When discussing how large or small stages are, especially compared to each other, it's usually a messy business full of guesswork and assumptions. I'm here to fix that.
Seeing the Home Run Contest, I saw an opportunity; a way to measure stages that does not rely on potentially inconsistent user input.

I've created an extended ruler using Event 22 with Sandbag marking a reference point. The length of each slanted line in the Home Run Contest stadium is approximate to one yard each and, though not exact, will be referred to as yards here on out for the sake of simplicity.


Click to expand thumbnail

Here's the ruler by itself, which is a panorama of the entirety of the Event 22 stage. The camera will go no further than this. It looks like a tiny horizontal line in the thumbnail because it still goes very, very far.

I'll list the measurements of all stages below. With walk-off stages, only the areas of the stage accessible by the camera will be counted. Both the end of one line and the beginning of another will be rounded towards a new yard because they overlap vertically. Also, keep in mind that this does not measure blast zones, only floor area.

Very nice research. It gives a good understanding of the difference between each stage's size. So by the measurements, ToS' base is about 16 yrs in length, simpler to most of the neutral stages.

More measurements are on the way. I'm going to do vertical stuff and offstage area as well.

Nice job man! Definitely put a lot of work into this one

Im curious, Why are these measurements important to the playability of the game?
surely it is just a matter of inconvenience for players who are trying to throw players off the map?

Big stages tend to favor characters that want to live a long time, or characters that need space to run, or characters that don't like being offstage. Small stages tend to favor characters that can throw out big hitboxes, characters that are vulnerable to running away and fighting from afar, or characters that want to get quick kills offstage. If you want to make a competitive stagelist that doesn't alienate half of your playerbase, you need to have a balance of small and large stages. Therefore, it's important to know how large stages are. For example, last version the tri-plat sizes (Yoshi's Story, Battlefield, and Dreamland) didn't match up with the main games, and so it was important to know that BF and YS were fairly close and DL was farther away. This research allows us to know that about Beta.

Different stage lengths can effect how a match-up is played. Someone like Falcon would do a lot better on Dreamland as it has a bit more space that would give him more room to dash around in neutral for safe approaches, more air space for combo execution, higher ceiling allows him to survive longer, while having a easier time than his opponent getting kills because of his higher power.

But on a small stage like Metal Cavern, he would have little time and space to avoi pressure. Someone like Marth could rush him down and bully him with his disjointed range easily on that stage.

These may seems like small difference on paper, but this factor can effect how a character can perfom on a match.

It's also nice to have these exact measure of a stage to judge them for competitive play. We can see here that many of the standardize competitive stage all range from 16-20 yrs (BattleField, Smashville, Final Destination, Dreamland, etc.). Not too big, not to small.

edit: ninja'd

thats actually really helpful and informative, i never would have made the connection until after a few dozen lost matches on big/small stages.
Its nice to know competitive league players try to make things as fair as possible.

You shrank the images down which is great, but I don't suppose you could also use the "box=" function? You could group them into alphabetical groups or even just into the stage measurements once you get more measurements for each stage (you said you wanted to do vertical measures and the like). It would drastically reduce the size of the OP and then we wouldn't have to scroll so far down to get to comments.

Alphabetical groups ahoy.

I was saving the boxes for the different groups of measurements since I can't nest boxes, but I might not do the verticals because I'm not sure what the baselines should be. The lowest platform? The lower blast zone? What about stages that HAVE no lower blast zone?
The more compromising and adjusting I have to do, the less accurate I can count on the measurements being.

wow FD and emerald cave are the same in length? never would've guessed that.Well, the more you know....