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

Was it ever clarified that math was the only way Horizons heightmaps are generated?

I can recall way back in the early days of Horizons, maybe in the beta play... But there was a bug where some planets were found to have surface terrain that was formed by the images of NPC characters. From orbit, one could see the NPC faces very plainly shaping in the mountains and such of the planet.

So at some point, it would seem that Horizons certainly was able to use images as heightmaps for planet generation. After seeing that, my own hunch was that image heightmaps were always in the mix, at some level.

Whatever it was to be honest, it was good enough to introduce enough chaos in planets.

There is no chaos in EDO.
 
I had a weird thing today where in my continuing tests of flying very quickly at low altitude, I was getting the thing I had before where the landscape became lower resolution the further I went, eventually being a sort of rolling Zarch landscape with huge patchwork squares for textures (not quick enough on the F10 to show this, but will try again) but worse than that I collided with a not-yet-full-detail hill, nearly totalling my ship. The only reason I knew what had happened was that the rocks were floating in the air (clinging to the higher-level detail underlying anything).

So it seems the engine can see the detailed geometry for positioning rocks/boulders, it can see the full detail hills for collision detection (although I maybe just collided with the rocks), but the shaders themselves can't keep up. You can fly faster than they're generated. And this is a thing that isn't just a cosmetic problem, it's potentially a rebuy screen problem.

That's my guess at what was happening, at any rate.
Was it ever clarified that math was the only way Horizons heightmaps are generated?
I'd always assumed so, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some masks over the top to make mountains pointier etc...
 
Horizons

Chunky.jpg


Odyssey

Screenshot_0048_34.jpg


I mean it's only one planet, and I'm sure there are planets that go the other way, but this was one of my favourite planets during DW2. Sad.
 

Attachments

  • Screenshot_0048_8.jpg
    Screenshot_0048_8.jpg
    195.9 KB · Views: 60
I mean it's only one planet, and I'm sure there are planets that go the other way, but this was one of my favourite planets during DW2. Sad.
Yep, now you know how miners were feeling every time FD made hotspots reshuffle.
Searching for overlaps again and again...
 
Looks good in a screenshot vs being good in game (especially for the activities peoples are talking about) is two totally different things.

And given you pull out the exact same screenshots all the time to prove your point shows that the majority of times those are the standard of the system.
Now if you kept posting lots of different 'in game' shots of you flying around so many AMAZING planets with names and locations etc then you may actually have a point rather than blindly repeating yourself.
Those I just saved from screenshots thread, theres plenty more, see for youself.
 
I had a weird thing today where in my continuing tests of flying very quickly at low altitude, I was getting the thing I had before where the landscape became lower resolution the further I went, eventually being a sort of rolling Zarch landscape with huge patchwork squares for textures (not quick enough on the F10 to show this, but will try again) but worse than that I collided with a not-yet-full-detail hill, nearly totalling my ship. The only reason I knew what had happened was that the rocks were floating in the air (clinging to the higher-level detail underlying anything).

So it seems the engine can see the detailed geometry for positioning rocks/boulders, it can see the full detail hills for collision detection (although I maybe just collided with the rocks), but the shaders themselves can't keep up. You can fly faster than they're generated. And this is a thing that isn't just a cosmetic problem, it's potentially a rebuy screen problem.

That's my guess at what was happening, at any rate.

I'd always assumed so, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some masks over the top to make mountains pointier etc...
I think you can see what you are describing on Obsidianant video (the one before the last one, I'll find the link) - he shows how the textures pop up in front of the ship. But yeah I hear you how it crosses from visuals to gameplay
 
I think you can see what you are describing on Obsidianant video (the one before the last one, I'll find the link) - he shows how the textures pop up in front of the ship. But yeah I hear you how it crosses from visuals to gameplay
Textures?
I had small hills raising or flattening in front of me as I was flying low.
I assumed it's a common bug, don't know why actually :)
 
Horizons can only dream of such rough realistic landscape.View attachment 232281
Someone literally posted a screenshots a few post early with a beautiful sets of canyon under a sky that was not full black. And you might remember the community who used to have races in canyon in odyssey.
Also, nice try taking the pictures when the star is low, so that the big shadows give an effect on the canyons to make them look deeper than they are. But from what I'm standing, they seems not very very deep.
Those canyons are not trealistic. What formed them ? They follow no patterns, they are random. The other guys canyon from Horizon does follow a pattern. Ripples and a long canyon.

Finally, all the pictures and ingame experience I had are either white flat desert with occasional big bump, or the "dessicated mud" terrain like you have there.
 
Back
Top Bottom