New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)

[Agrar Therenus]

It only takes one look at how human models look and behave on the sloped/uneven terrain to understand why planets were "flattened" to make it more "walkable". It's a horrible excuse and whoever came up with that idea should have chosen a different career path. Instead of detailing the animation and collision they went with the easiest and most damaging workaround.

This tile issue might even be a result of that as well as if you have pre-build areas it is much easier to make sure they are more "walk friendly".

I'm not so sure. Planets are very big things, and even with canyons and mountains all over one there'd be plenty of traversable terrain.

It's hard to say what's going on for some things, but the fact of its general shoddy state suggests a lot of them are also broken or unfished as well. I really hope though they realise how bad repeating tiles like these are no small matter in a game like Elite, one that touts procederul generation as one of its main selling points. You just can't have features that can be as big as 100s of miles wide repeat on a planet.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

They can just exclude those planets from regeneration I guess.

But who is to say those planets are the only ones out of the billions. Then billions of similar but yet to have been seen in this state may be ruined to an entirely different extreme

 

[Allin]

I'm not so sure. Planets are very big things, and even with canyons and mountains all over one there'd be plenty of traversable terrain.

It's hard to say what's going on for some things, but the fact of its general shoddy state suggests a lot of them are also broken or unfished as well. I really hope though they realise how bad repeating tiles like these are no small matter in a game like Elite, one that touts procederul generation as one of its main selling points. You just can't have features that can be as big as 100s of miles wide repeat on a planet.

By no means I am defending this nonsense and that was only a random guess nothing else - but if you have templates ready you can then set a min/max for the tile including curves and other rendering variables that, if used to cover all the planet (and that may be the case, we may just not see the whole "pattern" yet) could, in theory, be used to flatten the entire globe. From seeing dozens of fly-bys on random planets it does not feel THAT far from the possible truth, as most of them are now just roughly one level plus craters.

 

[Janesha]

That should annoy you more than the fact that it exists, since this is supposed to be a released product.

Oh I'm not trying to excuse this in a launched product, I'm just kind of fascinated at this point trying to figure out how and why they abandoned Horizons planets for a galaxy full of tiling dragons.

 

[Senzafine]

No, but 1 km is not much while he's flying 900 m/s. You don't know what he's doing, do you?

Obviously, I was pulling his leg. Hyperbole tends to bring that out in me.
I hope the hooning community gets canyons that fulfills all their needs when/if this all gets sorted out. OK?

 

[Frankymole]

Animated screenshot

Sounds more like video captures. I'll pass thanks - I don't mind opening an image file but a dodgy collection of suspicious non-thumbnailed files doesn't appeal...

 

[Agrar Therenus]

Unfortunately this kind of tiling system is probably hardcoded into how planet generation works, and it might not be some fix they can do in any reasonable time.

It might well be the kind of thing that requires pulling the game and re-launching later on. Personally for this - even though I'm not a serious explorer - I think it would be worth it because it's so deeply damaging to the core of what Elite is.

 

[Milkman76]

Meanwhile, pinned to the top of the forum, is the 150+ pages long Odyssey screenshot thread with a few intrepid explorers dumping any decent-looking image they can divine out of this unstable, often broken game into that section.

One might look at that thread and mistake the game's state as being ready for production, meanwhile we have threads like these dominating the forums and on steam.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Meanwhile, pinned to the top of the forum, is the 150+ pages long Odyssey screenshot thread with a few intrepid explorers dumping any decent-looking image they can divine out of this unstable, often broken game into that section.

One might look at that thread and mistake the game's state as being ready for production, meanwhile we have threads like these dominating the forums and on steam.

Just keep this thread live. Bet they invent some reason to lock it soon anyway. Fdev can't stop what you post on reddit or Twitter tho...

 

[Just]

Has someone already found the same tiles on different planets?
Except for the big crater with "tentacles".

 

[galahad2069]

Obviously, I was pulling his leg. Hyperbole tends to bring that out in me.
I hope the hooning community gets canyons that fulfills all their needs when/if this all gets sorted out. OK?

Ah okay sorry, I probably misunderstood.

I'm more of a pewpew guy, not one of them btw, but I really feel for these dudes, they are really awesome at what they're doing.

 

[SpaceIsHuge]

Unfortunately this kind of tiling system is probably hardcoded into how planet generation works, and it might not be some fix they can do in any reasonable time.

It might well be the kind of thing that requires pulling the game and re-launching later on. Personally for this - even though I'm not a serious explorer - I think it would be worth it because it's so deeply damaging to the core of what Elite is.

I hope this is just some typo\error in code. Like typo in Aliens Colonial Marines AI code, which broke most part of it.

 

[djadjok]

IMO for Engineers base we have quite a bad case of blending Horizons and Odyssey content. A screenshot to illustrate (Engineer base on Achenar - Blending content - base - on the left, "pure" Odyssey on the right

 

[Mike Reacher]

Thank you all for pointing out how Oddysey has ruined the game/immersion/fun for so many people.
Even my wingmates have abandoned Horizons for Oddysey.
I will continue to trade and mine. Lotsa fun unless Fdev stuffs Horizons up by cementing the two together.

 

[Erei]

IMO for Engineers base we have quite a bad case of blending Horizons and Odyssey content. A screenshot to illustrate (Engineer base on Achenar - Blending content - base - on the left, "pure" Odyssey on the rightView attachment 230886

I had that yesterday, but more beige. I thought it looked just like some camo. It's so pixelated, and not natural.

 

[Frankymole]

Thank you all for pointing out how Oddysey has ruined the game/immersion/fun for so many people.
Even my wingmates have abandoned Horizons for Oddysey.
I will continue to trade and mine. Lotsa fun unless Fdev stuffs Horizons up by cementing the two together.

You mean "until". That's the plan, once the console release is out. Roll it all up into one.

 

[SpaceIsHuge]

Whyyyyyy, why you did this to meeeee??? How to unseen it now? Looks like almost every planet have this.

Btw important question - theres same pattern on other planets, like exactly same pattern as seen on different planets, or its just repeats only on native planet? If second then all planets are still unique.

 

[fb0r]

People here say this can be fixed by just adding more patterns ...can it? If a person cannot fly through the whole ED galaxy in his whole lifetime - there is equally no amount of additional pattern that will really fix this issue.

Yes. I think it can definitely be done.

Horizons uses an assortment of pre-generated procgen surface features ("patterns") too, as a calculation shortcut, and some level of pre-generated shapes are basically required to not kill everyone's CPU (as rendering 1:1 scale planets entirely from scratch using only CPU cycles would do). Procgen placed "set pieces" were just used in a much more inconspicuous manner in Horizons. The devs need to use equivalent tricks to those that Horizons employs in order to fool our human eyes/brains into not noticing these recurring shapes and patterns on Odyssey planets as well.

Also the planetary textures, colouring and lighting system when viewed from orbit needs a serious working over to convey more depth and more blended colour transitions under all lighting conditions, including when the planet's surface is lit directly from above.

 

[djadjok]

I had that yesterday, but more beige. I thought it looked just like some camo. It's so pixelated, and not natural.

At least for me that screenshot shows quite well that terrain generation in Odyssey have nothing in common with the worst case of stitching pure Horizons content - hand-modeled "in place" base for Horizons terrain (engineers base) - on Odyssey landscape generation. There only few "personalized" bases like this in Horizons - and I suppose there were a big work to create them (I suppose it was comparable to all other Horizons planetary starports and settlements). Bad? yes. Annoying? yes. Game breaking? no. And definitely not an example of Odyssey terrain.

 

[DanGriswold]

OK, so now I'm really scared.

When I started hearing the bad reviews early on, I had assumed that all of the issues would be fixable. It might take a while, but they'd be fixed nonetheless. This, however, does not seem like a fixable issue. It was a choice to go down this road and it seems to be at the root of the build. The whole structure would need to be ripped out and started anew. Which, I believe, will not be done after so many resources have been poured into it.

The only interesting bits of Odyssey for me were the planetary tech and atmospheres. The on-foot part could be removed, for all I care. And it seems as though they've taken all that was interesting about the planets and scrubbed it.

I'm genuinely frightened.