How Big Is UO?

[Tek]

After seeing this today I was wondering what is UO's total land mass?

http://i.imgur.com/uBWCz.jpg

 

[G.v.P]

I wonder how they measure stuff like that. Would one foot be equal to a tile in UO? ;P

 

[sablestorm]

I remember one of the first days playing UO, I wanted to see what the scale was. My question was, how far can I travel on foot in a day. I wound up running from one end of Britannia to the other in far less than a day so Britannia really isn't all that big.....

 

[Derium of ls]

yeah it all depends on how you look at it. A quick google search says between 40-50 mile per hour a horse can run, gallop about 20-30ish. So it might be a 'decent' size world. But if you take into effects on the average castle size (450,000sq. feet) and given you can run that on foot in game in less than 5 seconds. It would make the world seem huuuuuge. A castle is 31x31 (961 tiles), so 450,000sq. feet would end up being 468.2622268470343 sq. feet per UO tile if you go by that scale... I think I did that right?

So I think that means for every 11.27 tiles you run, you just covered a mile.

 

[Kiminality]

My first thought would have been that you could measure the distance travelled at a walk in a period of time, then extrapolate from an average walks speed that distance is.
To greatly simplify it, if you assume that an average walk speed is 5mph, then the distance travelled in 12 minutes would be a mile.

But, there's a problem that the walk speed in a game is largely down to the developers' discretion, and even slight discrepancies in actual relative walk speeds lead to greater inaccuracies as you scale it up.

Using that method, though, 1,440 tiles would be a mile. 900 tiles for a kilometer.
The total map, including sea, is 5120x4095.
3.56mi x 2.85mi, or 5.69km x 4.55km.
That's not really very big...

 

[AesSedai]

- I haven't looked at the link, but I have thought about this in the past.

My theory was one step walking is the length of one tile. I think the average stride is about 2.5 feet... so 5120 x 4095 x 2.5 equals the amount of square feet, by using Kiminality's tile square area and my 2.5 sq. ft. per tile theory.

x: so that's like under ~ 9927 square miles and NYC is 305 sq. miles...

 

[Jhym]

I believe it's 2300x2300 tiles for the main (Britannia) map, most other facets are smaller.

IF you go explicitly by visual sizing:

Each tile "seems" to represent about 3x3 feet.
That puts the "explicit" worldsize aounrd 1.3 miles x 1.3 miles.

However, you could argue that the tiles are really just representations of things and not really comparable to "real world" sizing. This is because of things like gigantic snow flakes, gold pieces, totem poles that are 3 stories tall, etc.

Conceptually you could take a few dozen items that have been "mapped" to UO graphics, size them in the real world and then in UO to come up with an approximate conversion factor. However, I think we just have to accept that fact that a tile is an arbitrarily sized piece of the facet that can range from 3 foot to a few dozen or hundred feet wide. The reason I say this?

Most trees are 1-2 tiles wide. Most "roads" are 3 or 4 tiles wide. "Rivers" are about 5-8 tiles wide. Thus the sizing factor can't be the same across the entire map.

It might be interesting sometime to take all the environmental elements on the maps and resize them according to their realistic sizes and see how big the maps would get.

In any case, I'd have to say it's whatever friggin size you want it to be at the moment.

 

[G.v.P]

If UO is smaller than Oblivion, and Elder Scrolls II is almost four times that, man, there are some crazy huge games out there. I remember playing Star Wars Galaxies, trying to run from one town to another. It took forever. In UO, it definitely doesn't take forever to get from Town A to Town B. Of course, we also have recalling.

Before SA Beta, I had a grand idea of what SA would end up being like since we knew ahead of time there wouldn't be any recalling in to the new lands (aside from the recent housing change). Expansive areas are sort of fun, however, as someone recently pointed out, Ilsh is very squished together; I think, to this date, Malas might be the most open facet, however, T2A is a close second, no pun intended. Always loved T2A for its lack of forests and open terrain.

 

[Stupid Miner]

My first thought would have been that you could measure the distance travelled at a walk in a period of time, then extrapolate from an average walks speed that distance is.
To greatly simplify it, if you assume that an average walk speed is 5mph, then the distance travelled in 12 minutes would be a mile.

But, there's a problem that the walk speed in a game is largely down to the developers' discretion, and even slight discrepancies in actual relative walk speeds lead to greater inaccuracies as you scale it up.

Using that method, though, 1,440 tiles would be a mile. 900 tiles for a kilometer.
The total map, including sea, is 5120x4095.
3.56mi x 2.85mi, or 5.69km x 4.55km.
That's not really very big...

Doesn't make much sense to judge by speed of movement, since that's arbitrary.
Proportionality of objects makes more sense (namely people to tiles)

Assuming they made the male avatar 6 feet tall, which is likely due to the muscular physique he has on the avatar (and also since it's simple). The ingame height is about 1 inch, so that be 1 x 12 x 6 = 72 , and the game is tilted 45 degrees so it'd be the hypotenuse of a 45, 45, 90 triangle which means it'd be 72 times the square root of 2 approximately = 100

So UO is 1/100th the size of reality.
And so... whatever size the pixels are, multiply that by 100.
and find out how many pixels per tile there are.. think i heard 45 once?

 

[Mairut]

Including or excluding dungeons and mines?

 

[Tek]

too bad we dont have a Five on Friday anymore to answer this

 

[Nexus]

Hmm if I'm not mistaken.....

Trammel and Fel are like 6144 x 4096
Ilshenar 2304 x 1600
Malas 2560 x 2048
Tokuno 1448 x 1448
Ter Mur (includes the underworld and abyss) 1280 x 4096

That's in Tiles.....

So! now we figure out how big a tile is.. time to get a sextant....

Each tile comes out to about 5' x 5' so.....

Tram and Fel are about 5.8 miles North to South and 3.8 miles West to East
Ilshenar 1.9 Miles North to South and 1.5 miles West to East
Malas 2.4 miles North to South and 1.9 Miles West to East
Tokuno 1.4 Miles North to South and West to East
Ter Mur 1.2 Miles North to South and 3.8 Miles West to East

So you could fit all 6 Facets on a grid 18.7 Miles North To South and 11.9 Miles West to East making it average out around the same side as Burnout Paradise....

One thing you have to think about though, considering how "small" the land actually is how tall are the people? I mean are we mining the side of of a pile of Gravel? Are those vast oceans really no bigger than someone's garden pond?

 

[Kiminality]

Doesn't make much sense to judge by speed of movement, since that's arbitrary.
Proportionality of objects makes more sense (namely people to tiles)

Movement rate seems like a better metric for measuring distance, to me.

Backtracking my calculation to the dimensions of a tile, I got 0.9m on a side.
Measuring the closest door got me a width of near enough 0.75m, while a UO door is a tile wide.
Graves, if I remember rightly, are 1x2 tiles. A quick bit of research gets me 2.6'x6' for a grave.
A (2x2) double bed is generally 4'6"x6'3".

It does seem to support a tile being equal to a yard (along with what others have said).

 

[Kiminality]

So! now we figure out how big a tile is.. time to get a sextant....

Each tile comes out to about 5' x 5' so.....

I don't get how you're converting from the sextant coordinates to distance, when that conversion would require us to already know a dimension of the land.
Starting from LB's throne, at (0,0) if you walked east, once you've reached 1 degree east, you've travelled a 1/360 the circumference of the world. Without already having the data to determine that circumference, then you can't determine the distance you've travelled.

And I have strong words for anyone who says "torus" >=(

 

[Morgana LeFay (PoV)]

too bad we dont have a Five on Friday anymore to answer this

I love your Signature. I wonder how many of these people get it.

 

[Splup]

Measure population per m^2 and UO will

 

[Basara]

Also remember that you could travel about the entire length of Sosaria in Ultima III in about a day or so on foot, barring the time used in encounters.

The land has never really been that big, as it would take longer to get from entrance to level 3 or 4 of the typical UIII dungeon, than to run from Montor East or Montor West (roughly analogous to the Trinsic Jungle coast, on the UO map) to Britain.

Which makes me wonder...

Is Montor (Chaos Shrine) THAT Montor, sucked across facets by that well to the abyss (IMO, that SHOULD have been the SA entrance, or should be made into an alternate one), and the ruins we see in the Trinsic Jungle south coast the parts of that town not sucked into Ilshenar?

 

[Babble]

Most gamers compare world size in how long it takes you from one far end to get to the other.

In that comparisson UO is very small.

 

[Lord Chaos]

I must side with Kiminality here, it takes two steps to move from one tile to the next, so a tile is approx. 1 yard or 1 meter.

 

[Czernobog]

I always felt the land mass in UO was huge. Last night I made a char on Siege for the first time and decided to do the Ricardo quest to get my hands on some decent gear. I had no way to travel except on foot. I was compeletly surprised by how quickly i was able to move across the map. Compared to other games out these days I guess the land mass isn't very big. However, at the time of release I bet it was one of the largest game worlds to date.

 

[kelmo]

It is big enough. Even with out recall or magery to gate it is easy enough to get around.

 

[Lynk]

Tek, I applaud your Nerd Trapping question abilities.

 

[Nexus]

I don't get how you're converting from the sextant coordinates to distance, when that conversion would require us to already know a dimension of the land.
Starting from LB's throne, at (0,0) if you walked east, once you've reached 1 degree east, you've travelled a 1/360 the circumference of the world. Without already having the data to determine that circumference, then you can't determine the distance you've travelled.

And I have strong words for anyone who says "torus" >=(

Well considering UO is on a 2 dimensional plain circumference shouldn't matter. Additionally the sextants show a difference of 5 minutes between each tile so saying it's 5 feet by 5 feet (since it's written as 5' for example if you use a sextant in game) is just as good as trying to say that each tile is 5.75 miles on a side (1 minute of latitude is 6076 feet in our world). We be takin some big steps.....and if people want to feel better about UO they can take those raw tile counts and multiply the first on in each pair by 6076 and the second one by 5274 then divide them by 5280 and get a much bigger number. Still very unrealistic considering that means each set our toons take is roughly 5.75 miles...

 

[Tek]

Tek, I applaud your Nerd Trapping question abilities.

Tell me about it, ask a simple question…

 

[Kiminality]

Well considering UO is on a 2 dimensional plain circumference shouldn't matter. Additionally the sextants show a difference of 5 minutes between each tile so saying it's 5 feet by 5 feet (since it's written as 5' for example if you use a sextant in game) is just as good as trying to say that each tile is 5.75 miles on a side (1 minute of latitude is 6076 feet in our world). We be takin some big steps.....and if people want to feel better about UO they can take those raw tile counts and multiply the first on in each pair by 6076 and the second one by 5274 then divide them by 5280 and get a much bigger number. Still very unrealistic considering that means each set our toons take is roughly 5.75 miles...

Well, the UO map can't actually be mapped only any standard 3D geometric shape. Sextants work on a sphere, with known points of reference (stars), which is why I referred to it as such.

The thing is, 5' (feet) and 5' (minutes) would only be the same if the dimension described by the range of the sextant coordinates was a little over 4 miles. So, yeah, if we knew that dimension was a little over 4 miles, then 5' (minutes) would equal 5' (feet), but since that dimension's an unknown, then so is the distance described by the 5' (minutes).

 

[Basara]

Actually, didn't someone show that because of the way the wrapping works at the map edges, that Trammel and Felucca (without T2A) are the surfaces of Toroids?

 

[Kiminality]

And I have strong words for anyone who says "torus" >=(

Actually, didn't someone show that because of the way the wrapping works at the map edges, that Trammel and Felucca (without T2A) are the surfaces of Toroids?

Theoretically, yes. The wrapping at the edges supports that.
However...

1.) In the original UO opening, the world is portrayed as a globe. As it is in the various depictions of globes around the game.
2.) There's only one way a toroid could physically be formed, due to the dimensions of the map, and that would result in the north-south dimension of the map varying from 5120 to 1025, throwing the projection of the map way off