So I checked out Elite after ditching it for Star Citizen

[Old Duck]

One of the minor problems I had with No Man's Sky is, ironically, how quickly I noticed the repetitiveness of NMS's procedural generation. After about 20 hours, I started noticing the same body parts in different animals, the same structures in different plants, and even the same formations in the geology. Which is ironic, because I have yet to notice the so-called "tiling" problem in EDO, which is often compared to NMS.

Well, to be fair, Elite Dangerous also suffers from "same structure, different color, let's call it something different " flora. Nobody has perfected truly organic procgen. And I've seen the pictures of the repeating geology (which I assume is what you mean by "tiling") in ED 4.0, and I found it off-putting. Now if you're saying you've been lucky and never encounter that yourself while playing the game, that's one thing, but if you're denying that the pictures of repeating geology are not just that, repeating geology, well, I guess that sugar will help you swallow the pill, but not me.

I do agree, however, that NMS became repetitive surprisingly quick in all things procgen. I swear it actually had more diversity in the first year before the big galaxy reboot. Sure, lots more gameplay was added since then, and even some new assets, but I feel like the procgen was more varied and random in the early days. Maybe that's just the intoxication of the honeymoon phase of the game talking.

It's been ages since I've played NMS myself, not since the early days of the Drew Wagar streams, so I'm not trying to sell it. I just like diversity in space games (instead of always talking about Star Citizen as THE compare and contrast to Elite), just as I like diversity in my procgen

 

[Darkfyre99]

Well, to be fair, Elite Dangerous also suffers from "same structure, different color, let's call it something different " flora. Nobody has perfected truly organic procgen.

And ED, like EGS, has to date gone with hand crafted life, rather than procedural life in NMS. I don’t mind hand crafted life. It’s just that if you’re going to make that procedural life a headline feature of the game, it needs to do better than repeating itself after 20 hours of gameplay.

And I've seen the pictures of the repeating geology (which I assume is what you mean by "tiling") in ED 4.0, and I found it off-putting. Now if you're saying you've been lucky and never encounter that yourself while playing the game, that's one thing, but if you're denying that the pictures of repeating geology are not just that, repeating geology, well, I guess that sugar will help you swallow the pill, but not me.

I have too. I’ve also seen some of the absurd looking geology in Horizons…personally, during the course of normal gameplay. The thing is, I’ve played enough proc-gen games to know that even the best algorithms are going to fail from time to time. The important question is: how often is it going to fail.

NMS started started repeating itself after 20 hours, and after that 20 hours was doing it frequently enough to break verisimilitude. Horizons was rare enough that encountering those proc-gen failures, while off putting in the moment, didn’t break verisimilitude generally.

And as I’ve said, I have yet to notice such problems in Odyssey. Which is ironic, because when those pictures were posted, I’d gotten the impression that such problems were common. And maybe they were, and Frontier’s fix made them much rarer.

Maybe the posters are more sensitive to that kind of thing than I am… though I doubt it, because they’re the same ones who praise NMS as an example of what a smaller team can accomplish. If I noticed such repetition after 20 hours, surely they did as well.

Maybe they were just very unlucky, and I was equally as lucky, when it comes to encountering this kind of thing.

Most likely? I just have a radically different approach to exploration than the keepers of “true exploration,” and as a result the window to notice such macroscopic repetitions is smaller for me than it is for them.

It’s very much a YMMV judgement. Of the recent space-based proc-gen exploration games I’ve played to recently, when it comes to procedural generation, I’d list them, from best to worst:

• EDO - most realistic looking planetary surfaces, combined with accurate scale, axial tilts, and proper orbital mechanics, hand crafted life, accurate skybox, medium sized team
• EDH - very similar EDO, only with more frequent proc-gen failures of planetary surfaces
• big gap
• EGS - tiny scale, cylindrical map projection, does a decent enough job at faking orbital mechanics and axial tilt that it requires careful observation to detect, hand crafted life, accurate skybox, tiny team
• small gap
• NMS - small scale, planets stuck in the phlogiston with the star revolving around them, proc-gen life, proc-gen quickly starts repeating itself, random skybox, small team

 

[Marvin the Martian]

If you just stroll into another ship and fly off with it, it's no good at simulating that crime "arms race".

People leave their cars that have multiple levels of security running at gas stations while they "run in" and get them stolen all the time even in the face of a century of people telling them not to do that.

Regardless of any safeguards they would put on a ship, if you're dumb enough to leave it unlocked and open in a hangar with the "keys in the ignition" so to speak, anybody can just walk aboard and take off with it.

If you're going to model something, you have to take into account the stupidity of humans - which is epic and always has been.

 

[Zieman]

One of the TTRPG concepts I've got in my head is a star system where humans arrived by generation ship, and travel within the system is by solar sail, mostly because I find solar sails really cool, but partly, I thought it would make journeying from one habitat to another take considerable time, and therefore be a decision with some significance

Looks like you've read your Revenger series by Alastair Reynolds .
If you haven't, I highly recommend it.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

And I've seen the pictures of the repeating geology (which I assume is what you mean by "tiling") in ED 4.0, and I found it off-putting. Now if you're saying you've been lucky and never encounter that yourself while playing the game, that's one thing

There's multiple sorts of repeats, some of which are easier to accept than others (and some of which Horizons surfaces had, which Odyssey doesn't), and some of which were worse in the earlier days of Odyssey but are fixed now.

The ones which tended to show up on the early screenshots were the large-planetary-scale repeats: the same continent-sized terrain feature visible twice (or more) on a planet. The adjustment of planetary colours has made these a lot less obvious than they were - though the surface scan makes them a bit more obvious again if you get (un)lucky with where it's threshold line for geo/bio signals ends up, and that can also expose other patterns on that scale. I don't tend to see these in practice nowadays in general - though there are a couple of planets which I've happened to map and also have stations I visit where it's still pretty obvious. That my style of play doesn't spend masses of time looking at planets in the kind of mid-altitude slow orbit which really highlighted the original problem helps for me, of course.

The other one which is really obvious for me is actually an area where on a technical level Odyssey is much less repetitive than Horizons - the rock scatter. Rock scatter in Horizons had a well-measured (and not particularly large) repeating template, but wasn't that noticeable from most flight altitudes and speeds (too small) or from surface level (too close). In Odyssey, the rock scatter randomness is way higher, the rocks generally appear in more geologically sound places (accumulated at the bottom of valleys, not many on the crests of hills, for example) and there are tens of times more different types of rock. Unfortunately, the Sandwich Rock shows up far too often for how visually distinctive it is. And it's a nice rock! Someone clearly put a lot of effort into it! It's just a bit weird if you can see more than one of them at once in a way that seeing ten identical vaguely egg-shaped rocks isn't.

In theory the surface terrain when viewed from the surface is also repetitive - that mountain there, is a copy of a mountain you can find on another planet too, or maybe even elsewhere on this planet. It might actually be an interesting exploration challenge to go and find them - I certainly don't recall seeing an actual example myself, but others will do a lot more surface exploration and could. Especially if it's a Sandwich Rock level of interesting in the first place.

On the other hand, Horizons surfaces were also sometimes very repetitive - if you were on a "smooth and flat" bit of the planet - which was "most of it" on the higher-G worlds - the SRV-scale terrain had two types: actually completely flat except for the scatter rocks, or some small disconnected hills. And those might have been galactically unique disconnected hills - I wasn't getting out the theodolites for each one - but they were pretty repetitive nonetheless. For driving around and viewing the planet from that perspective, I almost always think Odyssey is better than Horizons...

...with the exception of craters. Odyssey completely lacks the mid-sized craters (or I've been really unlucky) - the ones maybe 25-50km radius, central mound, etc. Those gave some of the most fun terrain for Horizons driving and are just completely missing in Odyssey. That's not even a repetition issue - template up ten of those craters, and with rescaling, rotation, different lighting, overlap of other smaller-scale templates on them anyway, and I'm not going to notice. It's just that they're not there at all.

It's one of those things where whether you find the Horizons repetition or the Odyssey repetition "worse" is likely entirely down to personal taste and what scales you explore at.

But then, the basic ED 1.0 generation of systems has plenty of repetition at certain levels: cube density varies (in a famously visible way with E-cubes near the core) in a moderately predictable fashion ... the exact details may be different but how many systems where the order out from the star is "Star -> A belt -> 3 HMCs -> B belt -> Gas Giants -> one Iceball" have you seen? ... the way temperature is calculated means that you always get small rocky moons inner to small icy moons for gas giants, and other fairly static progressions, even though the ordering in "real" star systems can be much more diverse.

It's an unavoidable problem with having enough volume to fill that it needs heavy procgen to fill it. Too random, and people will complain it's nonsensical (and Horizons terrain was certainly geologically implausible at times) - too patterned (even if technically all the numbers are random and unique), and the repetition or at least component repetition gets obvious. And the thresholds are different for different people so on an aggregate level there's always going to be complaints about both. At some point you just have to accept that the key gameplay innovation of Odyssey is the ability to go on holiday with your friend Sandwich Rock and take photos of the cool places you visit together.

 

[Old Duck]

And as I’ve said, I have yet to notice such problems in Odyssey. Which is ironic, because when those pictures were posted, I’d gotten the impression that such problems were common. And maybe they were, and Frontier’s fix made them much rarer.

There's multiple sorts of repeats, some of which are easier to accept than others (and some of which Horizons surfaces had, which Odyssey doesn't), and some of which were worse in the earlier days of Odyssey but are fixed now.

If this problem truly has been fixed, then I'll move a stone from the "con" side of my personal scales of judgement for Odyssey to the "pro" side. This is one of the reasons I stick around this forum, in case and hope that Odyssey might improve enough to tip those scales someday.

Maybe the posters are more sensitive to that kind of thing than I am… though I doubt it, because they’re the same ones who praise NMS as an example of what a smaller team can accomplish. If I noticed such repetition after 20 hours, surely they did as well.

Oh there's definitely a sensitivity variance between players, I have no doubt. I'm highly sensitive to this, but I also go into my friends homes and straighten all the pictures hanging on their walls because they are off-level by 1mm, LOL.

As for NMS repetition, what bothered me about the "life" procgen wasn't that I was seeing similar animals on different planets. Evolution is not strictly random, but based on laws of physics and chemistry, so I expect similarities in life on similar worlds. I'm not even bothered that NMS used a "Mr Potato Head" approach to its procgen, because designing actual life from scratch is the purview of universities using supercomputers or massive compute clusters, not that of video game designers (though I do wish Mr. Braben had at least tried as a pioneer of procgen). What bothered me about the Potato Head approach is that they forgot these are supposed to be living creatures with DNA, not actual toys in a box. Seeing a dog's head on a lizard's body with non-functional wings bolted on just breaks my cognitive connection with the game, especially when I see the same dog's head attached to different body parts on different planets. It truly is a Mr Potato Head box of parts, and that's just not how life works. Now using this for ships, bases, stations, etc, that can and often does work.

How did we get on this off-topic? I blame you!

Of the recent space-based proc-gen exploration games I’ve played to recently, when it comes to procedural generation, I’d list them, from best to worst:

I know most people don't consider Space Engine (no er) a game, nor did I until recently, and still only an alpha, game-wise. It has some really good proc-gen, IMO better than ED (not just planet surfaces, but all things "stellar forge"). Even then I have seen repeating assets and the tell-tale signs of procgen that plague all games - the obvious "let's overlap sine waves to make hills" approach to geology rather than actual tectonics and erosion.

 

[FoolishOwl]

Well, to be fair, Elite Dangerous also suffers from "same structure, different color, let's call it something different " flora. Nobody has perfected truly organic procgen.

The thing I find jarring about the flora is that they have the binomial nomenclature that implies you know you're seeing the same species, on many, many different worlds. I'd thought maybe they were implying something about panspermia, though that wouldn't make a lot of sense either given billions of years of divergence.

(Do we even have a backstory for Vista Genomics? Is it The Club again? Or have we forgotten about them?)

I've spent less time so far on exobiology in ED than I've spent scanning flora and fauna in NMS, so maybe it's still the relative newness of it, but I do find the repetition less jarring than I did in NMS. I think I find the barren landscapes plausible, and don't expect much variation in an environment where there's barely anything alive at all; it's more jarring to see the repetition in lush environments.

Looks like you've read your Revenger series by Alastair Reynolds .
If you haven't, I highly recommend it.

I have not. I'll check it out. Thank you.

I know most people don't consider Space Engine (no er) a game, nor did I until recently, and still only an alpha, game-wise.

I'm not sure whether "game" is the right word, but that's me being pedantic. Space Engine is definitely something I've enjoyed using, and it's really quite remarkable how much it does.

 

[Old Duck]

I'm not sure whether "game" is the right word, but that's me being pedantic. Space Engine is definitely something I've enjoyed using, and it's really quite remarkable how much it does.

The reason I count it as a game these days is because I figured out how to fly an actual spaceship in it using my PS4 controller, so it "feels" like a game rather than a point-and-click tool. This is how I do my exploring in SE, though I admit that sometimes I implement the point-n-click "fast travel" mode to get where I want to be.

What's lacking is any sort of reward system, danger (ships don't crash), or progression system. I use it more for sightseeing and a primitive flight simulator.

 

[marx]

And ED, like EGS, has to date gone with hand crafted life, rather than procedural life in NMS. I don’t mind hand crafted life. It’s just that if you’re going to make that procedural life a headline feature of the game, it needs to do better than repeating itself after 20 hours of gameplay.

Where is the Odyssey life mentioned as a headline feature of the game? On Frontier's Odyssey page, and on Steam's store page, the flora isn't even mentioned at all.

As for procedurally generated life: NMS can get away with cartoonish looks for those, but ED's visual style is more realistic, so it would be more difficult to make generated stuff that's still believable. Even then, I still think it would be doable, but given that exobiology gameplay is currently as simple as it can get, I don't think they'd look into more varied assets without reworking that first... and that doesn't look to be on the table. (Although not impossible either, what with that unknown core feature rework.)

I have too. I’ve also seen some of the absurd looking geology in Horizons…personally, during the course of normal gameplay.

Some repeating patterns as well, like same-looking craters spaced out on an obvious grid. Yes, it was less frequent, and people were more forgiving of such than of large-scale patterns anyway. Such things happen with procedural generation.


As an additional example, the one game that has even more involved generation for planet surfaces is in an entirely different genre: Dwarf Fortress. However, using complexity like that for each and every planet in a system in ED would take far too long. (And I'm not counting the time it takes for DF to generate all the civilizations, history and all, just the world itself.)
But yeah, after DF and ED, there's a large gap in the quality of procedurally generated worlds.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Where is the Odyssey life mentioned as a headline feature of the game? On Frontier's Odyssey page, and on Steam's store page, the flora isn't even mentioned at all.

It isn’t, nor did I say it was. If I implied it was, that certainly wasn’t my intent.

As for procedurally generated life: NMS can get away with cartoonish looks for those, but ED's visual style is more realistic, so it would be more difficult to make generated stuff that's still believable. Even then, I still think it would be doable, but given that exobiology gameplay is currently as simple as it can get, I don't think they'd look into more varied assets without reworking that first... and that doesn't look to be on the table. (Although not impossible either, what with that unknown core feature rework.)

I don’t object to NMS’s cartoonish looks… for the most part. But Hello Games really over-hyped their procedural life, and so do many of its fans. Which is why it was so much of a let down to realize that after about 20 hours of really trying to like the game, I’d was already seeing the repeat of parts in its “potato-head” life. Which is why I said:

if you’re going to make that procedural life a headline feature of the game, it needs to do better than repeating itself after 20 hours of gameplay.

 

[marx]

Ah, looks like I misunderstood that line I quoted: I thought you were referring to ED and the Odyssey flora, however, you first referred to that and after to NMS instead. My bad, I didn't make that last connection.

And yeah, NMS was one of the poster childs of overpromising, although Cyberpunk 2077 later was perhaps an even worse example. (And I'm only counting released games, so no Star Citizen here. If on the other hand it released tomorrow as it currently is, hoo boy...) At least NMS made good on plenty of their promises, but years after the launch that was supposed to have them all.
On the other hand, it did count a lot that NMS released a supposed gameplay trailer, many of which's features didn't turn up in the launched game.

 

[Frankymole]

People leave their cars that have multiple levels of security running at gas stations while they "run in" and get them stolen all the time even in the face of a century of people telling them not to do that.

Regardless of any safeguards they would put on a ship, if you're dumb enough to leave it unlocked and open in a hangar with the "keys in the ignition" so to speak, anybody can just walk aboard and take off with it.

If you're going to model something, you have to take into account the stupidity of humans - which is epic and always has been.

Cars aren't as expensive as jet planes (a better analogy), and are much easier to hijack. Cars stop at lights with unlocked doors; planes are in an environment where it would be difficult to float across from another plane.

Also, when do we pop out of our ships near other people in Elite, except in stations/outposts with deadly ;lasers that execute you for a parking offence? I'm sure hijacking there would be difficult.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I've played a lot of NMS as well. You're right, it does have an exploration aspect. The rhythm of exploration is different, and I think I prefer the rhythm of it in ED, but that's a matter of taste of course.
Elsewhere I'd said that the journey from the Bubble to Colonia, for instance, feels like a long journey, and that makes a difference to the experience. (One of the TTRPG concepts I've got in my head is a star system where humans arrived by generation ship, and travel within the system is by solar sail, mostly because I find solar sails really cool, but partly, I thought it would make journeying from one habitat to another take considerable time, and therefore be a decision with some significance.)

You players traveled low passage?

 

[Ralph Vargr]

People leave their cars that have multiple levels of security running at gas stations while they "run in" and get them stolen all the time even in the face of a century of people telling them not to do that.

Regardless of any safeguards they would put on a ship, if you're dumb enough to leave it unlocked and open in a hangar with the "keys in the ignition" so to speak, anybody can just walk aboard and take off with it.

If you're going to model something, you have to take into account the stupidity of humans - which is epic and always has been.

This happens in my metro all the time.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

Cars aren't as expensive as jet planes (a better analogy), and are much easier to hijack. Cars stop at lights with unlocked doors; planes are in an environment where it would be difficult to float across from another plane.

Also, when do we pop out of our ships near other people in Elite, except in stations/outposts with deadly ;lasers that execute you for a parking offence? I'm sure hijacking there would be difficult.

I can get an airplane pretty easily...

 

[Marvin the Martian]

Cars aren't as expensive as jet planes (a better analogy), and are much easier to hijack. Cars stop at lights with unlocked doors; planes are in an environment where it would be difficult to float across from another plane.

Also, when do we pop out of our ships near other people in Elite, except in stations/outposts with deadly ;lasers that execute you for a parking offence? I'm sure hijacking there would be difficult.

Airplanes are relatively easy to steal as long as the thief knows how to fly and is familiar with airport procedures. If the owner does not leave the keys in the aircraft, the plane can be hotwired. After starting the aircraft, the thief simply contacts the airport control tower for takeoff instructions.

Aircraft Theft | Office of Justice Programs

www.ojp.gov

https://insightcrime.org/news/aircraft-theft-across-latin-america-continues-to-fuel-drug-trade/

The number of thefts on planes is rising

Business

www.economist.com

Planes spend the vast majority of the time on the ground, where they are just as easily stolen as cars are, if not more so. And that's before I even get started on all the hijacking that goes on in mid air each year.

 

[Frankymole]

Airplanes are relatively easy to steal as long as the thief knows how to fly and is familiar with airport procedures. If the owner does not leave the keys in the aircraft, the plane can be hotwired. After starting the aircraft, the thief simply contacts the airport control tower for takeoff instructions.

Do that while you're in the air and the other plane is in the air. That's what we were talking about. Stealing ships from another ship, in flight, as per Star Citizen.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

Also, when do we pop out of our ships near other people in Elite, except in stations/outposts with deadly ;lasers that execute you for a parking offence? I'm sure hijacking there would be difficult.

"Help! Security! Someone's stealing my ship!"
[BOOM]
" Good news citizen, Security has dealt with the offender."
"Great... Pilots fed insurance please..."

 

[Old Duck]

Do that while you're in the air and the other plane is in the air. That's what we were talking about. Stealing ships from another ship, in flight, as per Star Citizen.

You can also do this in Space Engineers - steal a ship by jet packing from one to another while in flight, and I honestly don't like it. Jet packs are OP, allowing a player in a jetpack to catch up to a ship in flight, and grinders (think cutting torch) are OP as well, allowing a player to slice into a ship they don't own like Luke slicing into an AT-AT walker with a lightsaber. It makes everyone feel like Iron Man rather than humble pilots of powerful ships. I personally use a mod to nerf this insane jet pack, but most public servers do not.

I have no idea how this works in Star Citizen. I can see using a ship with grapplers to grab onto another ship like pirate ships of old, and then sending a boarding party over. This plays out both in real life and many sci-fi movies very realistically. Heck, it's the opening scene of the most famous sci-fi movie of them all, the original Star Wars. It's more practically with larger, slower ships than two fighters, though I can almost picture Tom Cruise popping the hatch on his F16 in Top Gun and jumping onto the MiG below him and tossing out it's pilot, but that's because I've watched too many Mission Impossible movies, LOL.

 

[Fizzatron]

I have no idea how this works in Star Citizen. I can see using a ship with grapplers to grab onto another ship like pirate ships of old, and then sending a boarding party over. This plays out both in real life and many sci-fi movies very realistically. Heck, it's the opening scene of the most famous sci-fi movie of them all, the original Star Wars. It's more practically with larger, slower ships than two fighters,

I think a tractor beam would work in Elite for piracy etc.. Of course it would work in a greater capacity with EVA type stuff and ship interiors, but even so I think it would be a good addition to the game as it is and with Guardian tech in the game, there is something like it already that could be expanded upon: