I think I read an engineering study of that building somewhere, and it was determined that the entire building would have to be elevator shafts, basically. Elevator length limits, speed limits, and efficiency requirements are a major limit on building height.
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I can’t watch that Carrey guy and Halo is really kind of a dude-bro phenom (dudebromena(?)).
Blade Runner though… I can get behind Blade Runner
Skyscrapers are built with the assumption that it would be possible to empty them. I figure a lot of residential towers never come close to being empty, barring a catastrophic evacuation event, but the elevator design has to be able to accomodate that contingency.
If that didn’t have to be true… I think maybe a supertall Illinois or really thick Tyrell pyramid could become practical… I just don’t see much point.
Sky bridges seem more likely to me, enabling a single building to be evacuated with everyone going to the surrounding structures without the need to shuttle everyone down through a single choke point at the base.
I can imagine a future where instead of the building you live in as a status symbol, it’s which layer of the city you dwell in that shows your status. Whole generations of 1%ers might never come down from the tops of the urban canopy. Until the proles decided enough was enough…
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Totally! In fact, that status reversal happened with the invention of the elevator. The lower floors used to be for the wealthy, then suddenly the upper floors became higher status. The pre-elevator days in the Paris art scene were particularly charming, because the cheapest apartments had all the best views and the nice balconies. Spacious lofts and all that, as long as you didn’t mind climbing a lot of stairs. Ironically, the class association has switched, but all those fourth-floor walkups never got elevators, so now the rich people are climbing all the stairs. 
That thing I read on elevator design was fascinating. All the decision making that goes into it- there are local elevators, express elevators, and all kinds of different algorithms. The strict limits on acceleration also mean that travel time is hard to get right. The holy grail is more than one car per shaft. That would revolutionize what’s possible, but for now the footprint occupied by elevators is a huge limitation on building height.
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I should have been more precise and said “a few” rather than “some” because it obviously doesn’t work for many larger game structures that have no single model (or, for some games, no model at all). I was thinking specifically of e.g. the Skyrim building there, which has a scaled exterior model, and a Minecraft building which presumably was built in the game and with blocks of a highly specific size, so it was weird to me that both of these would be so imprecise in the given dimensions. For the Fallout structures, sizes are highly precise because the information was taken from in-game measurements, which, given that it’s the same engine, should have been possible for Skyrim in exactly the same way. I’m assuming that no one bothered to measure it, or that information wasn’t available from a cursory internet search because it’s very measurable. Though in general I’m actually surprised they got as many in-game measurements of structures as they did.
I know how ridiculous game spaces get. I worked on a game that had both recreations of real-world locations but was also built in a… not-terribly-modern game engine, let’s say. So exterior locations were minimized in size for technology and gameplay reasons, while interior locations were exactly doubled in size (which frankly ended up being ridiculous in itself as they were already large spaces) and sometimes also duplicated (i.e. rooms and hallways chained together to absurd lengths). I generally find the “Disneyland effect” of scaled-down exterior spaces to be a bit disconcerting in games, but in this case the interior/exterior dichotomy created an effect that vacillated between unintentional humor and surreal horror for me.
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There are a number of buildings that have double desk elevators - there are two lobby floors at ground and the skylobby and both cars in the elevator load at the same time - Roppongi Hills in Tokyo and 2IFC in HK are ones that I have used.
That’s not the same as two independant cars in the same shaft but I bet that is not far off.
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Yah, that’s very interesting (and I do wonder how the software manages that), but I think the challenge of independent cars is substantial. It seems like you could no longer use cables to run them? Like you might need a track of some sort? I’m not sure (and not an elevator engineer), but the challenges must be substantial or I’d think someone would be doing it already. Then again, maybe the need for that level of complexity just isn’t there.
Came here hoping to see I.Q.Hi’s 17,000th floor office from “Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century”.
Left . . . . . . .yes, disappointed.
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My last playthrough of the borderlands games, I found myself wondering what kind of spatial distortions I was ignoring… and how I might see a more “realistic” version of the model, some kind of scaled noclip mode?
I mean, if I were somehow able to fly around cinderella castle in disneyland, and take measurements, and see it from angles other than the designed ones, the forshortening would be pretty obvious I think. But these videogame environments don’t really have a single spatial standard, do they? Its just a bunch of interlocking spaces that suggest a larger coherent space, without explicitly defining every square inch.
The comparisons I see gamers do based on time taken to walk/run from one end of the space to the other… those make assumptuons that seem pretty dodgy to me as well.
Come to think of it, when I hike 5 miles in the city, it feels vastly different from hiking 5 miles in the woods. And I don’t just mean the exhaust fumes and noise, I mean the sense of scale, and how far it feels like Ive walked.
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Yeah, as @VeronicaConnor pointed out above, there’s multiple scales for various perspectives/usages in games. A lot depends on type of game, age of game, engine, etc, too. It’s often more cinematic than theme park, ultimately - changing from moment to moment depending on the needs of the particular scene.
Older games didn’t allow larger spaces to exist within the game at all. So any large structures would be depicted by modeling only the immediate area that the player would interact with at a given time, each area as its own disconnected world. The illusion of a larger structure might be conveyed by the use of the game equivalent of painted backdrops. Which were sometimes literally just painted images, sometimes geometry, positioned to create the optical illusion that the bit of geometry that you were interacting with - the “level” - was connected to something bigger.
Modern games have become relatively good at allowing for huge spaces and large objects within them, so they’re more likely to exist within a single spatial standard (excepting cutscenes, etc.) You can fly around and it won’t look too weird, at least on a small scale. Buildings might actually be modeled at something like their intended size relative to the player scale (model size/camera position), for instance. But that just allows more theme park like illusions, where the environment objects are used to create particular impressions and enact particular functions that can vary from scene to scene rather than being a consistent reality. At a minimum object models are being swapped out for ones with different levels of detail based on distance, or replaced because they need to do something different in one section of the game, etc.
It varies quite a bit how much the environment is broken up. A fairly static open world space, e.g. an MMO “overworld” may be built, on some level, as one giant, unified space (even if it’s only loading a small chunk of that at a time), only completely changing when interior spaces/instances are entered. On the other hand, a game might involve ever-shifting landscapes/environments; there might be some structure that you initially see off in the distance, move closer to it over the course of gameplay (where it’s being replaced by more detailed versions), and then when you actually get to it and enter it or scale it, the object is now being broken up into multiple “levels” and different sets of geometry. With modern game engines, transitions between “levels” can sometimes be very hard to spot, so there’s the illusion that you’re experiencing an unbroken, continuous environment, when the reality could be that it’s broken up into fairly small sections that don’t objectively match up. If nothing else, it’s quite usual for interior spaces to be completely different from exterior ones, and often not of the same scale. It raises some questions about what “size” even means, for video game buildings at the very least - the canonical answer may not correspond to any in-game measurements.
All this assumes Euclidean spaces, of course. Most 3D games are built that way, at least on the small scale (because the engines are, by default, set up to render and represent space that way), but it’s not necessarily so. The old “2.5 dimensional” games like Marathon weren’t made that way. You could walk in a circle and not end up the same place you started because the space could effectively folded in on itself. Even modern Euclidean-3D space games can fudge that a bit by playing with scale, movement, field of view, etc.
Players measuring space by running usually works pretty well because it’s spaces that at least have invisible loading zones - the seamless illusion of a contiguous space conveys the intended canonical size, even if it’s not actually built that way (but it likely is, to some degree, if it can easily be traversed that way). [It all falls apart once interior spaces are involved, but…] The Borderlands games are the opposite in that they give you clearly marked level loading points, so you at least know that when you hit one of those, whatever you can see outside your traversable area is just whatever minimum geometry was required to maintain the illusion of continuity. (E.g. stripped-down, partial duplicates of spaces you were just in or minimalist landscape features that are smaller and closer than you might expect because you can’t ever get there.)
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They exist, just are a lot more expensive:
https://www.thyssenkrupp-elevator.com/en/products-and-service/multi/
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The Eiffel Tower has these “double” elevators too, if I’m reading your post correctly.
found it here–
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