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

[Just]

Where I got it? I read what he said. In a couple of different interviews. The exact words vary a little, but essentially it's "we've added some tiled features to improve realism and quality". And the result is that it's reduced realism, by becoming cut and paste.

I like how some people claiming there is going to be less variety because of new tech like to cite Dr. Ross , but tend to avoid some fragments.

"Q: What type of planet is this new tech going to be applied to?
Every planet you could land on before, and the new ones opening up, will be using this approach. The old surfaces can't be represented in this new approach and you're going to get a

larger variety

using this new tech."

The truth is, we have absolutely no idea what the new tech is really capable of.
It's not like FD ever managed to get anything near intended state when they were introducing major changes.

 

[Just]

But my FPS tanked even more (sub 20 where I got 40 stable before).

It's funny, I wanted to write that I started to land on ultraforcapture setting because it has acceptable peformance now on my rig
It drops below 60 fps but not for long periods of time.

 

[fourrunes]

Well, they mentioned planetary tech in the patch notes. Not this patch, but they acknowledged it.

Yes, it's also one of the most upvoted topic in the issue tracker... actually someone even reach out to Dr Kay via Twitter (which imho is not needed and not in place) and she confirmed that they read the forums here...( she cannot comment on this.)

But this seems to be also the topic which is the most hard to deal with

 

[SpaceIsHuge]

Where I got it? I read what he said. In a couple of different interviews. The exact words vary a little, but essentially it's "we've added some tiled features to improve realism and quality". And the result is that it's reduced realism, by becoming cut and paste.

Your pics of handcrafted stuff in Horizons may be accurate - can't comment, not observed it myself - but if Ross is bigging up the new handcrafted tiles, one assumes that there are more of them... And the new ones are so big they're visible from space, not from low altitude only, which is what your pics demonstrate. And either way, if FDev have got away with disguising some handcrafted tiling in Horizons, the cat is now royally out of the bag due to the excessive use of them in EDO - and therefore, we can ask for them to be removed from all versions of Elite.

The question is not whether some tiling existed before, but can we get rid of it now, given the intrusive nature of the latest additions. If none of us spotted them in Horizons, that was a decent balance - now that they're noticable, we want them gone. Preferably all of them, but if not, the new ones at least.

She never said anything about handcrafted tiles.

Heres from her interview.
So, the last time we did a talk on this, I went into how planets start not as spheres but as cubes, with square patches that make up the cubes. Everything then becomes a sphere and an offset is generated to represent terrain. For Horizons, that terrain is generated entirely mathematically. There was a lot of effort put into representing the kind of shapes a hill or canyon makes, just using maths.

For Odyssey, there's an entirely different approach for making these offsets. It takes the view of starting big and refining small. A planet has all sorts of Stellar Forge data associated with it. Things like the gravitational stress its crust goes under, the proportion of its depth which is crust or magma or core, the stresses its under, how cratered it would be, if it's tidally locked, and more. From those, and the general knowledge of what the planet is made up of, we decide its top layer information. That is describing general shapes and regions of interest across the entire surface and the general types of formations which will be there. Things might make the terrain more chaotic, make more flat plains or basins and things like that. From stochastically sampling that information, the next layer of information goes down - we're talking up 100km worth of terrain for example, which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed.

 

[Amy Pendergast]

It's funny, I wanted to write that I started to land on ultraforcapture setting because it has acceptable peformance now on my rig
It drops below 60 fps but not for long periods of time.

Nope and running on the planet now stable 20 FPS, half of before the patch - playing on UFC also

Edit: It seems to now load something in the background, after that 25-30

 

[Ruthless4645]

There is a patch today?

Yes there is, FDev thought of a few more bugs to insert into Odyssey over the weekend and had the DEV team whip up a quick patch to make sure we all get them today.

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

Noted that it was an update, and not a hotfix.

You have to expect them to release small patches as things get fixed in the code. Waiting for the big cahootah to drop instead would be irresponsible and bad for morale.

 

[DarthLuca]

Found this

one. . .
repetition, repetition, repetition, . .

 

[Just]

For me the LODs on the planets seem fine so far - just landed on ShinDez B1

But my FPS tanked even more (sub 20 where I got 40 stable before).

It's acceptable for me considering the fact that ufc setting has noticeable superior quality.
And those are only temporary fps drops in the middle of landing approach, I get 60 fps when I am really low / on the ground.

 

[Franc Kaos]

...
For Odyssey, there's an entirely different approach for making these offsets. It takes the view of starting big and refining small. A planet has all sorts of Stellar Forge data associated with it. Things like the gravitational stress its crust goes under, the proportion of its depth which is crust or magma or core, the stresses its under, how cratered it would be, if it's tidally locked, and more. From those, and the general knowledge of what the planet is made up of, we decide its top layer information. That is describing general shapes and regions of interest across the entire surface and the general types of formations which will be there. Things might make the terrain more chaotic, make more flat plains or basins and things like that. From stochastically sampling that information, the next layer of information goes down - we're talking up 100km worth of terrain for example, which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed.

I don't see how that correlates with using repeating tiles on any planet, so maybe it is just a bug (or gremlin), an errant line of code hidden in the spaghettified Cobra engine that's just proving hard to find...

 

[Ricodelgado]

You know nothing, Jon Snow

Are these screenshots before or after the patch?

 

[Gwallt]

...which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed.

So we "know" what terrain shapes are formed on planets, do we? Err... How..? This quote isn't the one I had in mind, but it will do to demonstrate my argument. This final sentence is the crux of it. There's a stash of offline terrain shapes, perhaps for each planet, perhaps for all planets within a given bracket of characteristics. And those shapes are then tiled on the surface. This is what that final sentence states. Blocks of 100km of terrain (100km down each side? 100 square km?) are significant, and hence visible from space. So we've got the answer to the question of difference between EDH and EDO here, and it's that difference that's causing such concern in this thread. Finding the odd patch a few metres across is something we can live with, I suppose, but finding that a whole 100km of terrain is identical to one you just drove/walked/flew through is reducing ED to just another "repeating map segment" game, and that's not why many of us play it.

Thanks for finding a quote that demonstrates the accuracy of this thread, saved me the effort, much appreciated.

 

[Just]

Are these screenshots before or after the patch?

Those are old.

 

[Gwallt]

I don't see how that correlates with using repeating tiles on any planet, so maybe it is just a bug (or gremlin), an errant line of code hidden in the spaghettified Cobra engine that's just proving hard to find...

Fingers crossed that's the case, and they'll untangle the spaghetti - either to remove the larger size tiles, or to do a better job of disguising them so that we don't notice!

 

[Just]

Thanks for finding a quote that demonstrates the accuracy of this thread, saved me the effort, much appreciated.

Again: claims of this thread are that

we are going to have less variety,

they are based on reasoning following fragments of interviews with Dr. Ross, the same interviews where she claimed LITERALLY

" you're going to get a larger variety using this new tech.".

I'm not judging who is right, just trying to follow some patterns in drawing conclusions

 

[[VR] Merkir]

She never said anything about handcrafted tiles.

Of course she didn't use the term "handcrafted tiles". That term is being used here mostly for simplicity, partly for hyperbole. You need to think carefully about what Dr. Ross means when she said, "we're talking up 100km worth of terrain for example, which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed."

If "handcrafted tiles" concerns you so much, just go back in this thread and replace every occurrence of "handcrafted tiles" with "terrain shapes generated offline."

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

....

The truth is, we have absolutely no idea what the new tech is really capable of.
...

We do. We can easily see how the new tech butchered our boy in Odyssey with repetitive landscape tiles.

 

[Just]

We do. We can easily see how the new tech butchered our boy in Odyssey with repetitive landscape tiles.

Sure,
cherry picking
AND
ignoring the fact that game is unfinished even in core parts like stability and performance
surely is a way to reasonably draw the limits of new planetary tech when it will be working as intended.

You MAY be right, but... accidentally, because the quality of reasoning behind your claims is as flawed as Odyssey current state.

 

[Gwallt]

Again: claims of this thread are that

we are going to have less variety,

they are based on reasoning following fragments of interviews with Dr. Ross, the same interviews where she claimed LITERALLY

" you're going to get a larger variety using this new tech.".

I'm not judging who is right, just trying to follow some patterns in drawing conclusions

And the thread has presented plenty of evidence that whatever FDev's intentions, the outcome currently is less variety and highly visible tiling effects, at least in some cases. As such, although I have no doubt that the intention was to create both more realism and more variety, the objective has not been met. One reason that occurs to me is that of statistical variation. In, for example, 100 cases, the system works and we can't see or don't notice the tiling. But there are so many bodies in this game that the (hypothetical) one in 100 where the generation system has ground the numbers "wrong" for want of a better term, is actually extremely noticable, given the number of bodies we each see in one gaming session - especially in an expansion specifically focused on getting us out of our ships and onto planetary surfaces.

I suppose that's the point of threads like these - to point out to the devs when their intentions have not been met in practice, and to give them a feeling for how strongly the player community objects or not to the new thing, whatever that may be. And actually, this thread is for the most part devoid of the dogmatic ranting so common on forums, so kudos to all engaged in here. Whether we agree or not, we're being fairly rational about it!

 

[Gwallt]

...surely is a way to reasonably draw the limits of new planetary tech when it will be working as intended.

You MAY be right, but... accidentally, because the quality of reasoning behind your claims is as flawed as Odyssey current state.

Nothing to do with quality of reasoning - it's to do with the process of feeding back, as FDev resolve the issues of EDO, so that they are aware of the community feeling on this matter. Whatever the causes of the tiling effect may be, it's there in the game, and it's only right and proper that we talk about it. How else can FDev gauge community reactions? And the fact that it's been a civilised discussion is a truly pleasant change - let's not break it by calling someone's logic flawed when it's not, eh?