History Main / SpaceCompression

* In ''PaperMario: The Thousand-Year Door'', most buildings are the same size both inside and out, but by comparison to real-life buildings are ridiculously small. Possibly lampshaded, too: battles take place on a stage in front of an audience, but many bosses are so large that they can't actually fit on the stage (an early-game boss has to bend over to fit its head on the screen, which is conveniently an ideal thing to attack).

* Subverted in [[EVEOnline]]. Everything in the game is to scale, which is impressive considering that most distances in the game are ''measured in Astronomical Units''.

* Subverted in [[EVE Online]]. Everything in the game is to scale, which is impressive considering that most distances in the game are ''measured in Astronomical Units''.

[[AC:MMORPGs]]

* ''GalacticCivilizations II'' takes this trope to the literal extreme -- due to the way stars and planets are handled on the game map, it's possible for a planet to be closer to one in another system than to another one in its own (or even to its own system's star). One fan theory tries to {{Handwave}} this by saying that the map is a map of "hyperspace" and that a star's gravity distorts that dimension, but that still doesn't account for how an empire's borders are handled (among other things).
** It actually explains this in the manuals. Each hex represents a unit of -time- not distance. That is, each hex represents a variable amount of distance that a unit can travel in one static unit of time. As star drives are affected by gravity and what not, a ship is moving slower within a system's radius and within a planet's gravity while moving faster between systems and planets. An empire's borders are calculated similarly because the lack of natural boundaries as well as the three dimensional nature of space means that an empire's influence is more a function of time and the ability to travel rather than physical distance.

** This is still a tiny improvement over the game's model, {{Roguelike}}s. This can be used to your advantage by clogging the map with [[TheGoomba trash enemies]] while plinking something dangerous from long range.

* ''{{Runescape}}'' is another particular heavy offender. Towns take as much space as forests, yet stories of [=NPCs=] and history of the land might leave you another impression.

** If you calculate the the approximate size of Hyrule in ''[[OcarinaOfTime OoT]]'' based on how long it takes to travel from Kokori Forest to Castle town on foot (it turns out that journey was about 150 miles), then Hyrule is about 1/3 the size of England (The ridiculously small population on the other hand...).
** It takes a kid the better part of one day to walk that distance. How does that make over a hundred miles?

* ''DwarfFortress''' tiles are "the size of a dragon", a joke on the fact any given tile can contain a single standing creature of any size (whether a mouse or a dragon) and any number of 'crawling' creatures (so you can squeeze through cramped corridors by crawling). Multi-tile monsters are planned, as soon as the ensuing pathfinding nightmare can be worked around.

* ''DwarfFortress''' tiles are "the size of a dragon", a joke on the fact any given tile can contain a single standing creature of any size (whether a mouse or a dragon) and any number of 'crawling' creatures (so you can squeeze through cramped corridors by crawling).

** It takes a kid the better part of a day to walk that distance. How does that make 150 miles?

* Happened when the ''{{Ultima}}'' series stopped using an overworld/town/dungeon split from ''{{Ultima}} 6'' onwards. The kingdom of Britannia went from spanning multiple continents to approximately the [[http://watorrey.net/ultima/u7bgfov/maps/ultima7.gif size of a suburb]].
* The world of ''[[TheElderScrolls Morrowind]]'' is perpetually shrouded in fog. This was originally for technical reasons... but if you download a no-fog patch, you can see it was also to disguise that all the major cities of the world are less than a hundred meters apart.
** ''Morrowind'' also made use of terrain to make it really hard to travel in a straight line between towns, instead requiring winding detours through channels, bridges over gaps and around the ghostfence. All of this extended the time it took to go places and made the game feel much bigger then it really was (because traveling took so long). This, along with the absense of universal fast travel like in Oblivion led a lot of people to believe Morrowind's map was bigger than Oblivion, despite it being the opposite (as travel by foot in Oblivion tends to involve far less detours and it was possible to fast travel between any two explored destinations).
* The newer ''[[TheElderScrolls Oblivion]]'' doesn't even pretend to be to scale. The imperial island, which on the world map is about the size of Great Britain, is scarcely large enough to contain the Imperial City, which is as big as a large parking lot.
** And the country itself is small enough that if you turn off fogging and increase visibility range to maximum, you can still see the Imperial City's central tower when climbing mountains near the border. The in-world info would have you believe Cyrodiil is a huge empire; on in-game scale, it's smaller than most of Europe's micronations (under 42 square kilometers according to official data from Bethseda.)
** The level of vertical exaggeration applied to said mountains is fairly incredible too; the road from the Imperial City up to Bruma is almost all at a 30 degree (or more) slope. The chances of ever getting eg. a horse and cart up there don't seem good - or wouldn't be if the citizens ever needed to transport anything…
** And if the horses in the game [[YouFailBiologyForever weren't part mountain goat judging from how well they climb.]]
* DK Isles seems to shrink in size between the 2D ''DonkeyKongCountry'' and the 3D ''DonkeyKong 64''. This is because it's meant to be like a 3D version of the map screens from the 2D games. That's why the jungle, which is inside the island, has an open top sky.

** I once calculated the apporiximate size of Hyrule in OoT (Ok, I'm a nerd) based on how long it takes to travel from Kokori Forest to Castle town on foot (it turns out that journey was about 150 miles) and Hyrule is about 1/3 the size of England (The ridiculously small population on the other hand...).
* ''{{Freelancer}}'' did something deeply weird with the fabric of space and time where planets are only a few kilometers in diameter, five minutes' flight apart, and motionless relative to one another. They're actually smaller than some of the starships you fly.
** ''StarTrek: Bridge Commander'' does the same thing, with planets that show as small circles on the area map measured in kilometers.
* ''[=~Pokémon~=]'''s towns and cities are remarkably close together; even taking into account all the RandomEncounters, once all the {{Broken Bridge}}s are fixed, it takes ''maybe'' an hour to circuit the Kanto region. Even the largest cities have a few dozen buildings, and maybe eight you can actually enter.

*** Apparantly in early Alpha bulds the continents were much more realistically sized, testers and employees rapidly realised that this was ''incredibly boring.''

* The cities in the 3-D ''GrandTheftAuto'' series are kinda like miniature megalopolises: Liberty City is the size of a small suburb, Vice City is the size of a coast town, and the entire ''state'' of San Andreas is not even bigger than a large city.
* In ''AnimalCrossing'', outdoor and indoor maps are square grids. Character interactions with, say, furniture show that each cell of an indoor map is about one meter by one meter in size. But outdoors, an "acre" is 16 cells by 16 cells. If this is intended to call up the standard acre of 4047 m^2, that means each cell is closer to four meters on a side, and the characters [[UnitsNotToScale don't shrink to fit]].
* ''DwarfFortress''' tiles are "the size of a dragon", a joke on the fact any given tile can contain a single standing creature of any size (whether a mouse or a dragon) and any number of 'crawling' creatures (so you can squeeze through cramped corridors by crawling).
** This is still a tiny improvement over the game's model, {{Roguelike}}s. This can be used to your advantage by clogging the map with [[TheGoomba trash enemies]] while plinking something dangerous from long range.
*** Averted in ''Incursion'', where huge monsters take up more than one tile and a single tile can be shared by more than one normal sized monster. This realistically prevents huge creatures like dragons from moving down human sized corridors.
* The latest entries in the ''{{Avernum}}'' series effectively compressed the map by replacing the overland map with a continuous series of ''Geneforge''-style town-scale maps, reducing the distances between towns down to few kilometers.
* Combined with the [[UnitsNotToScale units not being to scale,]] SpaceCompression makes ''BattleForWesnoth'''s scale very mutable. One of the common abbreviations seen on the forum is HAPMA - Hexes Are Possibly Miles Across - explaining why, for instance, archers can't shoot further than a single hex. The terrain graphics are also very variable, with a stand of trees being the same in-game size as a mountain, a house, or a patch of flowers.
* In ''PaperMario: The Thousand-Year Door'', most buildings are the same size both inside and out, but by comparison to real-life buildings are ridiculously small. Possibly lampshaded, too: battles take place on a stage in front of an audience, but many bosses are so large that they can't actually fit on the stage (an early-game boss has to bend over to fit its head on the screen, which is conveniently an ideal thing to attack).
* ''GalacticCivilizations II'' takes this trope to the literal extreme -- due to the way stars and planets are handled on the game map, it's possible for a planet to be closer to one in another system than to another one in its own (or even to its own system's star). One fan theory tries to {{Handwave}} this by saying that the map is a map of "hyperspace" and that a star's gravity distorts that dimension, but that still doesn't account for how an empire's borders are handled (among other things).
** It actually explains this in the manuals. Each hex represents a unit of -time- not distance. That is, each hex represents a variable amount of distance that a unit can travel in one static unit of time. As star drives are affected by gravity and what not, a ship is moving slower within a system's radius and within a planet's gravity while moving faster between systems and planets. An empire's borders are calculated similarly because the lack of natural boundaries as well as the three dimensional nature of space means that an empire's influence is more a function of time and the ability to travel rather than physical distance.

* Also, ''{{Gun}}'', in which one can travel on horseback from Kansas to Montana in ten minutes of real time and approximately a day of game time.
* In ''DragonQuest'', like most [=RPG=]s, you [[WalkingTheEarth Walk The Earth]]. Normally, this trope can be avoided by assuming that only the important stuff is shown, not to mention WorldMaps in Eastern [=RPG=]s are deliberately on a wider scales than the towns. In [[DragonQuestVIII VIII]], however, the game keeps track of how far you've walked. By the end of the game, once you've walked over more or less every square inch of the planet, it tells you that you've walked maybe 500 kilometers.
* Hopefully to-be-averted in InfinityTheQuestForEarth, an in-development space sim MMOG that uses [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation procedural generation]] to create a game world of hundreds of billions of realistically sized stars and planets (i.e. big), with realistic expanses of nothing between them.

* Spectacularly averted by the ''{{Elite}}'' games, most notably ''{{Frontier}}'' and ''FirstEncounters''. All the planets and systems are FAR apart, there are orbital patterns to contend with (try approaching a planet from the 'wrong side' with damaged engines), gravity and atmospheres functions realistically, combat is performed at a distance of several kilometres etc. etc. About the only Space Trope ''not'' averted by an '''Elite''' game is SpaceIsNoisy, but that's likely RuleOfCool: noone wants a silent space battle.

* In the first WildArms game, you can walk around the entire world on the world map (yes, it's spherical) in a minute or two, though you'll need a plane and/or boat to get though the ocean areas.
* ''{{Fallout}} 3'' is nothing out of the ordinary for this article. It still hits home hard when you're familiar with the (real-life) areas and realize you'd ''kill'' to have those kind of commute times (think minutes on foot versus half an hour in traffic)....
** A big step up from the maker's previous game, ''[[TheElderScrolls Oblivion]]'', though.
** Compare to the first two Fallout games - the world map was realistically large (so the player travelled between places on an overworld map), though the towns themselves weren't very big.
*** Still, the kicker is the Vaults themselves: The typical capacity of a Vault in the canon is 1,000 dwellers. No single Vault depicted in any game is close to holding a ''tenth'' of that.
** For your information, the Capital Wasteland is about 50 km in each dimension. That takes about 5 to 10 hours to cross. You might even be able to get this in-game ... but the Fallout time is sped up by a factor of ''thirty''.
* Planets in ''{{Spore}}''. You can [[spoiler: find Earth and lay a colony down on it. The only areas large enough to facilitate the room of a single colony (which, in Spore, contains roughly 10 major buildings or so), without deforming the shape of the land, are Antarctica and Asia.]]
* The ''Battlecruiser'', ''Universal Combat'' and ''Galactic Command'' series by 3000AD totally averts this trope and pretty much everything is to scale. A planet is literally planet sized and it takes hours if not days to travel around it once.
* ''TheSaboteur'' places [[GayParee Paris]] within 30 minutes driving distance of Le Havre and Saarbrücken, and squashes the city of Paris into a smaller scale version. In reality it's a 2-3 hour drive from Paris to Le Havre, and a 3-5 one to Saarbrücken.

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* Spectacularly averted by the ''Elite'' games, most notably ''{{Frontier}}'' and ''FirstEncounters''. All the planets and systems are FAR apart, there are orbital patterns to contend with (try approaching a planet from the 'wrong side' with damaged engines), gravity and atmospheres functions realistically, combat is performed at a distance of several kilometres etc. etc. About the only Space Trope ''not'' averted by an '''Elite''' game is SpaceIsNoisy, but that's likely RuleOfCool: noone wants a silent space battle.

* ''{{Runescape}}'' is another particular heavy offender. Towns take as much space as forests, yet stories of NPCs and history of the land might leave you another impression.

* Notably averted in ''[[TheElderScrolls Daggerfall]]'', where it took 200 real-time hours to walk from one end of the map to another
** The world of ''[[TheElderScrolls Morrowind]]'' is perpetually shrouded in fog. This was originally for technical reasons... but if you download a no-fog patch, you can see it was also to disguise that all the major cities of the world are less than a hundred meters apart.
*** ''Morrowind'' also made use of terrain to make it really hard to travel in a straight line between towns, instead requiring winding detours through channels, bridges over gaps and around the ghostfence. All of this extended the time it took to go places and made the game feel much bigger then it really was (because traveling took so long). This, along with the absense of universal fast travel like in Oblivion led a lot of people to believe Morrowind's map was bigger than Oblivion, despite it being the opposite (as travel by foot in Oblivion tends to involve far less detours and it was possible to fast travel between any two explored destinations).
** The newer ''[[TheElderScrolls Oblivion]]'' doesn't even pretend to be to scale. The imperial island, which on the world map is about the size of Great Britain, is scarcely large enough to contain the Imperial City, which is as big as a large parking lot.
*** And the country itself is small enough that if you turn off fogging and increase visibility range to maximum, you can still see the Imperial City's central tower when climbing mountains near the border. The in-world info would have you believe Cyrodiil is a huge empire; on in-game scale, it's smaller than most of Europe's micronations (under 42 square kilometers according to official data from Bethseda.)
**** The level of vertical exaggeration applied to said mountains is fairly incredible too; the road from the Imperial City up to Bruma is almost all at a 30 degree (or more) slope. The chances of ever getting eg. a horse and cart up there don't seem good - or wouldn't be if the citizens ever needed to transport anything…
***** And if the horses in the game [[YouFailBiologyForever weren't part mountain goat judging from how well they climb.]]

** While this seems like only AcceptableBreaksFromReality, WordOfGod via the [[spoiler: Nomad Backstory]] indicates another reason: [[spoiler: all of Sirius was not so much formed as BUILT by the Daam K'Vosh- who are very much on a SufficientlyAdvancedAlien potential CosmicHorror power level- for the Nomads as a PLAYground, which provides a neat explanation for a good three-quarters of the scientific issues Freelancer has: it wasn't just that the Devs artificially screwed with Space/Time and created unbelievably small planets in a unrealistically compact solar system, the AbsentAlien gods who create an entire galaxy and sentient parastic race out of sheer curiosity/boredom did!]]

** Averted in some other space sims, such as ''{{Freespace}}'', by having planets only show up as background images.

* In ''[=~Assassin's Creed~=]'', it takes only about fifteen or twenty minutes between major cities on horseback, if you're being efficient about it and aren't stopped by guards. However, it's definitely averted in the vast cities themselves.
** It's implied that you're only riding to the main roads to the cities, not to the actual cities themselves. Note how it does the whole "fastforwarding to a more recent memory" fade-out when you get on those roads.

* As a text game, ''{{Achaea}}'' attempts to avert this trope using various mapping tricks, including the Wilderness (a Roguelike-ish ASCII map put in so that the developers could create distance without writing thousands of unique room descriptions, and only visible to the player a little bit at a time as he travels across) but patched-together maps made by players show that the 'continent' (which can be walked across in a game day) [[spoiler:has significant chunks missing]]. The 'cities' are also very, very small by anyone's standards.

* ''NeverwinterNights'' has two examples, listed below.
** ''Neverwinter Nights'' buildings are apparently [[DoctorWho TARDISes]]; the Tent, for example, is four times as large on the inside as it is on the outside.
** Justified in ''Neverwinter Nights 2'''s second expansion pack. You are limited to only a small part of the major city because you are a foreigner (The country is highly xenophobic because it is in a land populated by evil shapeshifters whose hat is take overs via infiltration).
* Spectacularly averted in {{Vegastrike}}. Solar systems are light-''hours'' across, and the only practical way to travel between solar systems is with instant travel wormholes; even traveling thousands of times the speed of light, it would take years to cross between stars. Especially noticeable if you reach Sol, as everything is the same distance apart as in the real world.

* TheSaboteur places [[GayParee Paris]] within 30 minutes driving distance of Le Havre and Saarbrücken, and squashes the city of Paris into a smaller scale version.
***** It's a 2-3 hour drive from Paris to Le Havre, and a 3-5 one to Saarbrücken.

* The world of [[http://static.tibia.com/images/library/map_big.jpg Tibia]] has major towns quite close to each other, though the towns aren't the usual five building metropolises, since all the towns have lots of houses for the players to rent. Some small towns are hardly anything but player houses.

* Hyrule's size fluctuates wildly over the course of the ''[[TheLegendOfZelda Zelda]]'' games but it never seems big enough to be the powerful kingdom it claims to be (except possibly in ''Zelda II''.) Worse in some of the games, where it's implied that Hyrule is the entire ''world''.

*** Strangely, a handful of fans remain convinced, [[FacePalm despite all evidence to the contrary]], that the in-game world is in fact meant to be a 1:1 scale representation, making it both the size of a small asteroid and a physical impossibility.

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* ''NeverwinterNights'' buildings are apparently [[DoctorWho TARDISes]]; the Tent, for example, is four times as large on the inside as it is on the outside.

* Justified in ''NeverwinterNights2'''s second expansion pack. You are limited to only a small part of the major city because you are a foreigner (The country is highly xenophobic because it is in a land populated by evil shapeshifters who's hat is take overs via infiltration).