole planet.

My estimates are that the planet is around 1440 tiles in circumference (120 tiles from 31.72^oN pentagonal-tile to the equator).  Assuming a roughly earth-sized planet (~40,000 km circumference) this gives planet-tiles a width of about 27 Kilometers.  Walking speed for humans is around 5km/hour, so it should take about 5 hours to traverse a tile on an earth-sized planet.  Caravans however can traverse a flat tile in a single hour, which either implies that the RimWorld is vastly smaller than earth, or that its day-length is longer so that an "hour" (1/24th of a day) is more time than we are accustomed.  (Longer days would account for the ridiculously fast growing times, but raise even more questions about sleep schedules and food needs).

Even so, if we just shrink the planet so crossing a tile takes an hour at normal walking speed (assuming hours are earth-hours), this still gives us a 5 kilometer width to our tiles.  The "medium" map-size is 250x250 tiles, which implies a whopping 20 meters per tile.  Even so, that's still giving us a world smaller than the moon (about the size of pluto).

It gets worse.  Walking from edge-to-edge of my 250 tile map took almost exactly 2 hours.  This implies that a medium map is actually BIGGER than a planet-tile...but let's ignore that.  Maybe your pawns go double-time when on caravan.?  Or maybe your colony-map actually includes more than one planet-tile worth of area?  Dunno.  On-map though it takes a pawn about an hour to traverse ~125 tiles.

So...this boils down to several equally implausible scenarios.:

• 
  1 tile is 1 meter, and 1 rim-hour is 1 earth-hour:
  
  • A planet-tile is 125 meters wide
  • Pawns walk at 3cm/s
  • The world has a circumference of 180 kilometers.  (1/10th that of our moon, and at the lower limit for gravitational rounding.)
• 
  1 tile is 1 meter, and 1 rim-hour is 0.02 earth-hours (72 seconds)
  
  • Pawns walk at 1.5m/s
  • Planet is still tiny.
  • A year lasts 29 earth-hours, so you can literally watch the grass grow.
• 
  1 tile is 100 meters and 1 rim-hour is 1 earth-hour:
  
  • A planet-tile is 25,000 meters wide.
  • RimWorld is about 90% the size of earth.
  • Pawns walk at 7 meters/second (25 km/hour, sprinting speed, 5x walking speed)
  • ...Yo pawn's so fat that she fills 2-and-a-half acres of land!
• 
  1 tile is 10 meters, and 1 Rim-Hour is 0.5 Earth-Hours (30 minutes)
  
  • Planet-Tile is 2500 meters
  • Pawns walk at 2.5kph on-map, and 5kph as caravans
  • Rimworld is 3,600km in circumference (30% size of moon, 150% size of dwarf Ceres in asteroid belt)
  • 1 Rim-Year takes about 1 Earth-Month
  • Walls are 10 meters thick, Pawns are the size of elephants.
  • Agricultural yields are reasonable, though growth speed works on the assumption that 9 pregnant women can make a single baby in a month.
  
  I think the only way to resolve this is to assume that some physical constants are different in the RimWorld universe.  Higher gravity so that tiny planets can have atmospheres?  That would certainly give faster orbits too.

Us wargamers have something called "Ground scale" and "Model Scale". its a really brave wargamer who tries to have both the same...

[Hans Lemurson]

Nice man.
Good job calculating those things.
But sadly I think one of the main answers will be "because gameplay". I don't think Tynan had all those things in mind when he put them down. It just "feels right" from a gameplay perspective.
Even though it seems ridicilous from the physical point of view

I wasn't asking anything about "why", I was just exploring the consequences of various assumptions about scale.  It all "works" in that it doesn't feel broken, but there are some amusing fridge-logic situations when you realize how the scale in two different game mechanics clash.  "Pawns walk HOW slow?! "

Us wargamers have something called "Ground scale" and "Model Scale". its a really brave wargamer who tries to have both the same...

Hehe, indeed.  In every system in the game, the scale feels roughly correct, but only when you carefully compare them to each other do the inconsistencies show up.  And that's the sign of good design!

[Wanderer_joins]

For the orbital year, consider a smaller star than the sun.

For base movement /world tile, i'd be ok with a "realistic" travel time. But i always have a colony running, and a faster game speed would be useful.

[Hans Lemurson]

Yeah, tighter orbit around a dimmer star, or a star with higher gravity (without scorching luminosity) and you've got yourself a faster year.  No problem.

...But then how should you describe age or the passage of time?  Is it in Earth-years?  Accelerated Rim-years?  Is a year that isn't a year long still a year?

As for distances, despite the rimworld being "tiny" by planetary standards, it is already excessively large from a gameplay perspective.  Huge number of settlements you will never reach or visit.  It's big enough to host a small MMO of over a hundred player settlements without feeling crowded.  But to be interesting from a single-player perspective, and have caravans be worthwhile, you have to make them able to reach nearby settlements quickly.

But when you combine the movement speed in-colony and the movement speed out of colony, then the result start to get amusing.  If the world is supposed to be sparsely populated, then the travel-time over open ground is actually a little bit on the fast side.  Are you embarking on serious journey with your caravan, or just popping over to market and back?

[Wanderer_joins]

A year is a full orbit.

A day is a full rotation of the planet, these parameters are independent.

I'm year 5523. I've been to the hidden ship and back home in a few years on a 30% generated world. I've destroyed more than a dozen of bases, keeping a few faction bases not to wipe them out.

World simulation is still lacking but A16 has been a great update.

Concerning the in out movement comparison, since island tiles turn into a partial map of the island, i've considered a map tile smaller than a world tile.

[Hans Lemurson]

Concerning the in out movement comparison, since island tiles turn into a partial map of the island, i've considered a map tile smaller than a world tile.

And yet crossing a map takes longer than crossing a world-tile. 

[Wanderer_joins]

Yep, but we're back to the problem of reasonable travel time (and play time... ) for not hardcore players.

[Arctic_fox]

Now im 3/4th asleep and the last 1/4th is running on nodoz and monster so hopefully i make sense.

Now that said how about lower (1/2 or less) gravity with bigger people taking much longer strides, as time has passed humans have gotten bigger, for example in biblical times the average  hight for males was 4'8" to 5'2"  depending on which paper you read and what area of the world with some ADULT male remains as short as 4', today the average hight is roughly 5'10" or more with 6'0-6'2" not that unusual.

Now.assume this trend keeps up, 2k years was a gain of 8 inches at least 1 foot 10 inches at most, that would mean in 3500 years you would have humans at a minimum of 7 foot a max of 8'7"

This is not taking into account things like generations on a low G worlds making them taller, mutations, bio engineering, bio weapons, cyro sleep ect.

But its a start, to someone 9 foot tall on a low G world 5km would be far shorter and easier to cross then someone 6 foot tall in 1 G, just a thought, im going to bed now

[Stormfox]

While I love your analysis as a well made fun fact presentation, I think searching for too much realism in game environments is prone to fall falt for the aforementioned reasons. Games cannot be to completely scale or they do not work.


Some more examples for that:

- Minecraft blocks are suggested as 1 cubic metre. This holds up with creatures, doors, chests and similar furniture, but breaks as soon as you want to build something "nice". Because then, you will want to make one level of your house about 5-6 blocks high, build "cupboards" out of a few blocks and two doors, and so on. Also, the world would be pretty small. A really huge multiplayer world we mostly played in my store lan for a few years was a handful of thousands in each direction, meaning it was about as big as a small forest if 1 block equals 1 metre on that scale :-)

- Most modern RPGs use a handful of houses to give the impression of a town or large settlement. I actually think most games *could* up the count a bit, but Whiterun in Skyrim is a perfect example of this. Even if you doubled the amount of buildings in Whiterun to make it feel a bit more like a settlement instead of ten haphazard houses below a castle (btw, Edoras in the LotR movies always looked kinda small, too), it would not even be near realistic for a settlement of the size it represents in the fluff.

- Walking from one end of Kalimdor to the other in WoW takes a manageable amount of minutes, even though the continent spans a few thousand miles north-south. If the scale was real, the poor griffins would likely combust from air friction because they fly so fast ;-)


There is a very good reason why many games chose to either detach detailed movement from the global movement (by dividing the game into smaller zones connected by boats or similar stuff, i.e. teleporters) or focus on a small region at a time. And even then, in most games the time scale used during action (combat or whatever) and adventuring/exploring is different.


Btw, this basically *is* the same discussion like the "armor vest vs windmill" one next door. In both situations, there needs to be a medium between not being completely unrealistic and game mechanics. Its a really interesting field and a few well made tweaks to those numbers can make a game be playable but feel much more realistic, but a certain suspension of disbelief is simply unforgoable.