Planets grapihics quality leaves a lot to be desired

Does FD looks like a company who is willing to heavy compromise their main player base to keep a niche market happy?

First you will first have to tell me which market you think is Niche? PC or console?

This is an old argument on these forums and people are going to have to get used to the answer, Microsoft are huge backers of frontier, in many ways we would not have a ED if it wasn't for MS and if anyone has been paying attention to gaming news, MS doesn't care if they sell less copies of ED on their console then PC or PS4 for that matter, they want the exclusivity. Tomb Raider anyone?

So in the end ED WILL run well on console, the weaker of the two for that matter.

For more info on this subject ( I am no way an expert) I would highly suggest looking at any of Digital Foundry videos on you tube or their articles on Eurogamer, great graphic analysis work they do.

https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalFoundry/videos
 
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This is not a like-for-like comparison. In the Comanche game you're very close to ground-level, whereas in those two screenshots you're many kilometres above the surface.
 
The frame rate was the video itself. David even specially said as much and that the game ran smooth on his end.

However, I am a bit disappointed with the surface detail and lighting effects of Europa and hope they enhance this a fair bit. As it is now, my main computer doesn't even feel Elite: Dangerous running on ultra, while the GPUs and CPU threads are much more loaded crunching for scientific and humanitarian researching in the background as well as hosting a few game servers on a virtual Linux machine.

DB said the video was recorded with FRAPS and something must have happened when he uploaded it to youtube, that's why the frame rate was so bad.

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Lol, comparing thousands of square kilometres of terrain, possibly more to maybe tens of square kilometres, scale is everything.

indeed CMDR
 
I am a bit disappointed with the surface detail and lighting effects of Europa and hope they enhance this a fair bit.
I think this is fairly likely, considering how massively the graphics for planets got upgraded since v1.0 . i.e. They are willing to reduce quality to ensure they ship something by a deadline (Xmas), and then improve it later.
 
First you will first have to tell me which market you think is Niche? PC or console?

This is an old argument on these forums and people are going to have to get used to the answer, Microsoft are huge backers of frontier, in many ways we would not have a ED if it wasn't for MS and if anyone has been paying attention to gaming news, MS doesn't care if they sell less copies of ED on their console then PC or PS4 for that matter, they want the exclusivity. Tomb Raider anyone?

So in the end ED WILL run well on console, the weaker of the two for that matter.

For more info on this subject ( I am no way an expert) I would highly suggest looking at any of Digital Foundry videos on you tube or their articles on Eurogamer, great graphic analysis work they do.

https://www.youtube.com/user/DigitalFoundry/videos

I won't tell you anything :) Enjoy your blue pill kthxbai
 
Nice pic :cool:

The shadows make a big difference as they add some depth perception that is missing from DBs video.
This they admitted in a video that shadows weren't working right, hopefully this will be changed, but yes right now shadows is the major missing components, but shadows are also notoriously tricky to balance right especially such long distance ones.

I expect ED to look EXACTLY how it looks now and from what I seen in DBs video. What makes you think I expected more? ED runs on FDs own made engine. And it looks awesome imo.

Is it ok that I have an opinion at all when it come to graphics in ED? Or should it all conform to yours?
It wasn't an attack on you, it was a genuine question, because there seem to be a lot that compare it with concept art, but rarely are games as good as their concept art. So yeah. wasn't meant to attack you in any way.

mars:

It's all about variation and actual tracks on sand:
Yeah, tracks and adding a bit more stone variation would lift it up a lot, but all things considering there are plenty of games where stuff like this hasn't been added before a beta, because they need beta data to see performance and such things, before they add more details and such :) Just seems like people are overreacting when not wanting to realize, that this is going to be a fairly long beta.
 
Just my thoughts... The reason things appear rather uniform is the sun angle. Near overhead. Drama sun angles do happen, but so does boring noon. The tall buildings are casting shadows near straight down, just barely reaching other buildings. The lower terrain features get few chances to cast any shadows, they disappear in glare.

I am confident that a low angle sun, with some surface reflectivity/sparkles from the ice (already visible in previous videos), and the subsurface scatter from ice asteroids... Nice dramatic moments can happen. They already do in Elite, so the capabilities are there. You just have to be in the right place, right time, right lighting, to catch those more fleeting scenes.

The Europa videos remind me of the bright, glaring day on Hoth. Little to no detail stands out in the glare. In an airless world it seems odd, but the only thing really missing to complete the typical sense of chilling, barren, cold is a blue sky and hazy clouds.
 
I won't tell you anything :) Enjoy your blue pill kthxbai

red-or-blue-pill_o_2027663.jpg
 
I am not talking about graphic fidelity but instead detail and realistic looking surface.

How do you know how Europa's surface looks realistically. Have you seen it? From what I have seen from scientific media, the airless worlds look pretty accurate in the game, including Europa. ED has never been about the most number of shadows rendered in real time or how the cutting edge lighting technology was not enough so they coded their own. It is and always was about creating and simulating a 1:1 scale galaxy with all the stars, planets and moons in it, which it does like no other game. Again, space engine doesn't count since it's not a game in the sense ED is.
 
I'd like to see sharper (e.g. jagged cliff edges) surface features (everything is so rounded), but it's overall it's totally good.
 
DB even said that the planet was a WIP, called out one major feature incredibly important to rendering ice correctly that wasn't working yet and that has to be fixed before they even think about fine tuning.

Secondly, the task of rendering the ED universe is vastly different from that in other games screenshots have been posted from, not only in terms of scale but in terms of having no control over what angle or viewpoint they are being rendered from by an individual player. That takes away the ability to bake in optimized details completely and everything has to be dynamically rendered. If you've never done any 3d modelling and rendering you have absolutely no idea how huge a difference this is.

Finally, yes it bothers me too that every large hangar has the same two blades missing from the same fan, for example, but it's such a minor irritation that the amount of modeling and coding required to change it would be way out of proportion to the benefit. Even the most simplistic "solution", that of having a number of different hangar models in each size to select from would fail because then we'd get folks complaining "meh, there's only half a dozen large hangars in the game" as soon as they saw them repeat. Alternatively, unless FD radically increased their data storage to record the precise hangar configuration at every station, outpost and now settlement the same people would be griping "this hangar is different every time I enter it! my immersion is broken!" A true "solution" with multiple options for every part of a hangar which are then combined to make something unique for every pad in the game would be even more of a nightmare and honestly not worth FD's time for such a minimal gain. Of course they are going to reuse an asset for part of the game that even the lore says is standardized and modular.
 
Thats a pretty weak response, the station looks IDENTICAL, as in its EXACTLY the same down to the chips in the paint work because it is the same. Every multi-story car park i go in to dosent look identical, you go under ground on these stations, these are underground hangers. Some rocky walls showing this would be pretty cool rather than the same space stations recycled.

Its not a huge issue for me, but it does show that assists are being reused.

Copy and paste is the mainstay of procedural generation.

Expect more before you get less!
 
Hangars being the same is only logical. In the world today, there are standards. Think about your car. Ever traffic worthy vehicle must adhere to the same standards as with other vehicles in their class. So, every parking lot looks bout the same. Doing this in a different way in the game would serve no other real purpose than deter criticisms of laziness such as yours.

i've travelled to many airports in the world. I've never seen a copy and paste of two airports. Lame excuse for copy paste in a game. There have been many complaints about little variety in space stations. This was an opportunity to change that.
 
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