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

Good point. The biggest issue here - I suppose - is that there is no realistic way to "evolve" present Horizons tech. It's a dead end as it is. So the only other way is to build another tech - on different principles. And I'm not as naïve as to suppose that any new tech will be flawless and as good as the old one after 5 years of corrections.
Whats wrong with the Horizons tech? It looks great to me. If it aint broke dont fix it.
 
I had a sneaky feeling all wasn't well when they said not all the new planetary tech was finalised in the alpha. Really? I mean - you've been working on this for years, right? You're replacing the flagship feature that this game is known for - and you're still working on it a few weeks before release? I would have thought this would have been nailed down months ago, and only green-lighted after a thorough QA analysis to confirm there were no obvious regressions compared to Horizons.
It wasnt just you with the sneaky feeling, but whats bad is that now everyone that dares say something bad of Edo is automatically a griefer and a childish customer, no matter the personal time, put away the money invested in this game. Frontier never akwnoledged the existance of big problems like this in odyssey, nor the Alpha, always implying that they are one step ahead of us with either advanced branch of Alpha, or now on supercruise news with this attitude of " dont bad mouth mouth my collegues" and take it or leave it tactic. The sad part is that all of this indicate the unwillingness of frontier to speak upfront of the real problems, instead bugfixing and improving by the number of many small problems that most of People probably werent even aware of, and therefore blurring out what was really intended with odyssey or with the game future itself. I mean if this was supposed to be minimum viabile product, they failed, succeding just to avoid refunds and law suits, but how this stands as a ed development? NMS managed to repair and comeback from a similar situation and gave their game a lot of game development love with their gamers feedback, does frontier have the same will ? Odyssey feels like a simple product, and even tho you can see on vids that they have strong social bonds between employees, you cant see in the same measure the love we the gamers have for the game, rejecting and refusing to clearly adressing these big issues. Its not about expectations, cus i hade none, in terms of game development, its about what frontier advertised themselves and then delivered. This my dissapointment feeling talking.
 
If this thread served one purpose, then it's that even most of the people who are positive about the new planetary tech (that's me!) really dislike the duplicate features and patterns (that's me too!), even with the occasional hate-flaming and over-protecting in between.
Mission accomplished I think.
I think it was not the mission to make the people enjoying it to not enjoy it anymore.

On the other hand it helped the DOOOOOOOMMM screamers get a proper look into they viewpoint also.

Actually by seeing what it can do if it works and getting a bit more into depth with it helped me to see "a light at the end of the tunnel" (okay, the light could be that truck driving on the other lane, but you get the idea :))
 
I think it was not the mission to make the people enjoying it to not enjoy it anymore.

On the other hand it helped the DOOOOOOOMMM screamers get a proper look into they viewpoint also.

Actually by seeing what it can do if it works and getting a bit more into depth with it helped me to see "a light at the end of the tunnel" (okay, the light could be that truck driving on the other lane, but you get the idea :))
Pleasedon'tbeatruckpleasedon'tbeatruckpleasedon'tbeatruck.
 
I just found a (so far) very unique lonely mountain on the planet I was sitting on!
It's about 5.5km high.

2021-06-12 12_30_22-Greenshot.jpg

2021-06-12 12_31_08-Greenshot.jpg

2021-06-12 12_34_09-Greenshot.jpg

2021-06-12 13_42_09-Greenshot.jpg

2021-06-12 13_39_37-Greenshot.jpg

EDIT:
Added two more pictures, one from another side and one from above, so if someone comes across this particular mountain somewhere else, it's easier to compare it.

Planet is Col 285 Sector ZK-O d6-85 9 d
 
Last edited:
I just found a (so far) very unique lonely mountain on the planet I was sitting on!
It's about 5.5km high.


EDIT:
Added two more pictures, one from another side and one from above, so if someone comes across this particular mountain somewhere else, it's easier to compare it.

Planet is Col 285 Sector ZK-O d6-85 9 d

well, not sure what is wrong there, the mountain, the crater or both.
could be the planet forge as well...
 
FD might have a very good reason for having simplified the planetary tech, but such speculation has two problems: Firstly, they haven't said anything to suggest what such a reason might be. And secondly, even if they did so their reason would have to be spectacularly good for me to accept the repeated degradation of the existing planet modelling. Believe me, I have been daydreaming about lakes, rivers and forests since Kickstarter so your wildly speculative suggestion would actually be right up my alley if proven correct. But if it meant the chance of stumbling upon the exact same rivers, lakes, forests etc. I'd sooner stick with the airless moons.
The planetary tech is much more interesting than it used to be (broken, but interesting!) and there will be things that procedural noise functions cannot reproduce in a convincing way. The actual world mostly doesn't look like noise functions. I think they just need to combine techniques, refine and increase variety.

Things like rivers and lakes are going to be extremely hard whichever technique they use. The problem isn't so much simulating the paths of rivers and where water pools, it's simulating them from scratch pretty much instantaneously at 60fps alongside everything else that's going on in the game.
 
well, not sure what is wrong there, the mountain, the crater or both.
could be the planet forge as well...
Yes!
And I really hope so!
I didn't post it to prove that something wrong, but because I thought the mountain is awesome and there was a debate about mountain height earlier in here.
But we're all horrified of the duplicates, so why not add the means to recognize it if it is one. Which I hope not.

I want it to be unique and awesome.
 
I didn't post it to prove that something wrong, but because I thought the mountain is awesome and there was a debate about mountain height earlier in here.

Just to clarify, that's another atmospheric landable planet you've posted. Has anyone said those don't have high mountains? I assume the "debate" you're referring to is when I said I haven't seen Rocky or HMC planets with high mountains, but I specifically excluded atmospheric landables, since we already know those have high mountains. Not sure why you keep posting atmospheric planets to try to answer this.

So continuing the real "debate"...
If you find a Rocky or HMC non-atmospheric planet with high mountains or deep canyons, please post it.
 
I just found a (so far) very unique lonely mountain on the planet I was sitting on!
It's about 5.5km high.


EDIT:
Added two more pictures, one from another side and one from above, so if someone comes across this particular mountain somewhere else, it's easier to compare it.

Planet is Col 285 Sector ZK-O d6-85 9 d

This one is even taller (5.8km). SYNUEFAI EB-R C7-5 planet 2E.

This side of the planet has vast plains with huge mountains, a few hundred kms away there were vast patches of very rugged terrain with some holes over 1km in depth. Best places to find this kind of landscapes are rocky planets with low gravity.

Screenshot-0166.png
 
Just to clarify, that's another atmospheric landable planet you've posted. Has anyone said those don't have high mountains? I assume the "debate" you're referring to is when I said I haven't seen Rocky or HMC planets with high mountains, but I specifically excluded atmospheric landables, since we already know those have high mountains. Not sure why you keep posting atmospheric planets to try to answer this.

So continuing the real "debate"...
If you find a Rocky or HMC non-atmospheric planet with high mountains or deep canyons, please post it.
This was the first "real" mountain I saw on any planet so far, and since I landed on many atmospherics, I thought it stood out. Usually it's ridges and all embedded in mountain ranges.
And really, not trying to make a point here. It's more like documenting stuff.
 
Last edited:
The thought occurs to me that that dark feature may have been formed by geological forces AFTER the crater impact, e.g. from past volcanic activity.
That's not how it works. The crater shape would be gone if that was true. Mountains don't form at a specific place on the world without affecting the land nearby. It's not someone going around plopping them.
I can find a way to explain with a volcano, but that's quite far fetched and I don't know if that body have any volcanism.

So I'll go for bugs. Perhaps related to mountain range appearing out of nowhere relatively frequently.
 
The thought occurs to me that that dark feature may have been formed by geological forces AFTER the crater impact, e.g. from past volcanic activity.
It's not any different on Earth. Old craters are buried under whatever happened after they were created. Earthquakes, volcanic activity, glaciers and newly forming mountain ranges.
 
That's not how it works. The crater shape would be gone if that was true. Mountains don't form at a specific place on the world without affecting the land nearby. It's not someone going around plopping them.
I can find a way to explain with a volcano, but that's quite far fetched and I don't know if that body have any volcanism.

So I'll go for bugs. Perhaps related to mountain range appearing out of nowhere relatively frequently.

I'll go for ease of coding, since it's much easier to simply merge the various terrain features rather than considering their geological and chronological interactions.

Edit: Btw, the second crater in my ss above seems to show erosion processes, which are identical inside and outside the crater. More evidence they haven't bothered to do more than simply merge terrain as they coincide.
 
Last edited:
I'll go for ease of coding, since it's much easier to simply merge the various terrain features rather than considering their geological and chronological interactions.
I honestly don't mind for those little "mistake" or whatever you want to call them. They are rare, and would probably need some work to fix. The rest ? Yeah.

I mean, look at yesterday Hesperus story continuation. It ended up at yet another big crater planet. Reminded me straight away why I don't explore and wait to be fixed.
 
Repeating patterns aside, my concern is that every new planet so far is that same grey color. Like dirty milk. Everywhere.
Absolutely not what I am seeing.
Rocky planets are of course lots of shades of grey (no pun intended) but also brownish, sand-coloured and so on. When there's volcanic features, there's pink, green, toxic yellow.
There's actually a lot of variety.
 
Back
Top Bottom