92 Meter dive only using air in lungs IRL! Now I feel gypped with my measly 45 seconds of base O2!
0x6A7232
US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
US Join Date: 2016-10-06 Member: 222906Members
...This dude's got 180 seconds base O2 lol:
https://www.facebook.com/LifeAndArtCollections/videos/1703944026380142/
https://www.facebook.com/LifeAndArtCollections/videos/1703944026380142/
Comments
Having said that, the fact that our very most advanced scuba tank only gives us a couple of minutes is irritating beyond belief.
Don't feel too cheated, @0x6A7232, because that guy certainly is cheating.
Free-divers, particularly those going for depth records, really game the system hard to achieve their marks. First off, their descents are practically powered; they hang on to a weighted sled that drops along a guide cable to their intended depth. So, really, rather than swimming down, they're just hanging onto an anchor dropped into the deep. Once they reach target depth, they start ascending, but that's done by hand-over-hand climbing up the drop cable and/or using swim fins...and these aren't traditional SCUBA fins, either. The current vogue is a monofin - it reminds you of a dolphin's tailfin - which provides a lot of thrust. So even at 92 meters, the ascent is rapid.
Naturally, swimming isn't a free action, but these divers undergo enough training that they're very oxygen-efficient, and temperature-induced vasoconstriction keeps the bulk of their blood in their vital organs, central nervous system, and bulk muscle which, not coincidentally, is exactly what they use to ascend.
What they're not doing is hanging around down there poking through a crappy Alterra lifepod or sawing through doors of a wreck. They have no dwell time and no functional operating time at all. They're an underwater human yo-yo.
You can do that (kinda) in Subnautica, but in a situation where you have stuff you need to get done underwater, it's pretty much a waste of effort. Don't get me wrong; freediving takes intense training, preparation, and it's fraught with dangers that can kill you deader than disco even if you do everything right. But it's essentially a very dangerous stunt rather than a means to do anything productive.
Agreed, and that's one of my longstanding gripes about the game. Basically, for all the tech, Alterra's SCUBA bottles, well...they suck. Realistically, given the depths and times, we're not using SCUBA tanks at all. Nope, what we have in game are pony bottles; their capacity is just too low to be a normal tank.
In many respects, a pony bottle and a bailout bottle are basically the same - small-capacity tanks designed to provide the diver with breathing gas in the event their main supply conks out. The difference, however, is that while a bailout bottle provides gas, it does so through the diver's primary regulator. Which means that if the problem is in the regulator itself or anywhere in the first stage, that diver's one dead duck. A pony bottle, on the other hand, has its own regulator and first stage, so even in the event of a catastrophic equipment failure, that diver still has at least some gas to go on.
So, realistically, if you have one and you're shallow enough, it will give you juuuuuuuust enough time to get your butt back up to breathable air. (If you're down deeper, though...well...in short order you're going to have zero problems.) Since in the real world you have to worry about things like decompression stops and the like, even a 6L pony bottle will only save you down to a depth of about 130 feet...and that's going to be a near thing.
That's essentially the performance we get out of our tanks in-game. Definitely nothing to crow about. Nope, for all their technical posturing, Alterra's slapping fancy labels on pony bottles. Even the rebreathers stink.
PS: Great avatar image @lordoffiling.
It appears that the game plays on accelerated time, which would explain why the air is consumed so fast in the game scuba tank time frame.
Therefore what would really highlight as unrealistic would be the contrast between how long does the character holds his breath against how much extra time a tank adds.
One nice question is, for how long can the protagonist (aka Scuba Steve) free dive in the game?
Given that the PDA notes that "swimming should have been his favorite activity" I take that Scuba Steve should be a near professional swimmer, and that maybe he also is a proficient diver.
And following the reasoning that our athletes keep improving and improving with each generation, records being broken every few years, it is possible that Alterran athletes are something extraordinary by today standards.
Today's trained free divers commonly hold their breath for 3-5 min. I'm not referring to competitive free diving, just trained people such as marines, amateur hunters, aquaculture farmers, and so on...
A regular, current tech, scuba tank should multiply this time by 10-20x near the surface, but it would be far less effective just a couple dozen meters deeper. If it were up to me, I would compromise and keep the breathing mechanic as it is, only altering the initial available air and the scuba tanks supply.
I would set it to 15 or 20 units initially, and increment the tanks supply by the deducted amount. This would set the basic tank to provide 4-5x more air than free diving, whilst maintaining the current scuba gameplay.
However the initial gameplay changes drastically, as the player is tied to the surface now. Longer/deeper diving (such as exploring caves) would be nearly prohibitive. The shallows becomes, more than ever, the very early game biome, as almost everything else is out of reach except, maybe, the tallest kelps or grassy plateaus outcrops.
The starting game resources should still be viably accessible, with the player exploring on the surface and diving only when needed.
It would also mark a sharp new tier in the game, building the first tank and finally freeing yourself from the shackles of the surface and start exploring the caves and deeper biomes.
They do, however, because of gameplay. Less so because of an improvement in experience, but rather to artificially prolong the exploration aspect of the game. If we had 5-10 minutes of tank air to use, wreck exploration and cave diving wouldn't take "enough" time, which would shorten the game overall. The tradeoff, however, is that we don't have to deal with gas toxicity or decompression. Whether it's a fair trade is a matter of personal preference. For my money, I generally turn the oxygen cheat on because I just can't stand the fact that I'm apparently using a Ziploc bag of air for my SCUBA gear. But that's just me.
@scifiwriterguy
Well, exactly how much is the time compression if we assume that the days should be ~20 hours? We can probably figure that out some be how fast the diver swims in game, but then again, gameplay... there's gotta be a way to guess the time compression though. I mean, the PDA says "Day 1, Day 2," etc so we can assume those are based on 24-hour days or things would get really freaky in a shorter or longer day environment. You'd think it had been a year when it's been only half, or visa versa.
Honestly, I just wish they'd set the timescale to realtime rather than this accelerated speed. That'd solve a lot of problems, not the least of which the epilepsy-inducing sunrise/sunset timing.
Probably cause then you'd have people who would finish the game without ever seeing day / night. xD Well... adjust swim speed down and maybe not. Hmm. Like, for example you should't be able to do a hull check on the Cyclops in 10 seconds.. that thing is half the size of a modern nuclear powered sub and those things are HUGE.
The experience would be very different from what it is now, much slower.
Night and day cycles can be adjusted more "freely". A fast rotating planet would have shorter night-day cycles and would also help explain the huge storms cited. Yet, realistically, it would be harder to explain a cycle that fits comfortably with science. One could set it to 1-3 hours for gameplay sake and it would be ok immersion wise.
The point about the Cyclops is also true. Either movement would need to be slowed, or things would need to be bigger. I personally feel like most things are described larger than they look.
I'll try an experience later. Pick up a few flares, throw them on a seamoth or cyclops and try to estimate their size relatively to the flare. As we pick it in our hand, it should work as a nice ruler.
It must really be out of this world in VR.
Build a seat in the cockpit. Look in from the outside and imagine yourself sitting. Also, place a beacon at the front, go to the screw, look back at the beacon, you'll get an in-game meter reading (not sure if we're exactly "life-sized" in that scale though).
I tried it way back then. Yet, like yourself, I'm not sure if a game meter scales to real life meters. I'm short on gaming time, but I'll try to think of a way to gauge spatial and temporal scales of the game.
Maybe most of the space is taken up by filters, ironically giving you less air at the expense of having fresh air.
Slower? Dear God, how short are the days in Illinois? It must be like living under a strobe light.
I know the day cycle is like 20 real life minutes, I mean how many in game Earth minutes have passed)
makes sense right?
If it's a 20 minute day/night cycle, then it's a 72:1 ratio.
1,440 minutes per day, divided by a 20 minute in-game day is 72. Assuming I didn't screw up somewhere (always possible when it comes to me and math), one minute realtime is 72 minutes in-game.
... which means taking that into consideration, the player speed is slowed when compared to actual IRL swim speeds, right?
With those 45 base seconds we can dive ~100m in the game.
Built a multipurpose room. It has ~11m of diameter (I'll go with 10m) and it fits ~2.5 single beds along it's central axis. Assuming 50cm walls (quite thick walls) it leaves us with 9m in its interior and 3.6m per bed. I'll call 3m of sleeping area (mattress, guessed visually). Assuming that the mean human height increased, let's give 2.5m for Scuba Steve (he is tall even by Alterran standards).
This height would also help explain why he is such a proficient swimmer.
Therefore I agree with you. It must be the game perspective. In most fps games we are anchored to the ground and that give us a reference for other creatures size. This game has fewer visual cues and the fast swimming doesn't help, it make distances appear shorter.
@scifiwriterguy I'm with @Flametusk, days might be shorter on 4546b.
Let's try to gauge time by other means. I'll tackle swimming speed.
(Personal note: it bothers me to no end that we swim faster submerged than we do with the front crawl style)
Game swim speed is ~4.5m/s, way faster than current professional swimmers. Even if he performs on par with our best athletes, open water swimming is far more taxing than competitive.
Let's assume he swims between 0.5m/s and 1m/s (agreeing with today professional open water swimmers).
That gives us a game time ranging from 9 to 4.5 times faster than real time. And the game days would last between 180min and 90min.
This is too fast.
It is hard for me to imagine the physics of a terrestrian planet rotating this fast. There are other variables required before calling it (un)feasible, including the planet gravity which would be considerably smaller near the equator. It would have a huge bulge near it, much larger than Earths. Its entire geophysics would be very different from ours.
Free diving swimming speed is considerably slower, but I didn't come up with any sources for mean values in my quick search (help is appreciated - it is hard as diving, free or scuba, does not focus on speed). If Scuba Steve swims ~0.15-0.3 m/s, then days would last 10h - 5h and that's far, far, more credible.
Days needed to be longer, and the game time slowed down. Maybe increase vehicle speed to compensate.
That would give the game a better sense of size, distance and time dimensions. Immersion should go through the roof (it is already very much so).
The problem is that if you fix this with the timescale cheat, it throws all timed events out of whack, including fabricator runtime, battery charge rates, and more. Now, considering that this would also be more accurate, it's certainly a check in the realism column. So they'd have to handle day-length adjustment by modifying the code from its current state...so while I, too, would love to see that slider appear, I'm not going to be holding my breath.