What's happened to the ring systems?! They look terrible!!
- Thread starter Obsidian Ant
- Start date
Here's the rings from Alpha...
Alpha 4.0
Premium Beta 1.0-2.0
Yeah the current asteroids look a LOT better without a doubt and I like the variety too, however has anyone seen where those shadows disappeared to?
Beta 1.0
Beta 2.0
I believe the switch that happened between premium beta/alpha 4 and beta 2 was the implementation of procedural generation for planetary rings, It does look like the work of an RNG imposter.
Another shot from beta 2
Don't get me wrong about the detail, I believe that the procedural planetary ring generator is really detailed too and has the potential to be as elegant as the hand crafted alpha 4 rings, but the problem is that some times they are not varied enough and are too plain.
who remembers this bug? (beta 2)
and then two seconds later the shadows would disapear.
The PG of rings has remained the same since beta 2 up to release.
Elite: Dangerous 1.0~
Present Elite: Dangerous 1.3
This is very good, But only because the light source is decent, if it was very dark you would notice considerable card boarding from the 2D background vs 3D objects. Notice how the back ground is just slightly darker than the actual 3D roids.
Premium Beta 1.0-2.0
Yeah the current asteroids look a LOT better without a doubt and I like the variety too, however has anyone seen where those shadows disappeared to?
Beta 1.0
Beta 2.0
I believe the switch that happened between premium beta/alpha 4 and beta 2 was the implementation of procedural generation for planetary rings, It does look like the work of an RNG imposter.
Another shot from beta 2
Don't get me wrong about the detail, I believe that the procedural planetary ring generator is really detailed too and has the potential to be as elegant as the hand crafted alpha 4 rings, but the problem is that some times they are not varied enough and are too plain.
who remembers this bug? (beta 2)
and then two seconds later the shadows would disapear.
The PG of rings has remained the same since beta 2 up to release.
Elite: Dangerous 1.0~
Present Elite: Dangerous 1.3
This is very good, But only because the light source is decent, if it was very dark you would notice considerable card boarding from the 2D background vs 3D objects. Notice how the back ground is just slightly darker than the actual 3D roids.
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Exactly. Thank you for pointing that out.
I'd forgotten just how gorgeous those rings were during alpha! Hopefully this is a target Frontier are aiming towards with the current rings.
I don't remember the bug with the disappearing shadows. But I do remember those highly dense rings, with the thousands upon thousands of rocks all close to each other, making it both interesting and difficult to navigate through. Those were awesome in VR!!
The "height" of some of these rings from top to bottom was also vast in some cases. I literally got lost in some of these rings. Once deep inside it was almost impossible to get back out again. You had to figure the axis of the solar plane in order to work out which way was 'up', and then keep flying and hope for the best. 
The ring system in your last screenshot looks quite dense with the rocks very close to each other. Was that actually the case? I haven't seen any of these extremely high dense rings since release.
The LOD in that screenshot looks a lot better than the one I posted in the first post - but I think the layer of dust actually masks some of the LOD transition.
TinMan said:
Who knows how Frontier operate. They have done things similar to this in the past, just as OnePercent points out above. Beta one saw a steep drop in ring quality, only for it to be greatly improved when the Ice Asteroids came out. It doesn't make sense they would deliberately downgrade any of the rings, especially only one type and not the other. But that doesn't mean that's not what they have done. I'm hoping it's a glitch. But it's also possible they are planning on doing an upgrade and this is just the transition phase...Frontier have worked in this way on the graphics more than once.
Dahan in the image you're referring to is probably hand crafted, that's why it had good contrast, but realise that it is still 2D when you went down there.
the new system is way better tbh
And the best thing about it? Well the Procedural Generator for gas giants has changing weather patterns, Unlike the hand crafted dahan you're talking about. This means those cloud tops are not static and future proofs the game when we'll be able to fly through those clouds!
Those early ones look fantastic.
Please bring em back. Pleaeaeaeaeaeaease.
Please bring em back. Pleaeaeaeaeaeaease.
Got to love the conspiracy theories on the first page.
I wonder if people know it is perfectly possible to make higher graphics quality for higher end systems and lower end quality for lower end systems... i know sometimes producers do limit the PC version so as to not have too big a disparity between different systems, but usually when it gets console release first or early on. It would be highly foolish of FD to try and sneak something in like this now when people have screenshots and vids from earlier if this was the sole reason.
There are more likely reasons:
1) Objective vs subjective: In other words the people responsible for the changes (art team, devs, etc) prefer the look of the new rings whereas some players don't.
2) They are experimenting with different lighting effects and stuff and there may be future changes to come while they play.
3) Optmization changes to provide a better experience for even those on high end machines, as they noted problems with the old rendering, even if it means a sacrifice in quality.
4) A technical mess up, in which case people can raise a bug report rather than just moaning about it. (Heaven forfend stopping people on the forums having a good old fashioned moan though!).
And, if you really are inclined:
5) Dumbing down for consoles because <reasons>
But i insist people wear a tinfoil hat if they assume 5 is the reason
I wonder if people know it is perfectly possible to make higher graphics quality for higher end systems and lower end quality for lower end systems... i know sometimes producers do limit the PC version so as to not have too big a disparity between different systems, but usually when it gets console release first or early on. It would be highly foolish of FD to try and sneak something in like this now when people have screenshots and vids from earlier if this was the sole reason.
There are more likely reasons:
1) Objective vs subjective: In other words the people responsible for the changes (art team, devs, etc) prefer the look of the new rings whereas some players don't.
2) They are experimenting with different lighting effects and stuff and there may be future changes to come while they play.
3) Optmization changes to provide a better experience for even those on high end machines, as they noted problems with the old rendering, even if it means a sacrifice in quality.
4) A technical mess up, in which case people can raise a bug report rather than just moaning about it. (Heaven forfend stopping people on the forums having a good old fashioned moan though!).
And, if you really are inclined:
5) Dumbing down for consoles because <reasons>
But i insist people wear a tinfoil hat if they assume 5 is the reason
Who paid you to smokescreen this?
I've never encountered any of those high density rings. That looks amazing! Where can I find one?
Got to love the conspiracy theories on the first page.
I wonder if people know it is perfectly possible to make higher graphics quality for higher end systems and lower end quality for lower end systems... i know sometimes producers do limit the PC version so as to not have too big a disparity between different systems, but usually when it gets console release first or early on. It would be highly foolish of FD to try and sneak something in like this now when people have screenshots and vids from earlier if this was the sole reason.
There are more likely reasons:
1) Objective vs subjective: In other words the people responsible for the changes (art team, devs, etc) prefer the look of the new rings whereas some players don't.
2) They are experimenting with different lighting effects and stuff and there may be future changes to come while they play.
3) Optmization changes to provide a better experience for even those on high end machines, as they noted problems with the old rendering, even if it means a sacrifice in quality.
4) A technical mess up, in which case people can raise a bug report rather than just moaning about it. (Heaven forfend stopping people on the forums having a good old fashioned moan though!).
And, if you really are inclined:
5) Dumbing down for consoles because <reasons>
But i insist people wear a tinfoil hat if they assume 5 is the reason
Hey even though number 5 isn't the case here doesn't mean watchdogs didn't happen. No aluminium required. People make opinions based on their experiences.
<snark>Yeah, because coding custom shaders is so easy nobody ever ever gets that wrong!!</snark> I agree with you.
Seriously, people act as if a programmer would go out of their way to make graphics worse. At the very least that would only happen if it was attached to some kind of setting. Even the Xbox version, etc, will have a resolution setting; nobody in their right mind is going to lower the quality for everything to a basic lowest common denominator if they still have a density setting control. Besides, systems like Playstation and Xbox' rendering engines do all the underlying stuff like make the decisions when to go from low-res to high-res textures, etc. If there was a quality loss in a platform port it would be a result of the platform's rendering engine making a decision about memory consumption by objects, or whatever.
That is why rings are so interesting. That's a lotta lotta objects and they all take some memory. I don't know how the ED engine works but if it's typical there's a switchover between modelled objects and flat objects, at some point in the distance; it looks like that switchover-point was set a bit too close in one of the shaders and may be using the wrong colormap for the flat-shaded objects.
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im assuming itll get fixed.
the devs have been playing around with everything from top to bottom.
the devs have been playing around with everything from top to bottom.
Certainly agree with this. The asteroids themselves look far better now, but the clusters, LOD and shadows are quite a lot worse.
Since I was planning to mark my travel back to Barnard's Loop, I'm trying this little feller's rings to see what's what.
And what I'm seeing is that before I drop out of SC, the ring is brown, after the roids close to me are white. Not only that, but flying over them some white roids blink out of existence, and the browner ones all turn white.
Did not see that before. Still, doesn't stop me from getting the shot I came for
And what I'm seeing is that before I drop out of SC, the ring is brown, after the roids close to me are white. Not only that, but flying over them some white roids blink out of existence, and the browner ones all turn white.
Did not see that before. Still, doesn't stop me from getting the shot I came for
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