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

CMDR Maxus

C
Honestly at thos point they should just scrap the failed DLC and start work on a sequel. Unlikely they have the resources or funding to do so though so they probably will keep beating this dead horse until they run it into the ground...kind of already have.

I'm not sure this DLC is salvagable anymore.
 

AdriánGuth

AdriánGuth
CMDR Maxus said:
Honestly at thos point they should just scrap the failed DLC and start work on a sequel. Unlikely they have the resources or funding to do so though so they probably will keep beating this dead horse until they run it into the ground...kind of already have.

I'm not sure this DLC is salvagable anymore.
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hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
I hear (read) the same in 2015 when Horizons was released
 

Gravity Drive

Gravity Drive
Sakashiro said:
Say what you will about the art style of NMS, but they know a thing or two about math-based generation of interesting non-repetitive terrain.

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It's funny you mention this, because I always found NMS to be an example of extremely boring repetitious procgen where every square mile of a planet is just the same repeating tile over and over again. They've improved it, somewhat, but Elite was always topographically considerably more interesting to me. That is, until Odyssey.

Have you played NMS or are you just going off that video? I've put a good number of hours into it but the activity I do the least in NMS is explore, because the single biome repeating terrain of each planet grows old exceptionally fast. Whereas in Elite, the only thing I've spent any great amount of time doing is exploring (out to Colonia and beyond).

Regretably, Odyssey has introduced the very element of NMS' procgen that I greatly dislike (repeating tiles).
 
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Straker

Straker
One of the most disappointing aspects of the new system for me is those rounded-edge mountains - they look really artificial. It now has the look of an additive sine wave system where hills and mountains look like, as someone else suggested, they've been hidden under a rug. Horizons didn't suffer from this issue and had a lot more realism and looked less like a mathematical construct of many sine waves summed together.
 

Gravity Drive

Gravity Drive
AdriánGuth said:
Remember Horizons
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I do remember Horizons. Fondly.

Because planets had unique topographical features at significant scale, opposed to repeating tiles of mostly flatness with rounded "mountains" and valleys you can hardly fit a Cobra into.

I actually read through this entire thread and the level of obtuseness some people display in completely failing to comprehend why many of us have an issue with Odyssey literally astounds me. It has NOTHING to do with whether or not Odyssey is capable of creating a beautiful planet. It has NOTHING to do with how any given Odyssey planet compares to any given Horizons planet, or vice versa. There are atrocious Horizons planets and GORGEOUS Odyssey planets. This is literally not the point.

The point is that the way planets are generated is now entirely different and we've seemingly lost a considerable amount of possible topographical variation in favor of a "repeating tile" system similar to what NMS does (I always hated NMS' procgen because once you've seen a square kilometer of a planet, you've seen the whole planet - Odyssey is better than this but it's not a high bar). Horizons planets were capable of producing unique, isolated features that were not part of a broader tile, and I can't overstate how critically important this is to making interesting planets that don't quickly begin to feel repetitious.

For anyone that's still not understanding the essence of what I'm getting at, this may help:


Obsidian Ant articulates the concerns very well, especially as it relates to unique, large scale planetary features. To be clear, the issue is NOT the fact that these cool Horizon planets no longer exist in Odyssey, it's the question of whether Odyssey's procgen can output interesting results / variations like this in the first place, because this is a massive part of what made exploration fun.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H3zwoB0h30&t=5s
 
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CMDR Maxus

C
AdriánGuth said:
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
I hear (read) the same in 2015 when Horizons was released
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Really? People were asking for a sequel two years after release? That is amusing.

However what I'm saying is perfectly reasonable after 7 and outdated technology. A sequel, although too late now since they invested too much into this, would have been the smarter option instead of tacking this rubbish on top an old game. But as they say hindsight is 20/20. Still think they should cut their losses.
 

Vekt Ey'doom

Vekt Ey'doom
I personally thought the planetary tech in the Alpha was more impressive. Don't know what happened between now and then.

At this point it's generous to say we're playing a Beta, maybe this was the plan all along, to have PC beta for the Console, lol.

As for DX12/Vulkan, it would be nice, but to actually utilize the new API, entire segments of the engine and renderer need to be rewritten from the ground up. And Vulkan in particular is very "Hands off" when it comes to things like Vram allocation, it leaves that kind of stuff in the hands of the developers, which is very powerful, but also very dangerous. With nobody (I think?) left from the Cobra team at FD, there's almost certainly neither the will nor the resources to bring Cobra into a modern API, even less so for a game that probably blew its one chance at a breakout success with this launch.
 

hunvagy

hunvagy
jafergon said:
I think that even with it's problems, EDO's planet tech is way better than Horizon's. The real problem is that it only looks good in ULTRAFORCAPTURE and that's very demanding on performance. So, what we have here it's an optimization problem. I'm not saying that all other problems are not real, just thinking that if everyone could run the game with ULTRAFORCAPTURE on, the global opinion about planet tech would be different.
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No, it also looks good on Ultra, and High. But only when you are making screenshots. Once you start moving, it all breaks down due to constant terrain lod morph and other pop-in problems. Stop with this ultraforcapture sillyness, because that only effects texture quality. It has no bearing on terrain loading, terrain LOD, shadows, rendering, or indeed tiling.
 

CMDR Sheehy

CMDR Sheehy
hunvagy said:
No, it also looks good on Ultra, and High. But only when you are making screenshots. Once you start moving, it all breaks down due to constant terrain lod morph and other pop-in problems. Stop with this ultraforcapture sillyness, because that only effects texture quality. It has no bearing on terrain loading, terrain LOD, shadows, rendering, or indeed tiling.
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I didn't realise that all my previous screenies were done on high and not ultra. I do see problems with with pop-in and terrain loading, though it is only occasional. I do have a lot of room overhead in terms of graphics. So - back to ultra...
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5QX8jBH.png
 

hunvagy

hunvagy
anthonycsheehy said:
I didn't realise that all my previous screenies were done on high and not ultra. I do see problems with with pop-in and terrain loading, though it is only occasional. I do have a lot of room overhead in terms of graphics. So - back to ultra...
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Have fun out there commander :) I do no accept the current performance on my hardware as passable, so will not touch ED beyond minimal testing whether they fixed it yet. It's not worth the headache.
 

dreampage

dreampage
I just remembered this was one of the images promoting the new planetary tech. Even if it's not a real screenshot, it promotes things that are not even in the game at all. Proper surface textures, different surface features and objects, huge crevices, etc. Just look at it. (Not to mention the lighting - there IS light in this image.) What happened to this concept? Why isn't it even remotely realized?

zgodfw5.jpeg
 

CMDR Sheehy

CMDR Sheehy
dreampage said:
I just remembered this was one of the images promoting the new planetary tech. Even if it's not a real screenshot, it promotes things that are not even in the game at all. Proper surface textures, different surface features and objects, huge crevices, etc. Just look at it. (Not to mention the lighting - there IS light in this image.) What happened to this concept? Why isn't it even remotely realized?

zgodfw5.jpeg
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Is it just me or does anyone else see the repeated rock structure pattern in this drawing?
 

The Reverend

The Reverend
Vekt Ey'doom said:
I personally thought the planetary tech in the Alpha was more impressive. Don't know what happened between now and then.

At this point it's generous to say we're playing a Beta, maybe this was the plan all along, to have PC beta for the Console, lol.
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Its not even a beta, its just a continuation of last months alpha, except instead of charging people an extra £10 to get in early, they charged everyone full price, claiming its a AAA full release. Still, its been a lesson learned, don't pre-order anymore.

Also don't be fooled by todays road map either. We've had them before and they never amount to much. A distraction technique at best.
 

[VR] Merkir

[VR] Merkir
Gravity Drive said:
I actually read through this entire thread and the level of obtuseness some people display in completely failing to comprehend why many of us have an issue with Odyssey literally astounds me. It has NOTHING to do with whether or not Odyssey is capable of creating a beautiful planet. It has NOTHING to do with how any given Odyssey planet compares to any given Horizons planet, or vice versa. There are atrocious Horizons planets and GORGEOUS Odyssey planets. This is literally not the point.

The point is that the way planets are generated is now entirely different and we've seemingly lost a considerable amount of possible topographical variation in favor of a "repeating tile" system similar to what NMS does (I always hated NMS' procgen because once you've seen a square kilometer of a planet, you've seen the whole planet - Odyssey is better than this but it's not a high bar). Horizons planets were capable of producing unique, isolated features that were not part of a broader tile, and I can't overstate how critically important this is to making interesting planets that don't quickly begin to feel repetitious.
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And to illustrate this point, here's a couple of comparison shots of two different planets/moons in my home system, so no cherry picking. In Horizons these have wonderfully long and unique valleys, chasms and mountain ranges. They're not actually even that large compared to many others in Horizons, but nevertheless they give a great impression. In contrast, their Odyssey counterparts are very flat, as always...

Screenshot_p1_horizons.jpg

Screenshot_p1_odyssey.jpg



Screenshot_p2_horizons.jpg

Screenshot_p2_odyssey.jpg
 
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