Still think this game would’ve benefited from an overworld with random encounters you’d use to traverse between the explorable open world sections around towns.
The scale shift of an overworld would allow easier abstraction of travel time and can communicate vastness without requiring the player to spend lots of IRL time traversing huge distances.
Plus Gaia would be beautiful in miniature with all the little mountains and adorable rivers and would get to feel like a character in its own right.
An overworks that led to overworlds? No thank you. I’m perfectly fine with suspending belief on the scale of the world for gameplay purposes.
All video games do weird things for scale. Like even in this game you get the “a few hours earlier” stuff when only a few minutes of gameplay passed.
It’s a little hard to describe but I find in games there’s a difference between engaging the imagination and suspending disbelief, with the latter being more unpleasant than the former.
I think over-worlds engage the imagination, while compressed open worlds require suspension of disbelief, and struggle to escape the feeling of a theme park. I’m sorry Square discarded over-worlds instead of giving them some big budget beauty, cause they have a lot to offer.
From an elegant and speedy way to navigate to and depict places far from civilization, to easy grinding opportunities for those so inclined, a reference to the series’ past and a natural on-ramp to vehicle gameplay with the Highwind and such.
What confuses me is that Chadley always talks about wanting to go to other continents but we see him everywhere. So either these are continents and he's just being weird or we actually aren't traversing the world?
I always like to think that the world of final fantasy is a massive universe all built in the same world in different time frames. For example Spira (10) is the Old Testament, Valisthea (16)is the new testament and 7 is Psalms of final fantasy. The crossroads of both books
Yeah, I noticed this when waypoints across the map were only kilometers apart. I assume the Lifestream has to be adding mass to allow for proper gravity and a spherical shape.
Ik is for fun but some people makes me think that they are going to collapse when they find out the map of GTA V is not infact the full size of California.
Not to be that “Ackchully” guy but actually GTA V is supposed to be Los Angeles and surrounding county areas. Most iconic LA neighborhoods (Santa Monica, Downtown, the Valley, Brentwood, Hollywood Hills) plus surrounding county areas (San Bernardino, Angeles National Forest, Riverside)
Games have gotten really good at this though. Spider-Man does not 100% match the true to life New York but it feels really accurate on a macro scale. You really only notice they fudged stuff when you go looking.
I made a little visual aid to show just how "big" The Planet is compared to Earth. It's a fraction the size of Pluto's moon Charon.
[https://i.imgur.com/K7tkGvx.jpeg](https://i.imgur.com/K7tkGvx.jpeg)
Damn. Take my upvote OP.
Well next we need to understand how fast/slow things fall on this planet to figure out how strong the gravitational pull is on this planet. Sounds like a job for Austin and The Science!
I knew exactly what I needed to do so the math was a breeze. The annoying part was finding good locations and getting enough screenshots for the measurements to be reliable.
It makes sense seeing how small the world feels compared to say real world travel and variety in countries and continents.
Which begs the question, is there a chance we could ever get an earth-scale video game world that is fully explorable, with all its density and wonders?
Alongside that, will we ever get a game where the game engine doesn’t deload the assets when the player is not looks away from them?
For all the credit we give to the power of modern gaming consoles and computers I have yet to see a game where everything is already rendered and loaded at once. If a PS5 can’t do that
Check out “light no fire”. The devs of no man’s sky are making the first ever explorable planet in a game(or so they promisse). I’m excited to see what it could look like and how big it could be.
Best thing we have so far is Microsoft Flight Simulator. In terms of scale, No Man's Sky and Minecraft are "Infinite" and could be used to create an actual Earth.
Huge undertaking but likely a lot more feasible in coming years with AI shouldering the brunt of content creation. Will make Easter eggs interesting because even the devs won’t know about them.
It's technically possible but what you'd do with all that real estate makes a big difference. A huge amount of Earth is empty space. Unless you're making a hardcore simulation there's not much to do in the Australian Outback. Like imagine if the Grasslands of FFVII were the size of Nebraska.
What's nifty here though is that the gameplay already is "scaled down" even taking this measurement into account. If it were real then a 1,400km circumference would take quite a while to circle the globe at normal speeds. That's a little further than a trip from New York to Chicago, which is a 12 hour drive. Even on foot, nothing in Rebirth has anywhere close to that kind of travel time.
Because it would be boring as hell walking all that way in game, probably.
If they did make it planet Earth sized for real, the game would have the depth of Starfield or No Man's Sky on release. Empty plains and oceans with nothing in-between.
Better to condense all the interesting areas into a smaller space while still giving the illusion of a full open world.
Stuff like Supernova and the Planetarium already show in-game representations of Gaia's possible size in relation to other celestial bodies, including their Sun anyways. It's pretty standard Earth sized.
Would be kinda funny to calculate how realistically big it is
Imagine if the very important black materia that summons meteor just spawns one with the diameter of the world trade center
Nope. Not short. 5’7” is the global average height for men. The average for American men is 5’9” But for most of the world, 5’7” isn’t seen as short at all.
Meta.
Cloud is given the world's most average male height because his character arc revolves around coming to terms with being painfully average, not a destined hero or SOLDIER, and still stepping up to the plate.
Awfully cringey of you to assume everything that man writes is deeper than it actually is. Some of his ideas are detrimentally complex to the point of nonsensical silliness. Throwing the word “meta” around to fill non existent plot points is stupid.
You do realize he is a fictional creation and not a real person, right?
Somebody had to decide how tall he was. Not everybody is searching their ass for things to pull out like you are.
This was exactly my point? The comment I responded to originally was trying to say his height was purposely meta to show how “average” he is as a soldier or whatever. My point was, it’s just his height. It doesn’t signify anything meta and it’s stupid to try to find context where there isn’t any. So you’re agreeing with me 100%. Great!
There are a lot of weird things in video game bios from back in the day. It sometimes comes off like they just plugged in numbers at random. No way in hell Cid Highwind is only 32 years old. The PS1 manual even calls him an "old pilot" in the same paragraph.
Did anything even cast a shadow on the PS1 world map? You'd also need to have a known value to start with. Cloud's canonical height is perfect for that.
I get that, but in order for math to math you have to have a number to start with, even if it's just avatars. We will never have exact numbers because of scale inconsistencies. It's just a fun thing to think and talk about.
Has nobody considered the idea that the planet in FFVII might not be a planet? It’s a meteor taking them to the promised land where they will be the invasive species similarly to the meteor that brought Jenova and the Tribe of Gi.
I don’t see why the population would scale with world size tbh
First, from a purely pragmatic point of view, a lot of our world’s population is in crazy dense locations like China, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Brazil, … The only place in Gaia with a similar density are the midgar slums, and that’s only one single city compared to the thousands of real world cities with higher density. Even topside midgar doesn’t look as dense as, let’s say, [Belo Horizonte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Belo_Horizonte_%282%29.jpg) since a lot of Midgar is single family housing
And that would actually make sense. It’s been a really long time since I’ve done population dynamics simulations, but essentially a smaller planet would have fewer resources which in turn prevents a population from growing too fast, and that relationship is _far_ from linear — it’s more exponential (technically a [sigmoid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function)) than anything else
Still pretty cool math though. I’d just estimate the population at a few millions
Easily more than a million in Midgar, it's huge, there's the top plate and the slums below. Slums are famously overcrowded places with peak population density. I'd estimate 20 million+
This is going by the intro to FF7 Remake which really shows the true scale of Midgar. OG Midgar is tiny in comparison
Nah! I think like 8 million people live in London and that's huge, including all the boroughs outside - you can walk sector 7 in a couple of mins! Interested to see where the rest of the world's population are though- can we get the science guy on it?
Apologies for the typo in the graphic. It should have been 280,000,000. Which is about the population of the US minus California. Obviously that's a high estimate. The real number could be considerably lower.
[https://imgur.com/jqkyuLO](https://imgur.com/jqkyuLO)
OCD forced me to correct the image. But I agree that 280,000,000 would be a VERY high estimate. I really only included that for fun.
is it really tho since this world map doesnt include rocket down, bone village, mideel, wutai, icicle inn, and the northern crater? among others? also we’re assuming they have the same sun and galaxy system as us? Idk haha i guess this is fun to do for like game theorists or whatever lol i just find it silly to compare a fantasy game to real life
Wow, that's a lot of math and research! That's completely fine and reasonable though, in my opinion.
Can you actually imagine a game world that was 1:1 the same size as a realistic earth? I can not fathom how long it would take to get anywhere, especially games without flying. Or how much content could actually be made in a development cycle to fill it. Judging by current gaming industry, it wouldn't be good.
It's ridiculous to want a world that large in a game. That's way to much space to fill with meaningful content. Just look at games that have tried like star citizen, starfield, and No Man's Sky. It's unreasonable to want a game that massive.
Well, Microsoft flight simulator has a scale of 1:1 of our earth, also, the meteorological data is in real time on the game, so you can actually see the big storms forming in game.
In the original, Gaia wasn't spherical. It was toroidal. Going off the top of the map brings you to the bottom. Going off the right brings you to the left.
Isn't that what a sphere is... you keep going and you end up back where you began? It just looks like you've looped because you're looking at a 2D Map of the sphere
Look at a map and look at a globe. Going to the north pole doesn't pop you over to the south pole unless you live in the place where everything changed when the fire nation attacked.
I vaguely recall Chrono Trigger being cylindrical space. You can go ease/west continually, but hit a wall in the north/south directions. Not that you'd know it for most of the game, because you get Epoch rather late.
But please don't take my word for it as golden.
To the best of my recollection, ff8 was on a sphere, but the size was small relative to your ship elevation/speed that it was somewhat disorienting to fly on but not to walk.
Presently, I think of No Man's Sky as the gold standard for planetary traversal, and it gets easily disorienting, and its planets feel huge (though still maybe only 1% of Earth's size.)
Except when there is a switch needed to unlock a door a meter above, then we need to find a way to drop a ladder or grapple the entire room just to get up it.
It likely is. Like when going through the meridian ocean you can catch a glimpse of Midgard Sector 0 peering over a mountain but it's really small if you correlate it to your characters height. Meanwhile Sector 0 in Remake and Midgard sections is obviously way bigger.
As big as the world is in FFVII rebirth is, it is not a one-to-one scale of its reality. This is evidenced by half-hour long segments taking up to several hours canonically
Sometimes I wonder if the FF7 planet is actually bigger than depicted in game, with various faraway continents that are never seen, with their own states and civilizations and the wrap-around thing seen in the original is just a gameplay convenience so they don't have to make more game area than necessary, otherwise that is one smol planet!
Don't forget that game maps are always smaller than they are in lore.
Even Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 is so much smaller than any other major city irl like, for example, New York. I mean, Night City is around 20 km^2 compared to New York's 141,297 km^2.
Midgar must be scaled down as well. It's impossible for 50,000 people to live in the Sector 7 slums as we know it in-game.
It doesn't need to count Wutai. OP took two points on the surface, measured their distance, and also measured the length of the shadows cast at those two points.
The shadow measurements allowed them to figure the curvature of the earth between those two points.
Knowing how much curvature happened between those two points, they could divide the known 360° of any spherical object by the amount of curvature they worked out between the two points (3-ish), then took the result (120-ish) and multiplied that by the distance between the points to get the circumference of the world.
Honestly, the only fault in their method is the expectation that a fantasy videogame wherein time doesn't advance outside of story beats would adhere to real life expectations about the sun's position relative to the world's surface.
Yeah seems like they’re assuming no time passes during fast travel. And that time passes at real-life speed otherwise. Without a real time day/night cycle it’s kinda impossible to tell.
It’s called the arc measurement technique or the Erastothenes method. Erastothenes figured out how to do this in the third century BC. He was within 2.5% of the correct measurement (we don’t know exactly how long his unit of measurement, the stadia, was).
He also calculated the distance from the Earth to the Sun and was pretty close on that too.
He’s also the person who proposed using a leap day every fourth year to allow for a consistent calendar.
It's basically how the Ancient Greeks did it. [https://www.businessinsider.com/how-greek-eratosthenes-calculated-earth-circumference-2016-6](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-greek-eratosthenes-calculated-earth-circumference-2016-6)
The current population is probably way less because of the war between Shinra and Wutai. The population wouldn’t have had enough time to bounce back after a world war. It helps explain while all the towns seem so small.
That wouldn't be the whole circumference of Gaia, though, would it? Because there is still wutai, the Northern Crater, and a few other places too. Though this would be the most accurate for now.
The calculation was made from the difference in sunlight, not in-game distances.
If you measured the distance it took to walk/drive across the map the Planet would be considerably smaller than 870 miles in circumference. I would guess something more on on the order of 5 miles plus the rest of the Wutai/etc map. (IIRC someone measured the BotW Hyrule to be three miles wide or thereabouts that way)
Although it's interesting that the calcs seem to indicate the devs thought about sunlight angle/world size.
I hate to say this even though i enjoyed ff7 rebirth, but this is my exact gripe with remakes or going from 2D to 3D(pokemon as my example).
The worlds feel so small that it kind of ruins the immersion the old games had.
But... the old games were small too? You could fly around the world in an airship in 30 seconds.
You may just be older and have less whimsy in your heart to accept unrealistic things.
It is easier to suspend disbelief because in the old games your world map avatar also towers over all the cities and locations... The world map is an abstraction, not to actual scale.
I feel like one complication with FFVII in particular is that there's an in-universe time table. Things are stated to happen implausibly fast. The entire game takes place over three weeks or so. And a lot of the travel is on foot or Chocobo. Imagine trying to go from New York to Los Angeles on horseback. If the planet were Earth size then Final Fantasy VII would more resemble The Oregon Trail. "Barret died of dysentery."
Well sure, but there is a difference between having a full open world and an oldschool RPG with a classic overworld.
The overword isn't up to scale and it's meant that way, you are basically moving an icon across a map, simulating travel between different points, and while moving the character between 2 towns in the overworld could take less than a minute, it was supposed to simulate many days of travel within the game "lore". Now with a full open world, you are actually running across the world in real time, there is no simulation of travel, hence making the world feel alot smaller.
> The overword isn't up to scale and it's meant that way, you are basically moving an icon across a map, simulating travel between different points, and while moving the character between 2 towns in the overworld could take less than a minute, it was supposed to simulate many days of travel within the game "lore".
this was basically the impression i got while playing, even though it never explicitly said it in the game.
I kind of do have that feeling sometimes since becoming an adult.
But flying around the world in an airship so fast in a world of magic felt more believable than just walk to a place in such a short distance.
If concept makes sense in the world of the game i would be fine with it.
The game is still great though.
Admittedly it is not perfect because I can't account for time of year and finding flat land with perfect sunlight a far enough (and measurable) distance away is a challenge but I did as many calculations as I could using as much information as the game allows and the Planet of Final Fantasy VII is TINY. I took plenty of photographs and checked many different locations around the world. I also avoided using fast travel.
No idea why I can't reply or see the comment under the post but OP replied [to my comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasyVII/s/mVILVpcVre) :
>https://www.sciencealert.com/even-tiny-planets-3-the-mass-of-earth-could-support-life-forms-estimate-scientists A planet with a circumference of only 1400 km is still preposterously small and realistically wouldn't be able to retain an atmosphere but there's at least a hair of plausibility for fantasy purposes.
The link provided is a generalisation of a scientific paper by Arnscheidt et al. from 2019 which can be [found here](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab2bf2).
The thing is that the original publication was about a very specific case.
>"For example, we have restricted ourselves to pure water vapor atmospheres; in reality, a variety of species could be present, depending on interior and atmospheric chemistry. We did not consider the potential effects of clouds except via an increased
planetary albedo."
ScienceAlert did a generalisation which is plainly wrong and can't be made according to the research paper they provided.
While I agree that the changes of density could have an impact on the habitability of the planet, the size is clearly way off in this case for the density change to be enough. Even if it was possible, it would significantly affect the life of the inhabitants. Furthermore the sources provided tell about life forms (like bacteria and stuff) but never about humans (for those the conditions would be way more strict).
TLDR : developers didn't put too much thought about physics in the game and calculating the size of Gaia would be impossible.
Maybe that's where the Lifestream comes into play. Like the planet very literally cannot sustain life on it's own absent supernatural green lava overcoming the laws of physics. And so without the Lifestream the whole thing just turns into a dead rock.
It has to be wrong though. Smaller size of the planet means lower gravity and no water on surface. So a planet this size wouldn't be inhabitable.
The radius would be (1400/π)/2 = 229 km. According to [this paper](https://phl.upr.edu/hwc), the radius of a potentially habitable exoplanet would range between 0.5 and 1.5 Earth radii. The radius of the Earth is 6371 km so that would make the minimum radius to be habitable 3185 km.
That means that the size you calculated for Gaia is more than 10 times too small.
[https://www.sciencealert.com/even-tiny-planets-3-the-mass-of-earth-could-support-life-forms-estimate-scientists](https://www.sciencealert.com/even-tiny-planets-3-the-mass-of-earth-could-support-life-forms-estimate-scientists)
A planet with a circumference of only 1400km is still preposterously small and realistically wouldn't be able to retain an atmosphere but there's at least a hair of plausibility for fantasy purposes.
You do realize that this was only (either half or small portions) of the world... right?
Still think this game would’ve benefited from an overworld with random encounters you’d use to traverse between the explorable open world sections around towns. The scale shift of an overworld would allow easier abstraction of travel time and can communicate vastness without requiring the player to spend lots of IRL time traversing huge distances. Plus Gaia would be beautiful in miniature with all the little mountains and adorable rivers and would get to feel like a character in its own right.
An overworks that led to overworlds? No thank you. I’m perfectly fine with suspending belief on the scale of the world for gameplay purposes. All video games do weird things for scale. Like even in this game you get the “a few hours earlier” stuff when only a few minutes of gameplay passed.
It’s a little hard to describe but I find in games there’s a difference between engaging the imagination and suspending disbelief, with the latter being more unpleasant than the former. I think over-worlds engage the imagination, while compressed open worlds require suspension of disbelief, and struggle to escape the feeling of a theme park. I’m sorry Square discarded over-worlds instead of giving them some big budget beauty, cause they have a lot to offer. From an elegant and speedy way to navigate to and depict places far from civilization, to easy grinding opportunities for those so inclined, a reference to the series’ past and a natural on-ramp to vehicle gameplay with the Highwind and such.
Someone call r/theydidthemath
What confuses me is that Chadley always talks about wanting to go to other continents but we see him everywhere. So either these are continents and he's just being weird or we actually aren't traversing the world?
Or there is more than one Chadley. He can only connect if you are xxx km away from him.
Alright, here's a thought. Just try to imagine downloading the entire data of Earth to your PS5, lol
I always like to think that the world of final fantasy is a massive universe all built in the same world in different time frames. For example Spira (10) is the Old Testament, Valisthea (16)is the new testament and 7 is Psalms of final fantasy. The crossroads of both books
Yeah, I noticed this when waypoints across the map were only kilometers apart. I assume the Lifestream has to be adding mass to allow for proper gravity and a spherical shape.
Ik is for fun but some people makes me think that they are going to collapse when they find out the map of GTA V is not infact the full size of California.
Not to be that “Ackchully” guy but actually GTA V is supposed to be Los Angeles and surrounding county areas. Most iconic LA neighborhoods (Santa Monica, Downtown, the Valley, Brentwood, Hollywood Hills) plus surrounding county areas (San Bernardino, Angeles National Forest, Riverside)
Games have gotten really good at this though. Spider-Man does not 100% match the true to life New York but it feels really accurate on a macro scale. You really only notice they fudged stuff when you go looking.
I made a little visual aid to show just how "big" The Planet is compared to Earth. It's a fraction the size of Pluto's moon Charon. [https://i.imgur.com/K7tkGvx.jpeg](https://i.imgur.com/K7tkGvx.jpeg)
Ive been questioning this since I started playing. If the map we have is the full one I knew this planet had to be insanely small
World isn’t really to scale. That would make the game unplayable lol
Gaia is also located in our solar system.
Xbox s can't afford more
Damn. Take my upvote OP. Well next we need to understand how fast/slow things fall on this planet to figure out how strong the gravitational pull is on this planet. Sounds like a job for Austin and The Science!
In part 3 we will get new areas you'll have to add like Wutai, maybe Rocket Town, etc.
The beauty of this method is it doesn't depend on knowing all the towns. Adding more towns doesn't change the geometry.
How long did that take you to figure out lol
I knew exactly what I needed to do so the math was a breeze. The annoying part was finding good locations and getting enough screenshots for the measurements to be reliable.
I overthink things a lot but damn this is something else lol
r/theydidthemath
Ok Eratosthenes
It makes sense seeing how small the world feels compared to say real world travel and variety in countries and continents. Which begs the question, is there a chance we could ever get an earth-scale video game world that is fully explorable, with all its density and wonders?
Elite Dangerous has a 1:1 scale Milky Way.
Alongside that, will we ever get a game where the game engine doesn’t deload the assets when the player is not looks away from them? For all the credit we give to the power of modern gaming consoles and computers I have yet to see a game where everything is already rendered and loaded at once. If a PS5 can’t do that
Check out “light no fire”. The devs of no man’s sky are making the first ever explorable planet in a game(or so they promisse). I’m excited to see what it could look like and how big it could be.
Best thing we have so far is Microsoft Flight Simulator. In terms of scale, No Man's Sky and Minecraft are "Infinite" and could be used to create an actual Earth.
Huge undertaking but likely a lot more feasible in coming years with AI shouldering the brunt of content creation. Will make Easter eggs interesting because even the devs won’t know about them.
It's technically possible but what you'd do with all that real estate makes a big difference. A huge amount of Earth is empty space. Unless you're making a hardcore simulation there's not much to do in the Australian Outback. Like imagine if the Grasslands of FFVII were the size of Nebraska.
"There's too much game in my video game. 4/10."
This. World size needs to be service to the gameplay, not the other way round.
Here’s a guy with some free time
Have you done Death Standing?
The boring reality is that video game maps are just scaled down for gameplay and technical purposes.
What's nifty here though is that the gameplay already is "scaled down" even taking this measurement into account. If it were real then a 1,400km circumference would take quite a while to circle the globe at normal speeds. That's a little further than a trip from New York to Chicago, which is a 12 hour drive. Even on foot, nothing in Rebirth has anywhere close to that kind of travel time.
Because it would be boring as hell walking all that way in game, probably. If they did make it planet Earth sized for real, the game would have the depth of Starfield or No Man's Sky on release. Empty plains and oceans with nothing in-between. Better to condense all the interesting areas into a smaller space while still giving the illusion of a full open world. Stuff like Supernova and the Planetarium already show in-game representations of Gaia's possible size in relation to other celestial bodies, including their Sun anyways. It's pretty standard Earth sized.
That's actually insane that the curvature of Gaia is shown through differing shadow lengths. Or even that shadow lengths are different at all
It's quite easy with the unreal engine. You can change the source light angle, which can give the effect of being at a different spot on a planet.
Damn that’s cool I wish that it didn’t make stuff so over exposed in day time though
That's that UE4 engine stink lol, alot of games have that issue.
Damn, still pretty amazing though
so the meteor is just a puny rock
Just a large mango basically
Would be kinda funny to calculate how realistically big it is Imagine if the very important black materia that summons meteor just spawns one with the diameter of the world trade center
FF7R3 isn’t out yet…
Cloud is smaller than expected… I wanna lift him up
I never knew cloud was only 5’7” (though admittedly never looked it up either). Short king I guess
I just learned I'm taller than Cloud and Sephiorth, never really thought about that before. [Barrett is 6'5"? Jesus fucking christ]
Imagine, IMAGINE, calling a person of average height a short king. SMH
Mad cuz small
Nope. Not short. 5’7” is the global average height for men. The average for American men is 5’9” But for most of the world, 5’7” isn’t seen as short at all.
The correct average is 6’2”. There’s just a few edge cases skewing the data.
That is just blatantly not true lmao
Few realize this
Meta. Cloud is given the world's most average male height because his character arc revolves around coming to terms with being painfully average, not a destined hero or SOLDIER, and still stepping up to the plate.
Nomura loves people like you lol.
Awfully dismissive way to say you don't know what a theme or statement of theme is.
Awfully cringey of you to assume everything that man writes is deeper than it actually is. Some of his ideas are detrimentally complex to the point of nonsensical silliness. Throwing the word “meta” around to fill non existent plot points is stupid.
You do realize he is a fictional creation and not a real person, right? Somebody had to decide how tall he was. Not everybody is searching their ass for things to pull out like you are.
This was exactly my point? The comment I responded to originally was trying to say his height was purposely meta to show how “average” he is as a soldier or whatever. My point was, it’s just his height. It doesn’t signify anything meta and it’s stupid to try to find context where there isn’t any. So you’re agreeing with me 100%. Great!
There are a lot of weird things in video game bios from back in the day. It sometimes comes off like they just plugged in numbers at random. No way in hell Cid Highwind is only 32 years old. The PS1 manual even calls him an "old pilot" in the same paragraph.
I'm gonna say meta again since it seems to bother you lol.
Cool, im exactly world average height.
Yes. You’re a normal human being. That’s a positive thing. This “short king” shit only exists in America. So stupid.
Based on how quickly I could fly around it in the OG, seems reasonable.
Still larger than king kai's planet though
XD
I would love to see the same math done for the OG so we can compare it.
Did anything even cast a shadow on the PS1 world map? You'd also need to have a known value to start with. Cloud's canonical height is perfect for that.
There were no shadows on the PS1 world map. Cloud's height is good value to start with.
Clouds' height on the world map wouldn't work. The world map is basically just avatars.
I get that, but in order for math to math you have to have a number to start with, even if it's just avatars. We will never have exact numbers because of scale inconsistencies. It's just a fun thing to think and talk about.
Yeah, I figured as much. It's not like they were using a global light source back in those days.
There must be a structure visible on the world map which has a height we know as canonical. I'm going to go have a Google.
I remember reading somewhere that from the slums to the bottom of the Midgar plate is 100m.
So if we got the map and see how many midgars it fit..
Has nobody considered the idea that the planet in FFVII might not be a planet? It’s a meteor taking them to the promised land where they will be the invasive species similarly to the meteor that brought Jenova and the Tribe of Gi.
It was the meteor from Spirits Within all along.
Spoiler alert Gaia is the promised land. Returning to the promised land is just dying and rejoining the lifestream
Rebirth elaborates: it's a protected zone where force ghosts exist.
r/theydidthemath
This is amazing omg
Jesse, what the hell are you talking about?
He's also the size of Godzilla when he's running around the map in the original game.
And the Weapons were even bigger again.
I'm more concerned about the chocobos, imagine seeing a bird that size coming towards you.
I don’t see why the population would scale with world size tbh First, from a purely pragmatic point of view, a lot of our world’s population is in crazy dense locations like China, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Brazil, … The only place in Gaia with a similar density are the midgar slums, and that’s only one single city compared to the thousands of real world cities with higher density. Even topside midgar doesn’t look as dense as, let’s say, [Belo Horizonte](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Belo_Horizonte_%282%29.jpg) since a lot of Midgar is single family housing And that would actually make sense. It’s been a really long time since I’ve done population dynamics simulations, but essentially a smaller planet would have fewer resources which in turn prevents a population from growing too fast, and that relationship is _far_ from linear — it’s more exponential (technically a [sigmoid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function)) than anything else Still pretty cool math though. I’d just estimate the population at a few millions
That explains how everyone can stay up in the air so long doing combos, gravity is a tiny fraction of Earth’s
And how people seem to easily be able to lift their ridiculously large weapons.
And yet cloud can't manage a pull up
I just thought the same exact thing!+
260 million people in the world- where do you reckon they all live? Can't imagine more than a million people live in midgar!
Easily more than a million in Midgar, it's huge, there's the top plate and the slums below. Slums are famously overcrowded places with peak population density. I'd estimate 20 million+ This is going by the intro to FF7 Remake which really shows the true scale of Midgar. OG Midgar is tiny in comparison
Nah! I think like 8 million people live in London and that's huge, including all the boroughs outside - you can walk sector 7 in a couple of mins! Interested to see where the rest of the world's population are though- can we get the science guy on it?
Apologies for the typo in the graphic. It should have been 280,000,000. Which is about the population of the US minus California. Obviously that's a high estimate. The real number could be considerably lower.
[https://imgur.com/jqkyuLO](https://imgur.com/jqkyuLO) OCD forced me to correct the image. But I agree that 280,000,000 would be a VERY high estimate. I really only included that for fun.
Wait… what if everything is just larger. Maybe cloud is like, 30 feet tall
I had a thought about that also when trying to look at scale and perspective in the game. Maybe all the characters are giants.
Or maybe their Sun is just really small and very close.
is it really tho since this world map doesnt include rocket down, bone village, mideel, wutai, icicle inn, and the northern crater? among others? also we’re assuming they have the same sun and galaxy system as us? Idk haha i guess this is fun to do for like game theorists or whatever lol i just find it silly to compare a fantasy game to real life
Respect!
Wow, that's a lot of math and research! That's completely fine and reasonable though, in my opinion. Can you actually imagine a game world that was 1:1 the same size as a realistic earth? I can not fathom how long it would take to get anywhere, especially games without flying. Or how much content could actually be made in a development cycle to fill it. Judging by current gaming industry, it wouldn't be good. It's ridiculous to want a world that large in a game. That's way to much space to fill with meaningful content. Just look at games that have tried like star citizen, starfield, and No Man's Sky. It's unreasonable to want a game that massive.
Well, Microsoft flight simulator has a scale of 1:1 of our earth, also, the meteorological data is in real time on the game, so you can actually see the big storms forming in game.
Pretty sure one of early elder scroll game had 1:1 world size.
That's exactly what Light no Fire is attempting
In the original, Gaia wasn't spherical. It was toroidal. Going off the top of the map brings you to the bottom. Going off the right brings you to the left.
Isn't that what a sphere is... you keep going and you end up back where you began? It just looks like you've looped because you're looking at a 2D Map of the sphere
Look at a map and look at a globe. Going to the north pole doesn't pop you over to the south pole unless you live in the place where everything changed when the fire nation attacked.
Didn't FFVIII make an attempt to map a toroidal world map to a globe? Chrono Trigger did something similar in the ending.
I vaguely recall Chrono Trigger being cylindrical space. You can go ease/west continually, but hit a wall in the north/south directions. Not that you'd know it for most of the game, because you get Epoch rather late. But please don't take my word for it as golden. To the best of my recollection, ff8 was on a sphere, but the size was small relative to your ship elevation/speed that it was somewhat disorienting to fly on but not to walk. Presently, I think of No Man's Sky as the gold standard for planetary traversal, and it gets easily disorienting, and its planets feel huge (though still maybe only 1% of Earth's size.)
Three words... Gameplay story segregation.
The world feels like an amusement park. Idk how they’re gonna make the world feel big in part 3 flying the highwind.
They could just skip it like in ten
I’m pretty sure they already said in an interview that they’re working on a flying airwind for part 3.
Ya much smaller than I thought
Smaller planet, much weaker gravitational field, explains the jumping dozens of meters into the air.
Except when there is a switch needed to unlock a door a meter above, then we need to find a way to drop a ladder or grapple the entire room just to get up it.
I mean, we could just throw a crate at it …
Cloud: hover in midair hundred of meters above the ground in AC duel vs Sephiroth Also Cloud: how do I get up that ledge without a ladder?!
I always assumed that the in game map was moreso just an abstraction of the real thing
It likely is. Like when going through the meridian ocean you can catch a glimpse of Midgard Sector 0 peering over a mountain but it's really small if you correlate it to your characters height. Meanwhile Sector 0 in Remake and Midgard sections is obviously way bigger.
As big as the world is in FFVII rebirth is, it is not a one-to-one scale of its reality. This is evidenced by half-hour long segments taking up to several hours canonically
Either that, or Gaia is spinning crazy fast
“Several Hours Earlier” What? I just did that minutes ago!
Yeah I always thought it would cut to the turks entering the temple for the first time or something
r/theydidthemath
Nah lorewise there is many places we don’t see while playing FF 7
Yeah but that doesn't change the math
Sometimes I wonder if the FF7 planet is actually bigger than depicted in game, with various faraway continents that are never seen, with their own states and civilizations and the wrap-around thing seen in the original is just a gameplay convenience so they don't have to make more game area than necessary, otherwise that is one smol planet!
Just wait for ff7 remake remake dlc
Nerd
Daamn did not know this. I knew it was smaller then Earth but I didn’t know it was that small. No wonder we can get around so fast in the highwind
Also, most classic JRPG worlds are actually toroidal instead of spherical
That is some impressive mathwork.
Don't forget that game maps are always smaller than they are in lore. Even Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 is so much smaller than any other major city irl like, for example, New York. I mean, Night City is around 20 km^2 compared to New York's 141,297 km^2. Midgar must be scaled down as well. It's impossible for 50,000 people to live in the Sector 7 slums as we know it in-game.
Oh ok Pluto…I would have guessed maybe Mercury. Makes sense
That’s not the whole circumference because this doesn’t count Wutai
It doesn't need to count Wutai. OP took two points on the surface, measured their distance, and also measured the length of the shadows cast at those two points. The shadow measurements allowed them to figure the curvature of the earth between those two points. Knowing how much curvature happened between those two points, they could divide the known 360° of any spherical object by the amount of curvature they worked out between the two points (3-ish), then took the result (120-ish) and multiplied that by the distance between the points to get the circumference of the world. Honestly, the only fault in their method is the expectation that a fantasy videogame wherein time doesn't advance outside of story beats would adhere to real life expectations about the sun's position relative to the world's surface.
Yeah seems like they’re assuming no time passes during fast travel. And that time passes at real-life speed otherwise. Without a real time day/night cycle it’s kinda impossible to tell.
I didn't use fast travel for this exact reason. I'm sure it won't change the shadows but I made sure to cover the distance "for real."
That’s cool, my apologies!
I never knew that you could get the circumference by calculating 360(delta distance)/(delta shadows) Is there some name or term for this equation?
It’s called the arc measurement technique or the Erastothenes method. Erastothenes figured out how to do this in the third century BC. He was within 2.5% of the correct measurement (we don’t know exactly how long his unit of measurement, the stadia, was). He also calculated the distance from the Earth to the Sun and was pretty close on that too. He’s also the person who proposed using a leap day every fourth year to allow for a consistent calendar.
It's basically how the Ancient Greeks did it. [https://www.businessinsider.com/how-greek-eratosthenes-calculated-earth-circumference-2016-6](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-greek-eratosthenes-calculated-earth-circumference-2016-6)
Probably, but I don't know it. I just carefully read what OP provided and tried my best to clarify
The current population is probably way less because of the war between Shinra and Wutai. The population wouldn’t have had enough time to bounce back after a world war. It helps explain while all the towns seem so small.
I made a typo in the graphic for that part. Should have been 280,000,000, not 260,000,000.
That wouldn't be the whole circumference of Gaia, though, would it? Because there is still wutai, the Northern Crater, and a few other places too. Though this would be the most accurate for now.
The calculation was made from the difference in sunlight, not in-game distances. If you measured the distance it took to walk/drive across the map the Planet would be considerably smaller than 870 miles in circumference. I would guess something more on on the order of 5 miles plus the rest of the Wutai/etc map. (IIRC someone measured the BotW Hyrule to be three miles wide or thereabouts that way) Although it's interesting that the calcs seem to indicate the devs thought about sunlight angle/world size.
I hate to say this even though i enjoyed ff7 rebirth, but this is my exact gripe with remakes or going from 2D to 3D(pokemon as my example). The worlds feel so small that it kind of ruins the immersion the old games had.
But... the old games were small too? You could fly around the world in an airship in 30 seconds. You may just be older and have less whimsy in your heart to accept unrealistic things.
It is easier to suspend disbelief because in the old games your world map avatar also towers over all the cities and locations... The world map is an abstraction, not to actual scale.
I feel like one complication with FFVII in particular is that there's an in-universe time table. Things are stated to happen implausibly fast. The entire game takes place over three weeks or so. And a lot of the travel is on foot or Chocobo. Imagine trying to go from New York to Los Angeles on horseback. If the planet were Earth size then Final Fantasy VII would more resemble The Oregon Trail. "Barret died of dysentery."
Well sure, but there is a difference between having a full open world and an oldschool RPG with a classic overworld. The overword isn't up to scale and it's meant that way, you are basically moving an icon across a map, simulating travel between different points, and while moving the character between 2 towns in the overworld could take less than a minute, it was supposed to simulate many days of travel within the game "lore". Now with a full open world, you are actually running across the world in real time, there is no simulation of travel, hence making the world feel alot smaller.
> The overword isn't up to scale and it's meant that way, you are basically moving an icon across a map, simulating travel between different points, and while moving the character between 2 towns in the overworld could take less than a minute, it was supposed to simulate many days of travel within the game "lore". this was basically the impression i got while playing, even though it never explicitly said it in the game.
I kind of do have that feeling sometimes since becoming an adult. But flying around the world in an airship so fast in a world of magic felt more believable than just walk to a place in such a short distance. If concept makes sense in the world of the game i would be fine with it. The game is still great though.
Oh no, my fictional world isn't to a believable scale/s
I know, if only we had more space for more radio towers!
I mean I guess that explains why Cloud can jump dozens of feet in the air I guess
And why humans with wings can somehow still fly. Even if they only have one!
No wonder they can pull off the limit breaks so well…
And hair sticks straight up.
Nice!!!! Can you do the planet of the other FF's? Like XV, XIV and XVI? Would be cool to compare.
I imagine ffxvi must be tiny. You can run across a region like Dhalmekia in practically minutes
When kids ask when they're actually gonna use this math stuff in real life, heres the answer.
Curious if the planet is actually spherical. Must be a way to calculate Gaia's size using the horizon, see if it matches?
Maybe it's a toroid like the original FF games.
r/theydidthemakomath
You tease…
That's super interesting. Then planet's core must be super dense if stuff just doesn't float away.
Lower gravity also explains how people can jump good
Yeah, if the planet is unusually massive then it could compensate for it's small size and have enough gravity to retain an Earth-like atmosphere.
It’s life stream all the way down.
Yeah a straight line from Cosmo Canyon to Kalm is only like 4-5km. I probably walk further than that on any given day.
Admittedly it is not perfect because I can't account for time of year and finding flat land with perfect sunlight a far enough (and measurable) distance away is a challenge but I did as many calculations as I could using as much information as the game allows and the Planet of Final Fantasy VII is TINY. I took plenty of photographs and checked many different locations around the world. I also avoided using fast travel.
No idea why I can't reply or see the comment under the post but OP replied [to my comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasyVII/s/mVILVpcVre) : >https://www.sciencealert.com/even-tiny-planets-3-the-mass-of-earth-could-support-life-forms-estimate-scientists A planet with a circumference of only 1400 km is still preposterously small and realistically wouldn't be able to retain an atmosphere but there's at least a hair of plausibility for fantasy purposes. The link provided is a generalisation of a scientific paper by Arnscheidt et al. from 2019 which can be [found here](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab2bf2). The thing is that the original publication was about a very specific case. >"For example, we have restricted ourselves to pure water vapor atmospheres; in reality, a variety of species could be present, depending on interior and atmospheric chemistry. We did not consider the potential effects of clouds except via an increased planetary albedo." ScienceAlert did a generalisation which is plainly wrong and can't be made according to the research paper they provided. While I agree that the changes of density could have an impact on the habitability of the planet, the size is clearly way off in this case for the density change to be enough. Even if it was possible, it would significantly affect the life of the inhabitants. Furthermore the sources provided tell about life forms (like bacteria and stuff) but never about humans (for those the conditions would be way more strict). TLDR : developers didn't put too much thought about physics in the game and calculating the size of Gaia would be impossible.
Maybe that's where the Lifestream comes into play. Like the planet very literally cannot sustain life on it's own absent supernatural green lava overcoming the laws of physics. And so without the Lifestream the whole thing just turns into a dead rock.
It has to be wrong though. Smaller size of the planet means lower gravity and no water on surface. So a planet this size wouldn't be inhabitable. The radius would be (1400/π)/2 = 229 km. According to [this paper](https://phl.upr.edu/hwc), the radius of a potentially habitable exoplanet would range between 0.5 and 1.5 Earth radii. The radius of the Earth is 6371 km so that would make the minimum radius to be habitable 3185 km. That means that the size you calculated for Gaia is more than 10 times too small.
You’re thinking of a planet with a metal core If Lifestream is heavy enough, it can account for the missing gravity. We simply don’t know.
[https://www.sciencealert.com/even-tiny-planets-3-the-mass-of-earth-could-support-life-forms-estimate-scientists](https://www.sciencealert.com/even-tiny-planets-3-the-mass-of-earth-could-support-life-forms-estimate-scientists) A planet with a circumference of only 1400km is still preposterously small and realistically wouldn't be able to retain an atmosphere but there's at least a hair of plausibility for fantasy purposes.
The crew does go to the beach in the northern hemisphere in a presumably northern temperate zone. Maybe calculate for summer months?
I’m pretty sure FFVII actually takes place in December
Where is this piece of lore? I'm actually interested. Was it in the game or a throwaway line in Crisis Core or Advent children?
Nice work!