Happened cos realism. We can haz instant teleportation across the galaxy, making the whole premise of the game be absurd, but we need to have ugly "realistic" planets (probably cos it's easier to leave as is, than fix).
High Metal Content Worlds: 2014 vs 2017 comparison!!!!
- Thread starter Mengy
- Start date
Sorry, but this isn't related to the beigening or brownification of the galaxy, as much as I want to support your cause. This thread just shows that you (and apart from xondk everyone else who participated as far as I can tell) don't know much about graphics. The 2014 example is just a flat 2D texture that got put on a sphere. It's also already the highest quality and would look like nothing when you are going to land on it. The 2017 picture has way more detail, variety and quality, it also has surface features that aren't even possible in the 2014 picture.
You are comparing a photo realistic texture that can't work with planetary landings, it would just be a very blurry, muddy thing looking worse than MS Flight Simulator 95 to an actual 3D representation of a planet. It would be best to just lock this thread.
You are comparing a photo realistic texture that can't work with planetary landings, it would just be a very blurry, muddy thing looking worse than MS Flight Simulator 95 to an actual 3D representation of a planet. It would be best to just lock this thread.
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I know enough about graphics to know that if ice worlds, rocky ice worlds, and the majority of rocky worlds can have color variations and terrain variety in 2.2, then why can’t high metal content worlds and metal rich worlds? They did in 2.1, but they don’t anymore in 2.2.
Frontier, Why?
Which is an entirely different topic. Comparing 2.0/2.1 to 2.2 makes sense, which is why I said I support your cause. Comparing it to 1.0 doesn't make any sense.
I'd much rather they opted for the less realistic eye candy, in preference to the beige blobs of boredom.
My two pennies.
What's more interesting to me is that the first picture clearly shows an atmosphere (look at the horizon).Allright, in this promotional video by Frontier from 2014, at timestamp 1:02 you can see a ship coming in to land on a high metal content world, an HMC:
https://youtu.be/8yd-m9AR7mY?t=1m2s
Here is the picture from the video of how the planet looks:
http://i.imgur.com/ETvgI2K.jpg
Now remember, this is from 2014, three years ago, but just look at that surface variety!!! There are a myriad of colors all across it's surface, raised plateaus, craters, this planet looks super interesting! It looks like something you'd see in our very own solar system, orbiting Saturn or Jupiter.
NOW, have a look at a so very typical HMC world from today, 2017, taken by me last week as I was flying down to land on it:
http://i.imgur.com/7WWqX2z.jpg
That is how the majority of HMC's look since 2.2: totally monotone, beige or a slightly off shade of beige, next to no color variation at all. 97% of them all look like this now!!!
WHAT HAPPENED???!!!!!?? WHY????!!!???:S [sad]
Can we please get an answer from Frontier on whether or not this is intentional, or is it a bug that will be addressed in some future update? Just some official word on the matter?
Why? last I checked it is more realistic now? that's the 'why'?
Only places that would even have a chance of getting interesting colour shifts and such looks and retaining them over million of years are places with solid atmosphere's, anything else is constantly hit by solar winds and whatnot, unless the planet was 'blended' upon creation with just big chunks rather then you know, actually being molten, then sure, big different chunks, but all planets were at some point molten, and they aren't without variation it is just a lot more subtle.
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If they cant do it because of issues with performance, then we can forget about any surfaces with anything more advanced on them. (I don't necessarily believe this btw).
Me thinks they got a low budget algorithm instead of the fancy flashy expensive one!
Were there people moaning about the HMC worlds not being realistic and wanting detail to be removed? I didn't see any.
Perhaps it was to make searching for ruins and listening posts easier to do with the Mark I Eyeball scanner.
I agree. The problem isn't beige in an of itself, it is how that colour has been used to make planets look like a singular colour blob.
Here is a metal world from 2.0 - again we could say this is "beige". But just look at the colour variation and surface geology there!
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Because FD would rather ruin everything first before half-heartedly attempt to improve things? Feels like it IMO.WHAT HAPPENED???!!!!!?? WHY????!!!???
But yeah OP, I feel your pain at this lacklustre attempt to beige'ify the galaxy. Just wait until FD make all earth-like planets mushy pea green!
As far as I can tell textures have been vastly improved across the board, and vertice counts on the LOD meshes have fallen drastically owing to the performance improvements. This is backed up by my experience: 4GB vram with the card I have, and even though there have been numerous improvements to surface textures my performance has been increasing since 2.1. So likely not related to textures, more likely a dip in shader/mesh quality.
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Honestly, I think this was the real reason for it. Microsoft and Sony both have rules against devs saying that reductions had to be made to support their platforms. FD can talk about accurate star lighting, but as Obsidian Ant said, there was more to it than that. And oddly enough the Xbox Horizons version hit at around the same time (Xbox release happened with 2.1, beige with 2.2). I played the Xbox version between there and planet side performance kinda sucked.
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It's due to the fact that their original planet textures were developed with the old lighting model in mind. To get the same detail with the new (accurate) lighting model, they would probably need to redevelop a lot of the textures.
I'm not sure how accurate it is. In Elite since 2.2, practically every moon except the ice worlds are beige, even ones with stars like our own. The Moon is not beige.
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Hypothesis
The Cobra Engine is running out of space in its texture buffer, as they add more into the game they have to scale back on the texture sizes......or...alternatively.....they are aligning textures for console.
The Cobra Engine is running out of space in its texture buffer, as they add more into the game they have to scale back on the texture sizes......or...alternatively.....they are aligning textures for console.
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