News From orbit down to Europa

[Mucka]

I have no problems agreeing with that. (and I'm perfectly relaxed BTW )

But that's different from claiming "false advertisement".

Also, in regards to managing expectations I think they have done pretty much everything they can by constantly showing us all these raw videos straight out of the latest builds. How many peeks of this nature have we got and how many pieces of concept art have they released? They could just as easily just have shown off only nice looking screenshots of scripted scenes and a bunch of CGI trailers...like many other games do. Instead they have shown raw footage all over the place.

At the end of the day they can't help that gamers themselves seem to be pretty good a expecting too much all the time just fine on their own.

Have they hit my expectations yet? In some areas they have surpassed what I thought they would deliver with the first expansion (the amount of different activities down on the surface and the big scale planetary features being two examples) in other areas they have fallen a little bit short (in regards to details and variation close to the ground). Overall they are pretty much where I hoped they would be at this point though.

So that sour taste due to expectations is IMO not only in the hands of the devs, it's just as much in the hands of consumers themselves. And this applies to all products, not just ED.



Also, something I agree with...and honestly regret even getting into it. It will never lead anywhere and no "solution" will ever come. Better go to bed now...

Yeah they have been upfront and fair with the teasers - no issue there at all.
People can watch actual game footage or go off some concept art if they like

 

[Ziljan]

Indeed, 0.13g is too light to really cause much of a noticeable effect. Past 0.4g it's fairly clear, higher than that gets extremely obvious - especially if you flip upside down! Clearly I'm not speaking from experience there... >.>

With FA on your ship will always try to hold position if its thrusters can cope (at the cost of generating heat/fuel usage, those things aren't designed for long continuous burn), but unless you're balancing on your ventral or rear thrusters ships can't manage that in any meaningful gravity. With FA Off your ship will faaaaaaaalll.

Exactly where the balance is between ships thrusters and gravity is very much something where we need a wider sampling of people to pitch perfectly - tweaks expected .

Wow. I love the depth you guys are using here for gravitational flight. I am looking forward to testing this out with various ships of different sizes to see what works best and which will be the most interesting and challenging to maneuver over a planet

This is going to be awesome!!!

 

[lysan]

View attachment 77941

I think that comparison pretty much says everything it needs to say.

I'm not trying to have a dig just for the sake of it, but some constructive criticism would be good.

1. Remove the bang from the "loading screen", unless you want to make it as obvious as possible that it's not seamless.
2. Build glide into the transition for loading the instance, at least keep the damn ship moving while the next part is loaded instead of stopping dead in the air/space.
3. Increase LOD. The ground looks OK at some parts detail wise but mostly it's too low poly or resolution. Please at least give us the option to turn it up if our machines can deal with it.
4. Improve the lighting, it looked overcast, how is this possible with only direct lighting from surrounding interstellar bodies, where is the direct light?
5. Add higher frequency detail to the base design. Cargo areas, roadways, lighting, ancillary buildings. The buildings look totally out of place on the surface.
6. Would a base like this not need to emit heat, could we not see some kind of smoke / vapour emissions or haze above the outpost?
7. Increase the ground level detail around outposts or bases if possible to match the poly count / detail of the buildings sitting on top of them.

I'll still be playing regardless of the above and think the mechanics are great, it's the aesthetics that need some love.

I agree, what you mention should not be impossible to make. The bases look to shiny, we need some tracks around it, building need more wear and tear appearance.

 

[jonne]

Is there any info on how big the planets and moons can be for a landing?

 

[mossfoot]

Is there any info on how big the planets and moons can be for a landing?

As far as I know, there is no upper or lower limit - just no atmosphere and non-gas giants.

 

[shikage]

As soon as they put that image external in a newsletter that image became advertising as well as concept art.

I think you are overlooking an important piece of the description: Concept. This means it is not end result, it is not in-game rendered, it is an artist's work to convey the Concept which they are aiming for. It is not an advertisement for the expected user experience. They made no promise to provide exactly what the artist portrayed but simply wanted to provide some kind of visual reference for people.

 

[mossfoot]

Hey, at least it's not misleading like the old Atari art boxes

Yeah, sure, it's EXACTLY like that...

 

[piqikahi]

Awesome share. The view is just amazing

 

[StarLightBreaker]

I made a quick graph to show the landing process.

 

[BEKTOP 3APEMOB]

I don't like the way Europe looks starting from the point where we start to notice height of it's terrain features. Nothing like I imagined. Don't understand why Braben decided to show it to us, if not for the purpose to quell our expectations, so we won't go awall when we see the scrapes they managed to pull together to sell us.

Europe only looking beautiful for first 9 seconds of this video:
[video=youtube_share;D8lD37ey74c]https://youtu.be/D8lD37ey74c[/video]
closer view looks like trashy mess


As for seamless landings - I only see one point where they load new things - when he drops from Supercruise into Glide mode. The pause in ship's movement (as with stations) I can attribute to the workings of frame-shift drive (makes sense actually). Change from Glide mode to normal flight goes smooth, ship's keeping its speed and nothing loads - to me it looks like just a faster and a slower modes of flying over surface with no loading between change. Look again at the video from 1:37 to 1:41 - looks absolutely seamless. Seamless landings are seamless enough for me and very self explanatory from game lore point of view.

[video=youtube_share;uyPoaVRErE0]https://youtu.be/uyPoaVRErE0?t=97[/video]

 

[Viajero]

Also the textures and granularity of the "ice" surface really looks exactly like "rocky", just whiter. I was hoping for a more "real" looking ice sheet texture tbh. Possibly, smoother and flater at spots. Hard to explain.

 

[Tinman]

Also the textures and granularity of the "ice" surface really looks exactly like "rocky", just whiter. I was hoping for a more "real" looking ice sheet texture tbh. Possibly, smoother and flater at spots. Hard to explain.

Yeah...they should really add some sort of subsurface scattering or something to simulate how light shines through ice...

Following on from the last peek, here is another unedited video, this time showing some orbital cruise around Europa, then docking at Haberlandt Survey on the surface. Sub-surface scattering is not working on the ice, and a few other things that will be improved.

https://youtu.be/uyPoaVRErE0

 

[The Law]

I will definetely sob mathematically if the beta does not start on Monday.

 

[wstephenson]

I'm guessing Glide is a loading mode? Otherwise I don't see the point of it - in space you go from SC straight to normal space, what's the point of the Glide interlude if not to load in the local environment?

Think ahead to atmospheric entry and the Glide phase opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.

I will definetely sob mathematically if the beta does not start on Monday.

Geometrically increasing volumes of tears with every hour past 5pm that the beta isn't available?

 

[Ekar]

Also the textures and granularity of the "ice" surface really looks exactly like "rocky", just whiter. I was hoping for a more "real" looking ice sheet texture tbh. Possibly, smoother and flater at spots. Hard to explain.

Yes, it's the same. Its going to be very hard to differentiate between these worlds I'm afraid, the revealed footage shows a very uniform sameness everywhere. I was hoping these iceworlds would be something quite different. Not particularly great news for sightseeing/explorer types.

 

[Kris]

Yes, it's the same. Its going to be very hard to differentiate between these worlds I'm afraid, the revealed footage shows a very uniform sameness everywhere. I was hoping these iceworlds would be something quite different. Not particularly great news for sightseeing/explorer types.

I think main difference will be in "land structures" - for example "europa lines" on ice planets, different craters, mountains (and different features on different size planets etc). All the stuff first Horizons planet stream revealed. I still think ice planets will be very different from other planetary types (for example look how Europa looked when David started orbital cruise, and how other planets looked in other sneak peeks - for example "misty" planet video).

Lets hope they can get ice subsurface scattering working. And as i said previously - loved how the ice sliding in SRV worked.

 

[CaptainKremmen]

Yeah, regarding the rendering and such...

Following on from the last peek, here is another unedited video, this time showing some orbital cruise around Europa, then docking at Haberlandt Survey on the surface. Sub-surface scattering is not working on the ice, and a few other things that will be improved.

https://youtu.be/uyPoaVRErE0

I just read the bolded bits, and thought, "Cool, let's see how it turns out once it's finished", and went to check out the thing I was most interested in...

...which was a video going from orbital cruise to docking.


Job done, very nice. Can't wait to fly it myself.

 

[Skizomeuh]

For what it's worth, in real life, given the time of day the same place can be moody or majestic or totally bland. Don't blame artists and techs for a place that can be seen at any angle, at any position, at any time to not reach your moment to moment cinematic expectations.
The standard high graphical value games are generally heavily crafted to place the players where, when and how they want them to look, hence the linear approach in FPSes.

Now, if I had to nitpick a little, I would say that I'm really looking forward to see and play Horizons by myself. First because Youtube makes a tremendous job at ruining surface textures, second because I want to go where surface composition changes and witness how it's done and that's where there wouldn't be texture overall uniformity like the one we see in these sneak peeks.

 

[CMDR_UberDude]

For what it's worth, in real life, given the time of day the same place can be moody or majestic or totally bland. Don't blame artists and techs for a place that can be seen at any angle, at any position, at any time to not reach your moment to moment cinematic expectations.
The standard high graphical value games are generally heavily crafted to place the players where, when and how they want them to look, hence the linear approach in FPSes.

Now, if I had to nitpick a little, I would say that I'm really looking forward to see and play Horizons by myself. First because Youtube makes a tremendous job at ruining surface textures, second because I want to go where surface composition changes and witness how it's done and that's where there wouldn't be texture overall uniformity like the one we see in these sneak peeks.

yup youtube butchered the videos as far as im concerned.

 

[Cula-Ta]

HOLY SMOKE!

That's awesome. Tic-toc, tic-toc, somebody hurry that clock please.