Video games tend to do this thing called "culling," where they don't render things that aren't in use. In Breath of the Wild, there's no reason for Link to be able to see how many apples are on a tree in Hateno when he's all the way in Tarrey Town, or know how many Bokoblins are running around Hebra Mountain. Link has a radius around himself that spawns in people, enemies, items, etc, so that the player gets the full experience of a rendered world without the game having to keep track of 850 Hearty Radishes sparkling.
Scarlet and Violet has really AGGRESSIVE culling. The devs knew the game was framey and did everything they could up until the last possible second to save on resources.
The player has a single square that's always rendered around them, which takes about 10 seconds to run across. Besides that, all that's visible is whatever the camera is facing; if the camera can't see it, it does not exist.
You might think that this would be good for performance, since the game isn't calling as many assets constantly. And you would be right, if the things culled were ALL that the game was trying to render.
We all know at this point about the memory leak problem the game has, where it won't toss garbage data it's not using. This is supposed to account for the framerate drop; however, if it was ONLY the memory leak, it should start out smoothly, then decay over time until it's unplayable.
It's pretty. It's got a tiny bit of reflection, some gentle waves, a nice gradient. A beautifully made ocean without repetitive textures is always nice.
Look at the SIZE of this thing! Paldea is an ANT in the middle of this puddle. It's rendering ALL of this, ALL its sparkles and waves, ALL the time.
Now, this is usually the part of the post where I'm like "and because we know the size of the ocean, based on the coastlines and wind direction, we can figure out how big the rest of the planet is by comparison!" like I did with Breath of the Wild over a year ago.
Another video game term you might not be familiar with is a "skybox." Basically, to give the illusion of faraway objects, clouds, mountains, etc, and to hide the black void most 3D games are built in, games will have a texture wrapped around either the level or where the player is standing. For example:
This is a level from Twilight Princess called Sacred Grove. You normally can't see the bottom parts of this, hence why it turns into a gray plane, but the parts you CAN theoretically see by looking through the trees are colored so you think you're looking at a sky. You can see the edge of the void down in the bottom right corner.
Here's another one from Twilight Princess. You can see the different textures that stack on top of each other, as well as the blue skybox that's centered around Link when he's in the area. You, as the player, FEEL like you're in a small part of a larger world, because the devs cleverly structured together elements you CAN see in other areas into the background.
More complicated versions of skyboxes, typically semi-circular, are called skydomes.
They tend to look kind of like snowglobes, because you do not need to render anything that can't be seen. There's no situation in which the player should be able to fall lower than the level, so there's no reason to render the dome into a sphere in the event that that happens.
In Scarlet and Violet, it would make sense for the skydome to end where the ocean does. There's no situation in which the player manages to go past or underneath the ocean, so even if you wanted a gigantic ocean size like they have, you don't need to use more sky to encompass that.
They did not get this memo.
You might be thinking to yourself "wow, that looks like the curvature of the Earth!"
AND YOU WOULD BE RIGHT!!!!!
Why is this here. Why is it so big. I can't even see Paldea anymore. What exactly was planned for this.
Clever readers might have noticed that I labeled this "Skysphere" and not "Skydome."
That's because it for some reason is a sphere. Paldea is sitting in the middle of a fully rendered gigantic sphere in space. For some reason.
Look at Earth. Look at the Iberian Peninsula (Spain + Portugal), which Paldea is supposed to mimic.
I overlaid the peninsula over Paldea and made them roughly the same size. Assuming the two to be 1:1, the OCEAN is bigger than Earth.
If I then take that size and apply it to the skysphere:
The skysphere is bigger than the PROPORTION OF THE SUN TO THE EARTH:
I will be taking this as canon sizing until the Pokémon Company comes out and either CULLS this monstrosity and stops forcing our Switches to render THE SUN, or until the Pokémon Company stops being a coward and gives us a canon planet size.
IMPORTANT EDITS
This is here to answer questions and clarify things.
I am not saying that Paldea as the game makes it is geographically the size of the Iberian Peninsula. This was originally a worldbuilding theory I thought was maybe going to get 30 notes (hence "we now know the size of the Pokémon world"). I'm saying that since the game is representing the Iberian Peninsula and expects us to take it as such (just like Sinnoh = Hokkaido, Kalos = France, etc, backed up by the anime making cities actually look like cities instead of ten houses and a shop) that this is the logical conclusion of it.
Switch is rendering Spain and Portugal, Switch is therefore rendering gigantic sun, and I am being petty towards the end and saying "if we're playing it this way, fine, here you go." There's a few ways you can measure a game's dimensions for worldbuilding purposes ft @el-smacko
That being said, these are the measurements if we take it as 1:1 with the peninsula ft @evilscientist3
These are the measurements if we take it to be its actual size as-is-shown in game, making the skysphere still 4x larger than the EARTH ft @valeriaasteria
This includes an error I made in explanation—the sphere ISN'T the skydome, the skydome is STILL above this
And this is a video where someone breaks out of bounds to view this whole thing
A lot of people have been quoting that the sphere and water wouldn’t have any effect. A lot of people have also been saying they definitely would. Both sides have programmers supporting it in the notes, including people who have worked on skyboxes (still assuming this counts at least similarly to one).
I am not a programmer. However, I do fall out of bounds in places on purpose often, and if you do that and leave it running, your character gets very wobbly until it eventually looks like a barcode because the switch can’t do math that high. The main reasons I personally think gigantic sphere = low performance is 1: constant lighting updates to something so large (screenshot DOES display a shadow), and 2: being forced to keep those coordinates stable in all directions, on all coordinate points, at all times without the sky turning into a stripey mess.
A possible explanation ft @sunspotpony!
And a video on how to launch yourself into Pokéspace (which I intend to attempt, and will update this with results when I do)
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