(That meme painting of a dude standing up in a town hall) "I think we should make our barrels bigger because as time went on people have gotten taller"
I work in a factory. I've been working with 55-gallon drums for over fifteen years. HOW DID I NEVER NOTICE VIDEO GAME BARRELS ARE TOO BIG? That's exactly the kind of nitpick I usually catch...
@@SierraSierraFoxtrot I'm reporting live from the factory. The drums are, in fact, 33.5 inches in height and 24 inches in diameter. From this we can draw one of two conclusions: either I'm not living in Half-Life 2, or I'm living in modded Half-Life 2.
"Gordon you lousy motherfucker! Get your dork ass down to the test chamber before I shove the sample up your ass! AND QUIT FUCKING WITH THE BARREL SIZES!"
As someone working in the game industry as an environment artist (the person responsible for making the environments you are walking throught) barrels and crates are usualy a bit overscaled in order to create cover points and visual blockers and correspond better to what we call "Metrics" We usualy have playable characters that are between 1.6m-2m, it's therefore easier for the players to hide behind them if those are a larger/taller than what you would see IRL) We also want most of the body to be covered while standing behind those sorts of objects, and fully covered if crouching behind them. All of those metrics are also dependant on the gameplay, if you have a coop game, your covers would be bigger so that multiple players could fit next to them, if the camera is in 3P instead of 1P we scale those up a bit more to improve camera collision, readability and remove some visual noise. (It's why for example everything is overscaled in World of Warcraft, allowing the camera to not bump when you enter a house and creating clear areas where you can/cannot walk // can/cannot hide, etc etc.
@@StygianEmperorThose barrels weren't there for cover purposes. First person also means that camera collision isn't an issue in the same way. Were barrels used at all in the gameplay?
@@StygianEmperor Mirror's edge doesn't have a compelling reason to scale them differently. It also works better for Mirror's edge because it's a parkour game, and not a shooter. In shooters you typically want slightly taller cover than a kneeling person, whereas in a parkour game you want it roughly the height you can step up on/mantle over. Mirror's edge also unrealistically slightly shrinks some objects that are typically taller (namely Railings) so that they are easier to mantle over. In Mirror's edge, parkour is the core tenant of gameplay, so levels will be designed around those metrics, rather than metrics typically used in shooters.
A 3D artist here. I don't know about other studios but the one I work for is where I make mostly buildings, sometimes props, sometimes vehicles, sometimes guns. People tend to specialize but I function best when I have a variety. If I don't, I burn out. The reason we make things larger than IRL (1.2x usually, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less) are metrics that specify minimum size for openings (doors especially), rooms, etc. There are also set heights for an object to hide a character standing, crouched and prone, then max. heights for vaulting, stepping over, etc. The most important metric is a door opening. When this metric was decided, there was focus on a 3rd person camera (inspired by Ghost Recon Wildlands and a few other games). We wanted openings to be big enough so the camera wouldn't clip through walls and the movement would be fluid. This has turned out to be less important than expected and it turns out openings can be closer to reality without causing trouble for the camera with how it's implemented now (+ the game is primarily an FPS). However, lots of assets have already been made. Assets are expensive. So rather than remaking everything, we just stuck to the metrics and almost everything is sized to fit in that environment. Besides, the cameras in games don't really behave exactly like eyes. Despite the larger size of things, it doesn't really look weird unless you're really focusing on comparing it to characters. Most people don't notice it. It could also be that people are just used to it. There's also the size of vehicles. It turns out, it's quite difficult to fit a realistically sized character into realistically sized vehicles. IRL, your butt gets squished, your clothes flatten, you are generally quite flexible and the seat is usually soft too. The characters or the seats in the game though? Not so much, especially when you have characters with vests, helmets, etc. The tech for simulating all this so nothing visibly clips through the seat is just not worth it. It's just better to make the vehicle 1.2x larger as well. It fits the environment better now, characters can use it without clipping and it still looks fine in the vast majority of situations. So these are some of the reasons why that could be the case. I wasn't a part of the development for neither of the games you mentioned so I can't say for sure that this is why they did so but that's why we do it.
It’s a shame to hear that modern video games can’t include butt squishing physics. How can I be fully immersed in a virtual world if my characters thighs don’t do the thigh thing when they sit down????
I would figure just having the characters slightly clipping through the seats is alright. The seats are meant to compress too, and unless you're looking *really* closely at the seat, it'll look like that's what its doing.
@@thekingoffailure9967 at best you could either just accept the fact it's going to clip (it won't be very visible to begin with) or bake it as an animation. But actually simulating soft-body physics for that? Sadly not yet. Maybe we'll develop an efficient butt-squishing algorithm within our lifetimes. There is still hope.
This feels like a video topic that had it been done by any other youtuber would have been a 2 and half hour long rambling essay, it's refreshing to see a video like this get straight to the point.
Honestly I would have far preferred the 2 hour video on how readability and intuitive understanding of game mechanics plays into environment design in video games compared to a 2 minute video where this guy, who seems to have no idea how game development works, goes “why are all these barrels large? Guess the designers must all be stupid idiots!”
The video, and that end bit about crates reminded of an old Valve Interview about Half Life where they mentioned that they tried REALLY hard to not fill the maps with crates and barrels as decorative filler for the various rooms, but found that they just could not make it work on account of the rooms looking barren without them and not really having any good alternatives that weren't either variations of barrels and crates, or wouldn't be diverse enough to place everywhere without potentially overbloating the game's size.
When it comes to barrels and crates, I always think of the legendary "Start-to-Crate" metric published by Old Man Murray in 2000, which complained that video games were creatively bankrupt in their overuse of these props and reviewed games based purely on how long it took from starting the game to finding a crate or barrel. (A little dated, but worth a read)
okay, but STC isn't really all that useful for really rating games, but is more of like, an analytical mechanism akin to the Bechdel test, where "passing" it isn't really impressive or meaningful either. STC and Bechdel are tests for you to think about content in general and whether you're doing enough when you make your own. it doesn't need to be a score component.
@@peacemaster8117 it originally was a joke, specifically from a lesbian comic but it holds true on sexism in media. like how "the black guy always dies first" is a joke about horror but also reflects real racism.
Despite the size discrepancy, it's a testament to a classic and important principle of video games: Fun > Realism. Video games will always break the rules when it comes to tailoring content so that is makes the experience better. Even if we could go back in time and change the scale of these objects it's probably not worth it, because they would have been made that scale for a reason, even if it means breaking the rules a little. It rarely has anything to do with a lack of research and almost always comes down to "What scale should these be to make the gameplay the best?". It's why in most games we magically remove bullets from magazines and add them back to reserves, or why parachutes don't fail sometimes, or character trip slip and slide on every slightly different surface. Realism can often hurt the enjoyment of games. If barrels need to be shot at to blow them up, bigger is better, because it makes them easier to shoot and also harder for them to be obscured by things like enemies. If they are used as cover, making them bigger is better for the player. There is also typically a standard metric per game for what height is best for a mid height object, and most things in that game (Road Blocks, Barrels, Crates, Fences, Counters etc.) will be scaled up or down slightly so that they are a similar height, which makes environments more readable, cover easier to identify, and also makes gameplay more consistent.
I remember seeing people talk about the implementation of the wrong type of manhole cover in videogames so one about barrels cannot be left out. one thing that doesn't aid with the feel of the barrels is that the camera is more often than not jammed in the chest under the head so it feel bigger besides being oversized to begin with.
Source era games uses a shortcut of using 16 units as 1ft, which is 12 in, for the larger architectural detail, but uses 1u to 1in for npcs and most props.
@@emersonpage5384 lmao i thought u was joking or something because this seemed super random comment in some documentary video so i dont understand the necessity to say such things but whatever, you do you i guess. its nice to have woman representation but not really something to gloss over, theres not much meaning in life anyways
1:41 "The barrels in game are accurately sized compared to the environment but 33% to large when compared with the humans." This means that there are no oversized barrels but that all games have undersized humans because if the barrels match the environment then ALL of the environment is 33% to large compared with humans.
I'm short enough that the scale of me to 55-gallon drums IRL always felt about the same as the player character to video game barrels, so I never noticed this.
Next up: Over-grating and vents being too large (the best example of it being at its worst is Halo: Infinite's vents in Forge... That can fit an entire Spartan, standing up) Thank you for raising awareness to the oversized barrel plague!
Half-Life 1 also got some crazy large vents, there's one in We've Got Hostiles that fits 1 Freeman standing up vertically and is twice as large horizontally, it may as well be a hallway.
To be fair, Half Life 1 is a great game, but some of the vent crawling gets really tiresome after playing it more than once. Specially the part with the snarks, just after the HECU shoots the one you're moving across. Let alone multiplayer games, I'm so glad the vent in Turbine in TF2 is big. I don't even have to explain why
What a crate idea for a video, it was bursting with interesting info that just rolled through my brain and the visual gags were a barrel of laughs to boot.
It's fine, normal. It's the same thing as oversized entrances and hallways, made to avoid the claustrophobic feeling of a "tall soldier character" POV.
The actual root of the issue is likely FPS games. Barrels are cover, and an actual standard barrel would be too small to hide a character behind without bits sticking out.
They *do* make barrels that large, is my thing. We had 3 of them in my parents' backyard- my dad intended to use them for barrel fires, super duper ghetto like, for parties on holidays. Normal oil drums are probably waist/stomach height, but I'm so used the the large, chest-height ones that they're kinda just... normal looking.
I noticed this kind of thing a lot after playing with both the NoVR mod for Half-Life Alyx and the VR mod for Half-Life 2. Props like barrels, bottles, and other litter under a certain size in Half-Life 2 were scaled up from their real-life counterpart, most likely to make them easily visible and feel better on a monitor. Everything in Half-Life Alyx is closer to how it would be in real-life, which works fine for a VR game, but makes everything feel absolutely tiny when porting it to a regular monitor. Swapping around the format makes it very obvious that this happened, and it's very likely that stuff gets scaled up contrary to real-world dimensions just to improve game feel. Or developers just completely eyeball it. either way.
This is one of those things I've always thought about in the back of my mind, but never really delved too deep into. Kinda cathartic to see someone make a whole video on it tbh lol. Good stuff.
Considering how often you see barrels in a videogame they are actually pretty rare for most people. Unless you work in heavy industry or shipping the odds of actually running into an oil drum are pretty low.
Not necessarily. Growing up in the country, it wasn't exactly rare to see homes using 55-gal drums as burn barrels for household trash. You could also find them (as well as larger versions) converted into barbecues. Before he passed, my father used plastic drums for wine making, while my mother still uses them as rain barrels for her plants.
Doorways are often even more over-sized (for obvious reasons). I remember it being especially noticeable in Vice City, where the door felt like it was twice as big as the protagonist model
I seen a 55 gallon drum and a bigger one where a 55 gallon drum would fit inside. Don't know the gallons cuz the drum is rusted and there's no readings left on it This is at work
@@MaaveMaave that's actually interesting to read. 48*40 inch pallets are sometimes used here as well, yet we refer to them as "block" pallets (120*100 cm), yet in shipping for standard sizes the most common I've seen were euro pallet crates, which are 120*80 cms, and about 20 cms high per layer (you can stack a few layers on top of each other if you need a higher side). We do also sometimes see 120*120 pallets, yet I've yet to see 120*120 crates. And that's coming from a guy that used to work in a place that makes crates. So I've seen a lot of different ones, from 10x10 cm to 400x230cm. Yet that may also be due to the truck regulations we have in Europe, as the maximum length trailer a normal tractor trailer combo can pull is a 2 TEU (2 "twenty-feet equivelant unit") trailer.
Considering all the games have big barrels, and we have the small ones, its fair to assume our reality is the one thats faulty, and the videogames had it right all along!
Flatscreen games tend to make things look a lot smaller than they are, so I suppose in some of these cases they might have wanted to offset that by making the barrels larger? I think it could also be to make them look heavier and sturdier, more industrial, as that's the kind of area barrels are generally placed in. Neat video.
Barrels do come in a variety of sizes, just they go by different names when they're smaller for some reason. For example my first job involved a cooking oil plant where we'd fill barrels up with them, except they were called tins because they were only 15 or 20 litre, instead of 200.
Do doors and door frames next. I remember trying to gauge the size of our operators in mw2, based on the door frames using DMZ as a reference. Using the average door size in middle eastern counties, we came to the rough estimate that our operators (ghost) stood at a staggering 4ft 1.
Games are, for gameplay reasons, typically not scaled realistically, even games with "realistic" art styles. A realistically scaled world tends to feel very cramped and be hard to move around.
I do find it funny that how small humans are in half life 2, doorways are so tall compared to you and if you play something like the vr mods on steam it allows you to look at it even closer and see just how hilariously small you are.
Can't help but feel like this could have been a longer video diving into the why of over-barreling. One big part of it, I feel, is the fact that barrels are used as environmental set pieces or in game objects with a purpose. Making barrels larger and red to stand out on a field as a target, making them larger as a formidable obstacle to jump over, making them larger so that they can be used with crouching or cover mechanics to be more adequate, or even just to make sure that they're big enough to block off an entrance. Most barrels in games are a symbol more than a representation, they do things that barrels just don't do, like explode when shot, or spray chemicals everywhere like it was pressurized, or serve as a barrier whilst empty, nor can you pick up an oil barrel with a moving car to refuel it. A lot of these gaming philosophies aren't talked about enough, how most objects in a game are just a representation of an idea using that object as a vector. You have an arbitrary health mechanic with no real life analogue aside from vague "damage" and you need a way to undo the damage to keep the game going, so you make a "health restore" pickup, and NOW we figure out what that's going to be represented by. Could be a medkit, could be a potion, could be a burger, it could be a floating pair of crossed bandaids. Likewise, many ideas can be contained in boxes and barrels since they are containers in the end. You can put a whole companion character in one, a cache of resources, something volatile, or just make it come to life and be a surprise enemy. So they're ubiquitous for gaming. A lot of times, the shape can determine the function. A box likes to stay put, a barrel can tip over and roll, a jar can roll around freely. You're just finding something that CAN fit the role you need filled, and over-barreling is, I believe, a symptom of this design philosophy. They just needed an object that looked like it fit the role and added more variety to the scene. If barrels were used realistically, you'd rarely see them unless the scene is set in a warehouse of some kind, and then most of their potential as a game object goes out the window.
I'm going to need that video about crates.
theres a lot to talk about with crates we need that video about crates
If we don't get it in the next two weeks, we riot
@@420lehtoo Unironically, I agree
Crates are a good topic to make a video about. They have in real world a limited use and in video games they are overrepresented.
And concrete!
Have you ever considered that video games are fine but reality has an underbarreling problem?
(That meme painting of a dude standing up in a town hall)
"I think we should make our barrels bigger because as time went on people have gotten taller"
Wait ! Look at the size of WW2 era German barrels,those are bigger,maybe the barrels in video games are old German ones
Reality is a shitty video game after all.
absolute cinema
The United States of America would agree
I work in a factory. I've been working with 55-gallon drums for over fifteen years. HOW DID I NEVER NOTICE VIDEO GAME BARRELS ARE TOO BIG? That's exactly the kind of nitpick I usually catch...
everything is weird sized in games
Check the drums at your factory. Have you ever measured one?
Maybe YOUR drums are lying to you!
@@SierraSierraFoxtrot I'm reporting live from the factory. The drums are, in fact, 33.5 inches in height and 24 inches in diameter. From this we can draw one of two conclusions: either I'm not living in Half-Life 2, or I'm living in modded Half-Life 2.
@@AsymptoteInverse what if... Half-life 3? 💀
@@AlleonoriCat If I'm living in Half-Life 3, then lemme just say, the gameplay is hella repetitive and the protagonist is kind of an idiot.
"Come right on through, sir. Looks like you're in the barrel today."
Oh no...
They're waiting for you... in the test barrrrrrel
"Gordon doesn't need to hear all this, he's a highly trained... barrel."
"Gordon you lousy motherfucker! Get your dork ass down to the test chamber before I shove the sample up your ass! AND QUIT FUCKING WITH THE BARREL SIZES!"
“Standard insertion procedure for a non-standard barrel...”
either that barrel at the end was the size of australia or that moon was fake
That's no moon
what if australia is of the size of a barrel
hi desinc
AHHH DESINC WADDUP
This guy thinks the moon is real
As someone working in the game industry as an environment artist (the person responsible for making the environments you are walking throught) barrels and crates are usualy a bit overscaled in order to create cover points and visual blockers and correspond better to what we call "Metrics" We usualy have playable characters that are between 1.6m-2m, it's therefore easier for the players to hide behind them if those are a larger/taller than what you would see IRL) We also want most of the body to be covered while standing behind those sorts of objects, and fully covered if crouching behind them. All of those metrics are also dependant on the gameplay, if you have a coop game, your covers would be bigger so that multiple players could fit next to them, if the camera is in 3P instead of 1P we scale those up a bit more to improve camera collision, readability and remove some visual noise. (It's why for example everything is overscaled in World of Warcraft, allowing the camera to not bump when you enter a house and creating clear areas where you can/cannot walk // can/cannot hide, etc etc.
how come mirror's edge then
@@StygianEmperorThose barrels weren't there for cover purposes. First person also means that camera collision isn't an issue in the same way. Were barrels used at all in the gameplay?
@@CODDE117 iunno i never played it
@@StygianEmperor Mirror's edge doesn't have a compelling reason to scale them differently. It also works better for Mirror's edge because it's a parkour game, and not a shooter. In shooters you typically want slightly taller cover than a kneeling person, whereas in a parkour game you want it roughly the height you can step up on/mantle over.
Mirror's edge also unrealistically slightly shrinks some objects that are typically taller (namely Railings) so that they are easier to mantle over.
In Mirror's edge, parkour is the core tenant of gameplay, so levels will be designed around those metrics, rather than metrics typically used in shooters.
Thank you for this fantastic comment
The over barreling situation is out of control.
Overbarreling situation is crazy
the barrel is leaking
“The barrel incident is wild”
“No one was prepared for the barrels”
“Barrels did something impossible”
average reaction video title
It's rolling out of control
The over-barreling situation just got worse...
A 3D artist here.
I don't know about other studios but the one I work for is where I make mostly buildings, sometimes props, sometimes vehicles, sometimes guns. People tend to specialize but I function best when I have a variety. If I don't, I burn out.
The reason we make things larger than IRL (1.2x usually, sometimes a bit more, sometimes a bit less) are metrics that specify minimum size for openings (doors especially), rooms, etc. There are also set heights for an object to hide a character standing, crouched and prone, then max. heights for vaulting, stepping over, etc.
The most important metric is a door opening. When this metric was decided, there was focus on a 3rd person camera (inspired by Ghost Recon Wildlands and a few other games). We wanted openings to be big enough so the camera wouldn't clip through walls and the movement would be fluid. This has turned out to be less important than expected and it turns out openings can be closer to reality without causing trouble for the camera with how it's implemented now (+ the game is primarily an FPS). However, lots of assets have already been made. Assets are expensive. So rather than remaking everything, we just stuck to the metrics and almost everything is sized to fit in that environment.
Besides, the cameras in games don't really behave exactly like eyes. Despite the larger size of things, it doesn't really look weird unless you're really focusing on comparing it to characters. Most people don't notice it. It could also be that people are just used to it.
There's also the size of vehicles. It turns out, it's quite difficult to fit a realistically sized character into realistically sized vehicles. IRL, your butt gets squished, your clothes flatten, you are generally quite flexible and the seat is usually soft too. The characters or the seats in the game though? Not so much, especially when you have characters with vests, helmets, etc. The tech for simulating all this so nothing visibly clips through the seat is just not worth it. It's just better to make the vehicle 1.2x larger as well. It fits the environment better now, characters can use it without clipping and it still looks fine in the vast majority of situations.
So these are some of the reasons why that could be the case. I wasn't a part of the development for neither of the games you mentioned so I can't say for sure that this is why they did so but that's why we do it.
It’s a shame to hear that modern video games can’t include butt squishing physics.
How can I be fully immersed in a virtual world if my characters thighs don’t do the thigh thing when they sit down????
I would figure just having the characters slightly clipping through the seats is alright. The seats are meant to compress too, and unless you're looking *really* closely at the seat, it'll look like that's what its doing.
@@thekingoffailure9967 at best you could either just accept the fact it's going to clip (it won't be very visible to begin with) or bake it as an animation. But actually simulating soft-body physics for that? Sadly not yet. Maybe we'll develop an efficient butt-squishing algorithm within our lifetimes. There is still hope.
This feels like a video topic that had it been done by any other youtuber would have been a 2 and half hour long rambling essay, it's refreshing to see a video like this get straight to the point.
great way to put it.
So, the history of barrels starts in the ancient Egypt...
Honestly I would have far preferred the 2 hour video on how readability and intuitive understanding of game mechanics plays into environment design in video games compared to a 2 minute video where this guy, who seems to have no idea how game development works, goes “why are all these barrels large? Guess the designers must all be stupid idiots!”
@@proking2354 you are the problem.
A three-minute video on barrels is worth more than a three-hour summary of a game's plot disguised as a video essay.
"five-foot-twelve" is an interesting way to say "six feet"
I once had a doctor tell me I was "five foot twelve" seriously - I was a bit concerned
Yeah it’s 4 foot 24
5'12? Are people trying to make themselves sound short?
@@le9038 Survivors guilt
@@Night_Hawk_475 then the doctor was like woo00osh
the ridiculous scale of HL2 barrels hits you very well in HL2 VR Mod.
A lot of props in the HL2 VR mod are ridiculously big. It first struck me when I saw the gargantuan padlock in the room before meeting the can cop
The VR mod made me realize how terrifying Vortigaunts since they are, in fact, aliens, and made me glad they're on our side.
Satisfactory in VR has very similar energy, it's ridiculous just how *_gihugic_* a simple conveyor splitter actually is.
The video, and that end bit about crates reminded of an old Valve Interview about Half Life where they mentioned that they tried REALLY hard to not fill the maps with crates and barrels as decorative filler for the various rooms, but found that they just could not make it work on account of the rooms looking barren without them and not really having any good alternatives that weren't either variations of barrels and crates, or wouldn't be diverse enough to place everywhere without potentially overbloating the game's size.
When it comes to barrels and crates, I always think of the legendary "Start-to-Crate" metric published by Old Man Murray in 2000, which complained that video games were creatively bankrupt in their overuse of these props and reviewed games based purely on how long it took from starting the game to finding a crate or barrel. (A little dated, but worth a read)
okay, but STC isn't really all that useful for really rating games, but is more of like, an analytical mechanism akin to the Bechdel test, where "passing" it isn't really impressive or meaningful either. STC and Bechdel are tests for you to think about content in general and whether you're doing enough when you make your own. it doesn't need to be a score component.
@@VitriolicVermillion StC is overtly a joke. Bechdel Test is also a joke, just not overtly.
sounds like an interesting speedrun category
@@peacemaster8117 it originally was a joke, specifically from a lesbian comic but it holds true on sexism in media. like how "the black guy always dies first" is a joke about horror but also reflects real racism.
Imagine doing a Start-to-Crate run of Crash Bandicoot
Despite the size discrepancy, it's a testament to a classic and important principle of video games: Fun > Realism. Video games will always break the rules when it comes to tailoring content so that is makes the experience better. Even if we could go back in time and change the scale of these objects it's probably not worth it, because they would have been made that scale for a reason, even if it means breaking the rules a little.
It rarely has anything to do with a lack of research and almost always comes down to "What scale should these be to make the gameplay the best?". It's why in most games we magically remove bullets from magazines and add them back to reserves, or why parachutes don't fail sometimes, or character trip slip and slide on every slightly different surface. Realism can often hurt the enjoyment of games.
If barrels need to be shot at to blow them up, bigger is better, because it makes them easier to shoot and also harder for them to be obscured by things like enemies. If they are used as cover, making them bigger is better for the player.
There is also typically a standard metric per game for what height is best for a mid height object, and most things in that game (Road Blocks, Barrels, Crates, Fences, Counters etc.) will be scaled up or down slightly so that they are a similar height, which makes environments more readable, cover easier to identify, and also makes gameplay more consistent.
I remember seeing people talk about the implementation of the wrong type of manhole cover in videogames so one about barrels cannot be left out.
one thing that doesn't aid with the feel of the barrels is that the camera is more often than not jammed in the chest under the head so it feel bigger besides being oversized to begin with.
0:36 Very nice spin
Made me laugh lol was that on purpose?
@@TheJayson8899 just a good old animation bug, or the character getting into position for the next camera angle
There’s a rule of thumb in game development to size everything up 33%, source just built it in to the engines units system I guess
AnyAustin's call of duty video told me that about video game scale, it's wild
Source era games uses a shortcut of using 16 units as 1ft, which is 12 in, for the larger architectural detail, but uses 1u to 1in for npcs and most props.
the size is very human
BWAHHAHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
@explodinghammeronthe17thof36 Thank you, thank you.
@explodinghammeronthe17thof36 dead internet theory
thank you for including a woman for reference, representation is so important
what 💀
@rexaorm oh sorry I'll type louder. THANK YOU FOR INCLUDING A WOMAN FOR REFERENCE, REPRESENTATION IS SO IMPORTANT
@@emersonpage5384 Now for the people at the back.
@@emersonpage5384 lmao i thought u was joking or something because this seemed super random comment in some documentary video so i dont understand the necessity to say such things but whatever, you do you i guess. its nice to have woman representation but not really something to gloss over, theres not much meaning in life anyways
A man needs a name
Very well produced, the delivery is direct and doesn't tangent too often, and a lot of questions were answered pretty definitively.
This is the peak of what im going to watch in 2025. I can already tell. Absolute masterpiece. BRAVO!
The quality, humor, the not-loudness... just what I was looking for.
Worf's biggest weakness, the blue barrel.
this is good content and i hope you are rewarded for not stretching this out to 30 mins for algo/ rev boosts.
1:03 the most fantastic
1:41 "The barrels in game are accurately sized compared to the environment but 33% to large when compared with the humans."
This means that there are no oversized barrels but that all games have undersized humans because if the barrels match the environment then ALL of the environment is 33% to large compared with humans.
Yeah, if you play HL2 in VR then you'll notice how humans are weirdly small and objects are weirdly big (which means you are smaller as well)
I'm short enough that the scale of me to 55-gallon drums IRL always felt about the same as the player character to video game barrels, so I never noticed this.
The over barreling situation has gotten worse
Something must be done
Glad to know that someone is bringing attention toward this truly immersion-breaking effect.
It's over for Pewds, bros.
ily for mentioning mirror's edge
TRUE
Great editing and humour. Rare to find a unique channel like this
Now do lightbulbs.
Looking at game maps in VR reveals that lightbulbs in games are the size of watermelons.
I love the presentation on this one lol
the idea of an explosive barrel just containing magically stable (until it isn't) pure fluorine is gonna be stuck in my head for a while.
It’s too much tannerite
this is the kind of pedantic content i desire
Next up: Over-grating and vents being too large (the best example of it being at its worst is Halo: Infinite's vents in Forge... That can fit an entire Spartan, standing up)
Thank you for raising awareness to the oversized barrel plague!
Space vents are bigger because space is big
Don't forget the civilian doors on Bazaar that are 3x the height of a spartan
Half-Life 1 also got some crazy large vents, there's one in We've Got Hostiles that fits 1 Freeman standing up vertically and is twice as large horizontally, it may as well be a hallway.
I mean, if the vents were realistically sized, nobody would really be able to go through them.
To be fair, Half Life 1 is a great game, but some of the vent crawling gets really tiresome after playing it more than once. Specially the part with the snarks, just after the HECU shoots the one you're moving across.
Let alone multiplayer games, I'm so glad the vent in Turbine in TF2 is big. I don't even have to explain why
I have now subscribed for the sole purpose of being notified when the "Crate" video comes out.
What a crate idea for a video, it was bursting with interesting info that just rolled through my brain and the visual gags were a barrel of laughs to boot.
"The design is very human."
It's fine, normal. It's the same thing as oversized entrances and hallways, made to avoid the claustrophobic feeling of a "tall soldier character" POV.
The actual root of the issue is likely FPS games. Barrels are cover, and an actual standard barrel would be too small to hide a character behind without bits sticking out.
They *do* make barrels that large, is my thing. We had 3 of them in my parents' backyard- my dad intended to use them for barrel fires, super duper ghetto like, for parties on holidays. Normal oil drums are probably waist/stomach height, but I'm so used the the large, chest-height ones that they're kinda just... normal looking.
I noticed this kind of thing a lot after playing with both the NoVR mod for Half-Life Alyx and the VR mod for Half-Life 2. Props like barrels, bottles, and other litter under a certain size in Half-Life 2 were scaled up from their real-life counterpart, most likely to make them easily visible and feel better on a monitor. Everything in Half-Life Alyx is closer to how it would be in real-life, which works fine for a VR game, but makes everything feel absolutely tiny when porting it to a regular monitor. Swapping around the format makes it very obvious that this happened, and it's very likely that stuff gets scaled up contrary to real-world dimensions just to improve game feel. Or developers just completely eyeball it. either way.
This is one of those things I've always thought about in the back of my mind, but never really delved too deep into. Kinda cathartic to see someone make a whole video on it tbh lol. Good stuff.
I really like these shortish informative videos you are making, please keep it up!
This video changed my life, i will never look at barrels the same again
Considering how often you see barrels in a videogame they are actually pretty rare for most people. Unless you work in heavy industry or shipping the odds of actually running into an oil drum are pretty low.
Not necessarily. Growing up in the country, it wasn't exactly rare to see homes using 55-gal drums as burn barrels for household trash. You could also find them (as well as larger versions) converted into barbecues. Before he passed, my father used plastic drums for wine making, while my mother still uses them as rain barrels for her plants.
Doorways are often even more over-sized (for obvious reasons). I remember it being especially noticeable in Vice City, where the door felt like it was twice as big as the protagonist model
I always pay attention to IBC totes in games. Seems like they always show up, even in the distant future like in Space Marine 2.
I seen a 55 gallon drum and a bigger one where a 55 gallon drum would fit inside. Don't know the gallons cuz the drum is rusted and there's no readings left on it
This is at work
You know, this is the first time I've seen someone just use a mii as their vocal insert avatar. It's kind of brilliant
I was ready with food here to binge a one hour video about barrels.
Please make a video about crates! (unironically I would love to see that.)
Yeah I actually want to see that. Shipping has standardized many container sizes so we should see things like 48x48x48 inch crates or 48x40 pallets.
@@MaaveMaave that's actually interesting to read. 48*40 inch pallets are sometimes used here as well, yet we refer to them as "block" pallets (120*100 cm), yet in shipping for standard sizes the most common I've seen were euro pallet crates, which are 120*80 cms, and about 20 cms high per layer (you can stack a few layers on top of each other if you need a higher side). We do also sometimes see 120*120 pallets, yet I've yet to see 120*120 crates. And that's coming from a guy that used to work in a place that makes crates. So I've seen a lot of different ones, from 10x10 cm to 400x230cm. Yet that may also be due to the truck regulations we have in Europe, as the maximum length trailer a normal tractor trailer combo can pull is a 2 TEU (2 "twenty-feet equivelant unit") trailer.
1:34 Well, then, mr smarty pants, try to build a pile of five floors of tiny little barrels to jump up into a windowsill
I did not expect to a 3 minute video about barrels in video games to be this insightful
Considering all the games have big barrels, and we have the small ones, its fair to assume our reality is the one thats faulty, and the videogames had it right all along!
I expected a call to action at the end of this video, but instead I was only left with a meek sense of having learned something I shouldn't have
0:45 "don't mind me, just gonna pepper in the fact that I'm 5'12""
Simply superb. Dooge came out of nowhere with incredibly high quality videos.
Seeing barrels in television I've always thought they were actually bigger
Flatscreen games tend to make things look a lot smaller than they are, so I suppose in some of these cases they might have wanted to offset that by making the barrels larger? I think it could also be to make them look heavier and sturdier, more industrial, as that's the kind of area barrels are generally placed in. Neat video.
I have three barrels the same size as in Half-Life 2. I have never seen such small barrels as in the presented mod.
theres probably a gaggle of barrel enthusiasts out there feeling validated by this video
Barrels do come in a variety of sizes, just they go by different names when they're smaller for some reason. For example my first job involved a cooking oil plant where we'd fill barrels up with them, except they were called tins because they were only 15 or 20 litre, instead of 200.
We're all going to need that video about crates.
i literally have a barrel outside that is the size of those barrels you are calling unrealistic...
nobody tell this man that more than one size of barrel exists
This is the kind of video you make when you don't work a real job.
This video makes me want a game about a bunch of barrels the size of sky scrapers.
Do doors and door frames next.
I remember trying to gauge the size of our operators in mw2, based on the door frames using DMZ as a reference. Using the average door size in middle eastern counties, we came to the rough estimate that our operators (ghost) stood at a staggering 4ft 1.
Thank you, can’t wait for the video about crates!
most barrels ive owned have been just slightly shorter than me by less than a foot
Extremley important video. Everybody needs to see this, lest they be in the barrel one day.
Yaa I get the feeling of going "Oh no I need to buy a whole videogame just to get 15 seconds of footage" lol
Games are, for gameplay reasons, typically not scaled realistically, even games with "realistic" art styles. A realistically scaled world tends to feel very cramped and be hard to move around.
... come to think of it, i don't think i've ever seen one of these barrels irl
I’m going to have to insist that you make a video about crates now. This is non-negotiable. Make it happen, Dooge. We’re all counting on you.
I clicked on this video hoping it would be an hour long
I wait patiently for the overcrating video.
I recently also realized this problem when I had to put oil barrels in my game. Also Im sorry but we Need that video about Crates
Fantastic video man! I loved every second of it :D
Those realistic hl2 barrels look tiny, it's like a baby version of a barrel, I just want to give it a pet
This is my favorite kind of content. Short videos about weird little details that most people probably would never notice.
I do find it funny that how small humans are in half life 2, doorways are so tall compared to you and if you play something like the vr mods on steam it allows you to look at it even closer and see just how hilariously small you are.
The editing is unbelievably unique in this video. And that's... a really good thing.
the 3d model of the mii and the reverse view when he was playing donkey kong where so professional, i would love to see more from you.
thank you for not making this video 4 hours long
This is the best, shortest video essay I have ever seen. Well done.
Using large scaled barrels to jump onto another platform or an obstacle instead of using ladders? Hmm...
0:35 brother tweaked and thought nobody would notice...
0:54 "Indeed very human"
This is the biggest gaming scandal since the cyberpunk manhole incident
5'12" the famous forbidden height.
We demand the video about crates!
Can't help but feel like this could have been a longer video diving into the why of over-barreling.
One big part of it, I feel, is the fact that barrels are used as environmental set pieces or in game objects with a purpose. Making barrels larger and red to stand out on a field as a target, making them larger as a formidable obstacle to jump over, making them larger so that they can be used with crouching or cover mechanics to be more adequate, or even just to make sure that they're big enough to block off an entrance.
Most barrels in games are a symbol more than a representation, they do things that barrels just don't do, like explode when shot, or spray chemicals everywhere like it was pressurized, or serve as a barrier whilst empty, nor can you pick up an oil barrel with a moving car to refuel it. A lot of these gaming philosophies aren't talked about enough, how most objects in a game are just a representation of an idea using that object as a vector. You have an arbitrary health mechanic with no real life analogue aside from vague "damage" and you need a way to undo the damage to keep the game going, so you make a "health restore" pickup, and NOW we figure out what that's going to be represented by. Could be a medkit, could be a potion, could be a burger, it could be a floating pair of crossed bandaids.
Likewise, many ideas can be contained in boxes and barrels since they are containers in the end. You can put a whole companion character in one, a cache of resources, something volatile, or just make it come to life and be a surprise enemy. So they're ubiquitous for gaming. A lot of times, the shape can determine the function. A box likes to stay put, a barrel can tip over and roll, a jar can roll around freely. You're just finding something that CAN fit the role you need filled, and over-barreling is, I believe, a symptom of this design philosophy. They just needed an object that looked like it fit the role and added more variety to the scene. If barrels were used realistically, you'd rarely see them unless the scene is set in a warehouse of some kind, and then most of their potential as a game object goes out the window.
the realistically scaled barrels are not realistically scaled and way too small for 55 gallon drums
This video is 10x shorter than I expected. Truly information-dense
we've been living a lie, barrels dont just have water inside, they're mostly filled with gnomes waiting to be deployed
As a fervent crate enthusiast, please make that crate video
would love to see a video about concrete, cause i really wanna know what makes mirror's edge's concrete the most realistic lol
When is the video about crates?
i absolutely loved this video. It was fascinating and informative and i love the art style. Going to binge every video now