I dont know about anybody else but Ive always wondered about how fast our in game characters/vehicles were. Since its hard to judge exact distance/size in game with actual measurements, I set about testing to find out how fast various things in game are. Several things made this hard to measure precisely, like how the character models dont stand up perfectly straight and lining up a large amount of warthogs was hard to do. Take it for whats its worth.
I started by standing my spartan directly behind and as near flush with one side of a warthog (on a perfectly level forged lane) as I could and then went into theatre to take a picture and examine it. After some thought on how far away the camera should be I ended up putting it at a distance that when I put a piece of notebook paper up to my screen vertically, my spartan was exactly 7 spaces tall. I figured this was appropriate since, lore wise, they are roughly 7 foot on average. Turning the paper horizontally made the warthog almost exactly 20 spaces long (I wasnt sure if I should consider the tusks or gas cans on the back as part of the length).Down my lane I put 30 warhogs, end to end. I tried to make them just touch without clipping into one another or lifting each other up. With a warthog being 20 feet long ( or at the very least being 2.8 times longer than my spartan is tall) this came up to 600 feet.
I then tested walking, sprinting, walking backwards, and sprinting with use of thrusters at every recharge. I also tested warthogs and ghost, both while boosting and while not.I figured it all up in mph by dividing 600 by the times I got in seconds, giving me feet per second. Multiply this by 60 to get feet per minute and again by 60 to get feet per hour. Divide by 5280 for mph.Since most everything has at least a small window of acceleration time before they reach top speed, my intent was to already be moving at top speed when I passed the start line so as not to lose any time during acceleration. This combined with the FOV being so small meant I would have to review all of this in theatre. Unfortunately, theatre was being uncooperative, so I was forced to do my best with a stop watch while playing. This meant that although I did run all scenarios I described, I dont have any numbers on the backwards walking or constant thrusting runs.
Here are the numbers:
- Full-speed walking- Time in seconds: 22:30 - Speed: 26.9 FPS/ 18.3 mphSprinting- Time in seconds: 17.33 - Speed: 34.6 FPS/ 23.6 mphGhost not boosting: Time in seconds: 9.58 - Speed: 62.6 FPS/ 42.7 mphGhost boosting: Time in seconds: 6.2 - Speed: 96.7 FPS/ 65.9 mphWarthog: Time in seconds: 6.75 - Speed: 88.8 FPS/ 60 mph
Again, take this for all its worth. Use it as support for your “pro sprint” argument or use to bash the idea of “immersion” since a sprinting spartan is apparently about as fast as Usain Bolt. Either way I hope you find it interesting.
~anon