Cubes and turrets in portal are hella a lot bigger than I thought.
This video is pretty good for considering the scales of some objects in portal !
https://youtu.be/obku6AYXP44

If you are smaller than the size of Chell in the source engine, then everything will look bigger to you

Source 1 games were usually built with the intention of measuring 1 foot to 16 game units for the sake what visually feels good to be in for a flatscreen. But Source units are defined by inches, not 3/4 of an inch... in both versions of the engine. It's just that those scales were typically ignored. So this larger scale carried over into assets ported straight into Alyx.

@buildmine10
I was blown away by the sheer scale of Aperture when I played the map-pack too, but I can happily confirm the scaling is not an accident:


To clarify, a full "rectangle panel" is 128 Hammer Units tall (for the sake of simplicity, I'll be abbreviating "Hammer Units" to "Hu"), and each smaller tile is just half the size of the previous one (so panels go from 128Hu, to 64Hu, and finally 32Hu. Source engine loves Powers of 2)

Now, you mentioned the possibility of Chell being massive, so I opened up Portal 2's Hammer editor to measure the player model's eye-level compared to these wall segments/sizes.
I measured the eye-level of Chell's model (both in T-Pose and in her "portalgun_standing_idle" animation, as Chell's stance puts her head lower than her T-Pose) as well as the Playermodel stand-in used in Hammer to represent the player's spawn location ("info_playerstart"), just in-case.


The results can be seen in this screenshot (with included annotations): [LINK, BECAUSE STEAM DOESN'T EMBED IMAGES][i.imgur.com]

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Keep in mind, this was measured IN Portal 2, no texture scaling (and no prop/model scaling since Portal 2's version of the Hammer editor doesn't support prop-scaling).

There might be some slight perspective warping in the screnshot, but the camera is 64 units above the ground with a low FOV of around 10-20, so any warping due to the perspective is minimal at best.


According to the Valve Developer Wiki's page on "Dimensions" (a handy source for understanding measurements in Source 1 games, you can read it here if you want: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dimensions ), the player's view is typically 64 units off the ground, so it makes sense that the playermodel - when animated - has an eye-level that roughly fits 64Hu.


In short, Chell isn't huge. Aperture is (and, by extension, Portal 2's environments).

If you still have a hard time believing this, here's another screenshot of Chell's model in a made-up test chamber (with some testing elements scattered around). Notice how large everything is when compared to Chell: https://i.imgur.com/bg0IO2g.png

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Honestly, I'm glad I spent time doing this measurement stuff, as this whole experiment made me rethink how scale is perceived in Portal 2 (without VR).


Portal 2 is filled with lots of unconventional objects/machinery you don't see in the real world, so with nothing to compare them to, it's possible that players psychologically use Portal 2's fictional testing elements (especially chamber doors and elevators) as a point of reference to judge scale, to the point we may unknowingly assume that the player camera is chest-height, not eye-level (which would imply Chell is taller than the camera).

It also doesn't help that props which CAN be compared to the real world are sometimes incorrectly large, like how office doors in Portal 2 are almost twice Chell's height (in-fact, doors tend to be larger than necessary in most Valve games. I remember seeing somebody show how ridiculously tall the doors in CS:GO are compared to the playermodels and I remember hearing in an early Half-Life: Alyx interview that they tried importing props like doors and tables from Source 1 games only to find some models were far too big in VR).


Another thing that might be affecting perceived scale is the fact you never see another human character in Portal 2 (or even the original Portal), so there's no easy point of comparison to compare the size of the world to (even in Co-op, it's hard to judge scale as you don't instinctively know the height of Atlas and P-Body, the bots you play in that campaign).




This is just a rough theory (I haven't even touched on how VR impacts perception of scale), but it does make me curious about if people would feel comfortable with
this ApertureVR map-pack if everything was 3-quarters (or 4-fifths) of Aperture's real 1:1 scale.

Hope all of this answers your question, @buildmine10!

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This is something you'll experience pretty universally playing worlds in VR that you grew accustomed to flastcreen. Some really stark examples are Minecraft and Risk of Rain 2. In Minecraft, a block is 1m, but when you see it with a flatscreen FoV, most people think of them as just about step sized, but then you see it "in person" and a single block is coming up over your waist and everything feels massive.