Should we delete or clarify the 'scale' tag?

Question

The tag info for the scale tag reads as follows:

Scale in relation to:

Size - the physical size that an object in inside the gameworld.
Project scale - the amount of work and/or ambition that goes into making the game or project meet all requirements.
Image - the amount that the source image needs to be stretched by to suit the current needs. For example: covering a surface bigger or smaller than the image.

I find this is a very poor usage guideline. In context, we are giving users varying uses, where they would likely use a more specific tag to clarify the usage. In turn, this would make scale a meta tag, in these uses. We do not use meta tags.

This seems to extend past the main usage guideline. While the guideline states use of the scale in three seperate contexts, there are many questions that go outside the bounds of these three contexts.

Should we clarify or delete the scale tag?

Answer 1

There are two types of scale issue I see arise fairly frequently in game development:

1. Asset export / import scale. A number of bugs can arise from exporting a mesh from a 3D modelling tool with one set of units and importing it into a game pipeline that expects different units:

• Models showing up too big or too small.
• Skeletons interpreted at a different scale than the vertex data, leading to the mesh vacuum-forming or ballooning out from its bones.
• Animation data interpreted at a different scale than the mesh, leading to wacky exaggerated movement on translations like the start of a jump.

2. Dealing with non-uniform scale. Which introduces a number of gotchas...

• Maintaining aspect ratio when scaling an image/sprite/texture on a surface

• Understanding that physics primitives commonly ignore non-uniform scale.

• Understanding that non-uniform scale in a transform hierarchy can introduce skew into child transforms.

• Understanding that engines like Unity commonly strip non-uniformity in the rendering pipeline by baking it into the vertices, so shaders won't be able to detect the non-uniformity in the matrix.

I remember these issues being very mysterious to me when I was starting out, and over time I've learned what symptoms to look for, what import/export settings to check, where non-uniformity works & doesn't, etc. So in that sense, I would say it's possible to develop gamedev expertise in the topic of "scale"

I'd have more confidence I could answer a question tagged "unity gameobject scale" than "unity gameobject" alone, for example, since the tag suggests it's in a narrower subset of all the possible GameObject questions that could exist.

So, my recommendation would be to keep the scale tag, but boil its description down to the geometric sense.

Answer 2

If we're to make anything with scale, we should probably do something with rotation. Both are basically transformations.

So why not make both of these tag synonyms of transformation? Users that know about scale are generally well versed in rotations too :)

Answer 3

Given that we seem to agree that the scale should be used in relation to transform, I am going I would like to invite other users to slowly iterate through the questions using the scale and ensure that the questions either apply to scaling a transform or have the tag removed.

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I have also submitted a revised tag wiki that reads as follows:

Scale in relation to the geometry, in a game, whether that be 2D or 3D.

It certainly leaves much to be desired, so feel free to improve the tag wiki, providing we stick to the decided scope.