New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
Patch without patch notes incoming: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threa...ning-another-twitter-only-news-update.577822/
TweakGuides.com - Crysis Tweak Guide - PCGamingWiki mirror
A central resource for PC optimization information.
tweakguides.pcgamingwiki.com
Didn't they?
I remember tinkering in options, so I googled now and found this:
e_hw_occlusion_culling_objects [0,1] - This option enables hardware Occlusion Culling. Occlusion testing is a way for the game to detect what is not visible to the user and hence not waste power drawing it. Enabling this option may result in a performance improvement depending on your system, as it appears to shift the occlusion testing procedure for objects entirely to your graphics card hardware. A similar explanation applies to the e_hw_occlusion_culling_water command (system).
Apparently you need to look VERY carefully to notice the pattern, and even then its not so obvious.
But it seems that our community has some people that are capable to find them quite easily.
They have my sympathy.
I'l just keep enjoying my game, not worrying if one pixel is the same than another one.
Probably the FC dupe, and that's probably why there are no note yet. They don't want the exploiters to go panic mode and cash in.
Comparing an online vast universe to a single player game is folly. Why have so many people used RDR2 as some kind of comparison?
How much procedural generation does RDR have to do?
Yes, the performance in Elite Dangerous: Odyssey is poor, but that's because we can compare it to another game that's really quite comparable, and it's called Elite Dangerous: Horizons.
Ah my bad, it just always rendered the ocean under the surface, not actual culling missingTweakGuides.com - Crysis Tweak Guide - PCGamingWiki mirror
A central resource for PC optimization information.
Didn't they?
I remember tinkering in options, so I googled now and found this:
e_hw_occlusion_culling_objects [0,1] - This option enables hardware Occlusion Culling. Occlusion testing is a way for the game to detect what is not visible to the user and hence not waste power drawing it. Enabling this option may result in a performance improvement depending on your system, as it appears to shift the occlusion testing procedure for objects entirely to your graphics card hardware. A similar explanation applies to the e_hw_occlusion_culling_water command (system).
Also thanks to this I found an article that Crysis 2 made a Pascal Titan and a Ryzen 2700X cry in 2017. Let's hope that's not the resource intensity we are aiming for.They are real features on the surface, which means you'll rather more quickly exhaust those terrain types in question.
Repeating patterns do in fact effect gameplay. Exploration being the main one, and as far as I know that's a pretty big part of Elite.
Did my couple of screenshots with ultra for capture, full quality here (cant be arsed to crop them to fit in here).
drive.google.com
I think the repetitions are in general smaller issue than this thread make it sound. Yes can spot some of them here and there but vast majority of cases isnt nowhere near as obvious as the exmaples shown here; feels like it could be relatively easilly solved by generating more predefined chunks.
The more obvious uglyness is the leopard camo patch on many rocky planets thatgets super pronounced. Thats just uber ugly.
01 - testing – Google Drive
drive.google.com
I think the repetitions are in general smaller issue than this thread make it sound. Yes can spot some of them here and there but vast majority of cases isnt nowhere near as obvious as the exmaples shown here; feels like it could be relatively easilly solved by generating more predefined chunks.
The more obvious uglyness is the leopard camo patch on many rocky planets thatgets super pronounced. Thats just uber ugly.
Long time explorer and first time poster here. Sorry everyone. I'm possibly going to ruin Horizons' procgen for you as well. It's one of those "once you see it you can't unsee it" things...
So I just lifted this screenshot at 1:50 from the video about terrain quality in Horizons vs Odyssey that someone linked earlier in this thread and marked some of the pre-generated terrain assets used by the Horizons procgen algorithm. See the top two tiles for Horizons terrain and notice the similar patterns baked into the Horizons terrain? A few of them are obviously somewhat distorted (see Horizons night vision screenshot top right). Perhaps it's due to being rescaled/squished in the y axis by the Horizons procgen or maybe due to the fish-eye effect in the original screenshots, but they're clearly drawing from the same assets. There are more repeating patterns in the screenshot of course but I only marked the, at a glance, most egregious ones.
This is as far as I know the only way to get procedural generation to work with anything resembling reasonable performance on today's hardware. Having every little piece of the landscape entirely procedurally generated on the fly, down to every rock and bump, for an entire planet at 1:1 scale is simply unworkable given today's hardware restraints (i.e. local storage, memory and computing power). In particular if the procedural generation is being done in real time on the user's own CPU/GPU. Also, it's extremely resource intensive and complex (if even at all feasible) to simulate and procedurally generate more complex geological formations, such as those formed by wind, liquid erosion or tectonic stresses, using real-time mathematics and achieve anything resembling 60+ fps at the same time. Perhaps when we all are running quantum computers sometime in the future...? This is 100% why Frontier uses these large pre-generated ground assets and try to blend them together as best as they can when Odyssey is generating planet surfaces.
The trick is to have enough variety of pre-generated assets and arrange these assets in random and subtle enough patterns to make it less obvious to the human eye that they're actually based on the same meshes and textures. (Even that won't work all of the time as one can see in Star Citizen and No Man's Sky procgen, or in the screenshots above...)
IMO the issue with Odyssey is not so much that it uses pre-generated assets on planet surfaces. As you can see Horizons does that too and for performance reasons it needs to do that! The issue is that Odyssey's lighting, planetary colour variety at a distance along with a (quite likely) lower pool of larger, more detailed and comprehensive mesh assets compared to Horizons. All of this makes the baked in patterns in Odyssey stick out like a sore thumb compared to Horizons more subtle approach to surfaces.
Could Odyssey do better as far as planetary surfaces go for us explorers? Absolutely! I fully agree that it needs more work and a more subtle approach to asset re-use. Is it unfixable? Most likely not. Horizons uses the same approach Odyssey does well enough that most won't ever notice any repeating surface assets in Horizons, as this thread is evidence of.
The devs need to tweak the sharp Odyssey surface lighting (yes please!), increase the variety and subtleness of ground mesh/texture assets and improve surface colours (i.e. make them better blended and with more subtle colour transitions between different spots on the surface, in particular when looking at a distance) and if possible also try to limit the adjacent re-use of pre-generated assets enough in Odyssey to make its surface assets blend as subtly as Horizons procgen does it. If the devs can pull that off then Odyssey procgen will fool the human eye at least most of the time, just as Horizons procgen algorithms manage to do.
Cheers!
PS. Again I'm sorry if I've ruined the Horizons procgen for anyone. Once you see it you can't unsee it...
So I just lifted this screenshot at 1:50 from the video about terrain quality in Horizons vs Odyssey that someone linked earlier in this thread and marked some of the pre-generated terrain assets used by the Horizons procgen algorithm. See the top two tiles for Horizons terrain and notice the similar patterns baked into the Horizons terrain? A few of them are obviously somewhat distorted (see Horizons night vision screenshot top right). Perhaps it's due to being rescaled/squished in the y axis by the Horizons procgen or maybe due to the fish-eye effect in the original screenshots, but they're clearly drawing from the same assets. There are more repeating patterns in the screenshot of course but I only marked the, at a glance, most egregious ones.
This is as far as I know the only way to get procedural generation to work with anything resembling reasonable performance on today's hardware. Having every little piece of the landscape entirely procedurally generated on the fly, down to every rock and bump, for an entire planet at 1:1 scale is simply unworkable given today's hardware restraints (i.e. local storage, memory and computing power). In particular if the procedural generation is being done in real time on the user's own CPU/GPU. Also, it's extremely resource intensive and complex (if even at all feasible) to simulate and procedurally generate more complex geological formations, such as those formed by wind, liquid erosion or tectonic stresses, using real-time mathematics and achieve anything resembling 60+ fps at the same time. Perhaps when we all are running quantum computers sometime in the future...? This is 100% why Frontier uses these large pre-generated ground assets and try to blend them together as best as they can when Odyssey is generating planet surfaces.
The trick is to have enough variety of pre-generated assets and arrange these assets in random and subtle enough patterns to make it less obvious to the human eye that they're actually based on the same meshes and textures. (Even that won't work all of the time as one can see in Star Citizen and No Man's Sky procgen, or in the screenshots above...)
IMO the issue with Odyssey is not so much that it uses pre-generated assets on planet surfaces. As you can see Horizons does that too and for performance reasons it needs to do that! The issue is that Odyssey's lighting, planetary colour variety at a distance along with a (quite likely) lower pool of larger, more detailed and comprehensive mesh assets compared to Horizons. All of this makes the baked in patterns in Odyssey stick out like a sore thumb compared to Horizons more subtle approach to surfaces.
Could Odyssey do better as far as planetary surfaces go for us explorers? Absolutely! I fully agree that it needs more work and a more subtle approach to asset re-use. Is it unfixable? Most likely not. Horizons uses the same approach Odyssey does well enough that most won't ever notice any repeating surface assets in Horizons, as this thread is evidence of.
The devs need to tweak the sharp Odyssey surface lighting (yes please!), increase the variety and subtleness of ground mesh/texture assets and improve surface colours (i.e. make them better blended and with more subtle colour transitions between different spots on the surface, in particular when looking at a distance) and if possible also try to limit the adjacent re-use of pre-generated assets enough in Odyssey to make its surface assets blend as subtly as Horizons procgen does it. If the devs can pull that off then Odyssey procgen will fool the human eye at least most of the time, just as Horizons procgen algorithms manage to do.
Cheers!
PS. Again I'm sorry if I've ruined the Horizons procgen for anyone. Once you see it you can't unsee it...
Another one from Shinrarta Dezhra: planet B 2. System map here:You don't need to go far to see things repeat. I was docked in ShinDez, so I picked the nearest landable planet. This is planet A 2:
You can see a terrain structure appear twice in the system map preview. But do they appear outside the preview, too? Here's one:
And here's the other:
And here it is in space:
The whole fps discussion is utterly pointless.
Someone playing on a 60 Hz monitor won't be bothered much if the framerate dips to 50 fps.
I'm used to play at frame rates between 80 to 144 fps and will feel very uneasy if it dips to 50 fps. Bordering on unplayable.
It all depends what you are used to. People won't find consensus on this.
Someone playing on a 60 Hz monitor won't be bothered much if the framerate dips to 50 fps.
I'm used to play at frame rates between 80 to 144 fps and will feel very uneasy if it dips to 50 fps. Bordering on unplayable.
It all depends what you are used to. People won't find consensus on this.
If it's EDO and Horizons I don't expect much, they first have to deal with people not being able to log in at all - make sense.
The little kid in me wants to see a hotfix for the topic on this thread.
The adult in me knows for a fact there is no quick fix for EDO design choices.
I could compare it to Star Citizen if you want to, which also runs poorly on my machine, but I'm fairly sure that's not a comparison you want me to make. Elite Dangerous is in Space. There's nothing else to render at a station, then the station itself. There's no wildlife, a low number of NPCs, and one room. How on earth does that make my system perform worse then a major CITY in RDR2, with hundreds of NPCs, houses, weather, lighting, volumetric effects and other players? Because Red Dead Online is not a single player game. Elite does not have to render the rest of the galaxy, when I'm a station.
So anyway I've decided to look for repetitions, wasn't hard - in fact there were some on the very planet I was when I booted the game:
and for the UltraForCapture guy I just want to say - I don't have that option:
Source: https://youtu.be/-rKwr-4-UXY
Must be that 6GB of vram not good enough for it, what about consoles then? eh?
Yeah - that option is not an option, so think about something else when defending this tech.
Edit: spelling correction
and for the UltraForCapture guy I just want to say - I don't have that option:
Must be that 6GB of vram not good enough for it, what about consoles then? eh?
Yeah - that option is not an option, so think about something else when defending this tech.
Edit: spelling correction
Ultra for capture, as the name imply, is intended for screenshots and gifs. Not for actual gameplay. Whether you can run it or not is irrelevant, since it's not supposed to be the base for your average gameplay.Did my couple of screenshots with ultra for capture, full quality here (cant be arsed to crop them to fit in here).
01 - testing – Google Drive
I think the repetitions are in general smaller issue than this thread make it sound. Yes can spot some of them here and there but vast majority of cases isnt nowhere near as obvious as the exmaples shown here; feels like it could be relatively easilly solved by generating more predefined chunks.
The more obvious uglyness is the leopard camo patch on many rocky planets thatgets super pronounced. Thats just uber ugly.
Terrain quality. You literally checked them all but that one. Above the rest.
TBF:
- some planets are distinctively "pattern-broken" to the level it make me wince
- there are (probably) not that common, otherwise this would be a thing instantly after release
- explorers have right to be indignant at (possible) abandoning of procedurally generating planets, because more pattern usage means less (or none at all) diversity in exploring experience
I remember coming back to Crisis several years after release just to max everything out and check if my hardware will do the jobAh my bad, it just always rendered the ocean under the surface, not actual culling missing
And those were times when we had like 1.5 performance increase per year if I remember correctly.
Honestly I'm more bothered by the LOD problems and that some planets look like they joined the "You cannot AA us" club. There's some really gnarly looking planetary textures at times, and awesome ones at other times.