Canyon Racers, do not despair

[Jeebs]

Now, I haven't gotten around to canyon racing myself yet (it's on my list of things to do, eventually) so forgive me in advance if I'm wrong about these but they seem suitable to me. It's late where I am and I can't sleep. I decided to log in and go check out a few more planets on Odyssey to see if the planetary tech really is as bad as the forums are making it out to be. I didn't go very far, but I did find a planet with some decent canyons on it. These canyons might not be exactly what you were used to with Horizons, but surely this means that there is a chance there are canyon worlds out there. Here's some screenshots for you:

Synuefe Pi-H B30-0 3 D

 

[M_72]

More like a valley than a canyon. But you get a B+ for the effort

 

[Deleted member 121570]

Now, I haven't gotten around to canyon racing myself yet (it's on my list of things to do, eventually) so forgive me in advance if I'm wrong about these but they seem suitable to me. It's late where I am and I can't sleep. I decided to log in and go check out a few more planets on Odyssey to see if the planetary tech really is as bad as the forums are making it out to be. I didn't go very far, but I did find a planet with some decent canyons on it. These canyons might not be exactly what you were used to with Horizons, but surely this means that there is a chance there are canyon worlds out there. Here's some screenshots for you:

Synuefe Pi-H B30-0 3 D

View attachment 230989View attachment 230990View attachment 230991View attachment 230992

Whilst your heart is definitely in the right place (and thanks!), and I'm really sorry to say it ... those are not raceworthy
They're literally massive, wide straight lines. You could hit boost, and go AFK for a beer.

This is pretty typical for Odyssey. Sorta shallowish, too wide and boring to fly in.

Edit: if you want to get into surface racing with ships; stick to Horizons for as long as you can.
Until it dies.

 

[Flimley]

Jelly mould world. \o/

Flimley

 

[Jeebs]

Heh. I wasn't suggesting these specific canyons for racing, so much as putting forth the hope that there are planets out there that will be suitable. You are correct in that they are more like valleys than the canyons of Pomeche 2 (whichever one it was, I always had to look at the sysmap to remember). Hopefully there are canyons like that out there. While I didn't go racing in them, I did enjoy flying around canyons in Horizons.

 

[Deleted member 121570]

Heh. I wasn't suggesting these specific canyons for racing, so much as putting forth the hope that there are planets out there that will be suitable. You are correct in that they are more like valleys than the canyons of Pomeche 2 (whichever one it was, I always had to look at the sysmap to remember). Hopefully there are canyons like that out there. While I didn't go racing in them, I did enjoy flying around canyons in Horizons.

There's been fairly organised efforts so far hunting for anything worth flying at speed, and sadly it appears as tho the new generation has reduced the elevation variation and range down to something that's more aligned for the foot-based play rather than flight now.

In comparison to Horizons, almost all surface features are now significantly more shallow, much of the 'noise' in the system that led to small spike-type features providing obstacles or turns has been removed, terrain edges have been smoothed, and the size of areas also reduced.

Pomeche 2C received special attention and was 'handcrafted' as a gesture to 'canyon racing', and whilst canyons are still pretty high (much higher than every other planet) - they're also far too wide, straight and without any internal complexity to offer any challenge at all.

On this basis - that everything so far has been flattened (where before there was much variety and thousands of good sites just in the bubble), and even the specifically handcrafted single example isn't fit for the purpose they handcrafted it for - it's looking very bleak indeed.

It's not a racing / hooning game though. There's still the option for space-based racing around stations & installations (if they also fix the NPC spawn bugs there and janky framerates). Surface-based emergent gameplay in the form of challenging flight appears gone though in EDO.

Edit: See also: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-horizons-comparison-thread.575895/

 

[Jeebs]

Yeah, I've seen that thread... but from what I can tell, it seems like people are posting the worst possible pics they can find. Which is fine if you want to show where there needs improvement, but I wouldn't pass it off as all planets being bland and uninteresting. Certainly there needs to be some tweaking done, but I feel like it's nowhere near as bad as the masses are screaming. I just went for an hour long trip, landed on three different planets and they looked fine.

Hopefully now that they've been made aware, they'll find a way to tweak the planetary tech system so that Horizons-style canyons are possible again (if they are completely gone, as you say)... once they deal with more pressing bugs like performance issues and disconnections.

 

[Deleted member 121570]

Yeah, I've seen that thread... but from what I can tell, it seems like people are posting the worst possible pics they can find. Which is fine if you want to show where there needs improvement, but I wouldn't pass it off as all planets being bland and uninteresting. Certainly there needs to be some tweaking done, but I feel like it's nowhere near as bad as the masses are screaming. I just went for an hour long trip, landed on three different planets and they looked fine.

Hopefully now that they've been made aware, they'll find a way to tweak the planetary tech system so that Horizons-style canyons are possible again (if they are completely gone, as you say)... once they deal with more pressing bugs like performance issues and disconnections.

I disagree to be honest. Every planet I've seen in EDO has been bland and uninteresting, when viewed from the perspective of 'could we race/hoon the living crap outta that like we used to in Horizons?'. And I'm basing that on my own foray into the game, from what I've heard from friends & community members in the racing / hooning groups, and from looking at the best screenshots that people have cherry picked to look great.

For clarity: I am purely talking about suitability for racing & hooning about at speed with challenging terrain that allows you to push the flight model.
I am not talking about framerates, LOD texturing etc etc etc (seperate issues, seperate threads a-flame). But on this subject; the surface features are now all bland and all crap for this purpose.

 

[Jeebs]

Right, apologies. That last post I meant they don't look totally bland and uniform overall, not from a racing perspective. However, after reading the forums this past week, I was under the impression that planets were mostly all flat with barely any surface features (since these are the kinds of shots people were posting) and then there was the flip-side of that, as you pointed out. So it was kinda hard to figure out what the truth of it was. My own experience has been somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, so I will keep hoping that they will tweak the planet tech eventually.

 

[Deleted member 121570]

Right, apologies. That last post I meant they don't look totally bland and uniform overall, not from a racing perspective. However, after reading the forums this past week, I was under the impression that planets were mostly all flat with barely any surface features (since these are the kinds of shots people were posting) and then there was the flip-side of that, as you pointed out. So it was kinda hard to figure out what the truth of it was. My own experience has been somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, so I will keep hoping that they will tweak the planet tech eventually.

No apologies required! Disagreeing and discussion is good, and I'm sure lots of folks (me included) appreciate you trying to help!
Keep hunting, and I hope for the same

 

[The Galactic Penguin]

I'm not 100 percent sure what makes a brilliant canyon experience as I've not done it myself much yet but I was on Meli BC1 yesterday looking for lifesigns. Searching for the rarer kind of lifeform on the heatmap brought me to some extremely steep sided mountains with a deep, narrow valley at the bottom which I don't recall being in a straight line.

It's quite a mountainous world; the location I got to was about a third of the way down from the northern pole of the planet. The lifeforms were all congregated on the exposed mountaintops; I didn't venture into the valley/canyon as it seemed too steep and I wasn't sure I'd get back up, lol. It might be worth a look though folks. Fair warning that it is 23,000 ls from the star, mind.

I'll keep my eyes peeled on my travels and if I see anything I'll post back here.

 

[Agrar Therenus]

There's been fairly organised efforts so far hunting for anything worth flying at speed, and sadly it appears as tho the new generation has reduced the elevation variation and range down to something that's more aligned for the foot-based play rather than flight now.

In comparison to Horizons, almost all surface features are now significantly more shallow, much of the 'noise' in the system that led to small spike-type features providing obstacles or turns has been removed, terrain edges have been smoothed, and the size of areas also reduced.

Pomeche 2C received special attention and was 'handcrafted' as a gesture to 'canyon racing', and whilst canyons are still pretty high (much higher than every other planet) - they're also far too wide, straight and without any internal complexity to offer any challenge at all.

On this basis - that everything so far has been flattened (where before there was much variety and thousands of good sites just in the bubble), and even the specifically handcrafted single example isn't fit for the purpose they handcrafted it for - it's looking very bleak indeed.

It's not a racing / hooning game though. There's still the option for space-based racing around stations & installations (if they also fix the NPC spawn bugs there and janky framerates). Surface-based emergent gameplay in the form of challenging flight appears gone though in EDO.

Edit: See also: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/odyssey-horizons-comparison-thread.575895/

Dr Kay did specifically say it's high-G worlds that are going to be more flat, which makes sense. Then she specifically stated that low-G worlds will see all the huge mountains and such. It's rather likely there was a mistake, or perhaps mistakes, in the Stellarforge number crunching.

People use the 'because of FPS' as a reason for the Great Flatttening, but they forget that in mountain regions there are also flat areas, there are mesas and plateaus. A deep canyon can be just as flat at the bottom as a shallow one.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Dr Kay did specifically say it's high-G worlds that are going to be more flat, which makes sense. Then she specifically stated that low-G worlds will see all the huge mountains and such.

That's certainly how it used to work in Horizons.

In Horizons, low-G ice moons close to a gas giant used to pretty regularly have deep canyons - not necessarily racing-quality ones, but certainly ones you could go a couple of kilometres down into with steep sides and sharp edges - in a network all over the body.

In Odyssey, none of the moons like that have had significant canyon structures, the ones they've had have been much more shallow-sided, and the mountains have been more suppressed too.

The Odyssey terrain is more variable in terms of the shapes and patterns of elevation, but all feels (and I've almost entirely been on low-G worlds) much less substantial.

Hoping this is something they can solve by turning up the "intensity" a bit.

 

[Deleted member 121570]

Dr Kay did specifically say it's high-G worlds that are going to be more flat, which makes sense. Then she specifically stated that low-G worlds will see all the huge mountains and such. It's rather likely there was a mistake, or perhaps mistakes, in the Stellarforge number crunching.

People use the 'because of FPS' as a reason for the Great Flatttening, but they forget that in mountain regions there are also flat areas, there are mesas and plateaus. A deep canyon can be just as flat at the bottom as a shallow one.

Low G worlds have always been better for definable course design through terrain that supported it for these exact reasons. Only speedbowling uses high-G.
Odyssey low-G don't have any suitable terrain so far, in anything yet posted/seen by hunters.

I'd also say that when I say 'flattening', I'm referring to reduction in variation in elevation, not describing completely flat surfaces (although there's enough of those!).

I'm not 100 percent sure what makes a brilliant canyon experience as I've not done it myself much yet but I was on Meli BC1 yesterday looking for lifesigns. Searching for the rarer kind of lifeform on the heatmap brought me to some extremely steep sided mountains with a deep, narrow valley at the bottom which I don't recall being in a straight line.

Thanks for thinking of the racing side! Maybe I can help with a bit of clarity on at least how the 'canyon racing' term relates to activity in the Elite Racers and Newton's Gambit communities - as a lot of what I see in suggestions (well-meaning and appreciated!) is mostly big straight line stuff. I get that it's probably quite unexplained what goes into design for a challenging track that enables racers to compete on skill rather than just a straight line drag race that's more about build. Builds can be mirrored, and straight lines are kinda easy. (although there are people who enjoy it - no disrespect to them!).

Good terrain for surface ship racing should have tight turns, fast sections, slower technical sections that can throw you out if you mess it up, places to enable passing, logical flow of the track, etc. Whilst not the best track/vid by any stretch (it's mine and I suck at making vids), this might serve as an example to illustrate. There's a map in the comments too, which also gives an overhead view of terrain, and you can see the scale/altitude aspects from the video. Another video in slightly wider terrain is here (Arkansand's vid from Qarato). Again - look for the turns/sections and scaling.

I hope these 2 vids show how the stuff in EDO isn't workable so far, and might give pointers if looking for new terrain that might work!

Also worth pointing out that I do understand ED's not a racing game per se - this is emergent use of what's there, not a demand for a revision of the whole game. Let's just hope they dial up the terrain a bit!

 

[Jeebs]

Some nice flying there, Sanderling. Pretty sure I would have crashed repeatedly, haha. Then again, I'm not that good at flying with FA off. That was what I decided I'd get into racing for, figuring it would at least be a fun way to get better. Ironically, when they announced Odyssey, I decided I'd wait for that to come out figuring the canyons would look better. Here's hoping there are still canyon worlds out there or that it's just a bug in the tech preventing them from forming.

 

[no namn]

does this count as a canyon then? lot of long narrow canyons on this planet
yeah.. FD flipped the planet upsidedown...

 

[fishevi]

Not a racer or serious explorer, but interesting different planet features were things to make me land srv down or fly dangerously on random planets.
Not mats %.

So yeah, not looking forward to Odyssey galaxy if it stays like this(ps4 here)

 

[Deleted member 121570]

does this count as a canyon then? lot of long narrow canyons on this planet
yeah.. FD flipped the planet upsidedown...

Does look decently deep! Maybe a bit wide, and tbh, you're in an AspX so expectations set accordingly
Doesn't show much of the terrain surrounding though. Got a shot from up higher?

 

[no namn]

well how deep/narrow do a canyon have to be, i didnt spend much time fly around in them much thats just on my way out.. but there was lots of twists and turns etc... unfortunatly i didnt take more ss thou bec i at that time had not figured out how u used to do that ingame and was tinkering with gfx settings mainly

and that is my normal Asp with 48+ something Ly range which means its kinda sluggish slow to change direction and so on, its not well suited to fly around in upside down canyons

 

[Ydiss]

Yeah, I've seen that thread... but from what I can tell, it seems like people are posting the worst possible pics they can find. Which is fine if you want to show where there needs improvement, but I wouldn't pass it off as all planets being bland and uninteresting. Certainly there needs to be some tweaking done, but I feel like it's nowhere near as bad as the masses are screaming. I just went for an hour long trip, landed on three different planets and they looked fine.

Hopefully now that they've been made aware, they'll find a way to tweak the planetary tech system so that Horizons-style canyons are possible again (if they are completely gone, as you say)... once they deal with more pressing bugs like performance issues and disconnections.

This.

This.

And this.

I've seen some spectacular landscapes in Odyssey in less than a week. Not saying that some are quite flat and definitely a lot of the "old favourites" are now not as cool, can't argue with that (and I'm not against the proposal that Fdev make more "higher" height maps if it'll make a niche player base happy ). But there are so many stunning worlds in Odyssey that I have to wonder what happened to the people who went out in Horizons and found the stunning worlds there. It's as though they just vanished because Farseer's base doesn't look the same any more and have now reverted to giving up on the thing that's actually fun about finding new locations (the finding them bit) and just want to badger Fdev into doing something that I am sure is impossible (retain the old worlds exactly as they are with the new tech). Not saying everyone is doing that exactly but that's how it comes across.