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

surfarer

surfarer
djadjok said:
I just leave it here for illustrative purposes =)
For those curious here is an occasion to "sneak a peek behind the scenes" - at the normally hidden stages of the stellar body surface generation.
All credit goes to the quite coldblooded commander @Derelict-NIK that have captured this sequence few days ago as the result of a not-so-lucky jump.
ps_app_20210620_084459-jpeg.242530


the image is captured from this video:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASpbPEfl4nY
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Christ, I thought a borg cube had suddenly appeared inED!!!
 

MCCART

MCCART
A couple of observations. I'm out in the black and finding that undiscovered systems have way more variety and better features than those already discovered. Still a bit shallow in the vertical but quite nice. I'm also hard-pressed to, casually notice, excessively repeating assets. I'm wondering if FDEV is making incremental changes, server-side, and silently pushing them or if there is some issue with converting already created systems to the new tech.
 

djadjok

djadjok
MishaTX said:
I'll make up my own mind when my 3070 rig arrives in a couple of months.
If it fails to perform with EDO, I'll be mighty salty, though. I won't drown the forums with it, I'll just go play something else. :)
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While reading this I start to feel myself a bit crippled with my old 970=)))) Also I begin to wonder how I still manage to play and have fun - probably that is due to I dislike pew-pew FPS and prefer stealth approach exclusively=)


MCCART said:
A couple of observations. I'm out in the black and finding that undiscovered systems have way more variety and better features than those already discovered. Still a bit shallow in the vertical but quite nice. I'm also hard-pressed to, casually notice, excessively repeating assets. I'm wondering if FDEV is making incremental changes, server-side, and silently pushing them or if there is some issue with converting already created systems to the new tech.
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Honestly I doubt as that "incremental approach" is technically way too complicated. That's not about "converting" - that's just simple regeneration using different algorithm and is performed client side as far as I understand.
 

[VR] Merkir

[VR] Merkir
CptArcher said:
If fdev doubles down on tiling and repeating patterns for planet tech, then people need to realize they've given up on their revolutionary planet generation engine that made them famous in the first place. That was their claim to fame.
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Exactly what I said on page 1 of this thread. It's hard to believe David Braben has allowed this. I would have thought the procgen was his little baby, to be nurtured, grown, evolved. Not replaced by pre-generated tiles. Why wouldn't he want to continue as a leader in this field?

I still see nothing in these pre-generated tiles that couldn't be done procedurally on the client side. And if they didn't want to develop the new algorithms in-house, the work to add new detailed terrain to the Horizons procgen code would have been great as Masters/PhD postgrad work. I assume DB still has ties at Cambridge, for example.

The other irony is that it appears (at face value at least) that many of the Odyssey performance issues may be a direct result of the new streaming tiles system. The load-on-demand, pop ins, texture loads, etc.

I'd really like to see a better explanation of why they've gone down this path.The vids they've released so far on this topic just don't quite sit right with me. It's too easy to come to the conclusion that they went with the "easy solution", not the best solution, and that commercial factors/deadlines were priority #1.
 
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jojon

J
Merkir said:
I'd really like to see a better explanation of why they've gone down this path.The vids they've released so far on this topic just don't quite sit right with me. It's too easy to come to the conclusion that they went with the "easy solution", not the best solution, and that commercial factors/deadlines were priority #1.
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Presumably it should remove a significant portion of the required deep congnitive effort from the technical side, for when adding new features for more planet types in the future, at the costs of the sad repetition, and of a ton of asset library production busy work.

-No need to figure out a processing-costly, multi-staged just-in-time algorithm, to produce (whether unique or not) fractal landscape elements that exhibit a verisimilitude (i.e. not an actual simulation - just something that believably looks like the outcome) of the effects that would have been produced by geological action, erosion (with a feedback loop), etc, over time, if you can "just" "draw" the end results, and have it applied when playing the game (still have to procedurally decide how to place them, mind), at exactly the same terrain-gen cost for any complexity level of feature, and of the history that would have formed it...

I feel fairly sure in presuming the underlying terrain-gen stage of surface elevation modification using a height-value bitmap (albeit that bitmap may in previous revisions have been converted to an array of floats, instead of used directly), to produce desired ground character in a specific area, was already part of the planet-gen engine, especially for point of interests, such as the flattened ground at surface installations, gashes at crash sites, and guardian earth mounds; Sometimes to quite funny effect (...at least I assume this is what causes it), when the modification has become applied to the visual mesh, but not its collision sibling, leaving you SRV:ing through a field of rocks that float above a depression in the ground (...including the occasional hangar lift shaft, where one may also have assumed rock scatter would have been masked).

So what remains of the old? Maybe we could guess the continental plates generation is still there, unaltered, guiding where and how you place assets..? Other than that, there would be the constant layer of interacting pseudo-random noise to create varitey - probably more than one layer at different scales -- stretch it out on one axis and you have striations, but I don't think I see any effects of anything like that... There are massive plateaus and such in Odyssey, but I don't think I've yet seen so much of the mountain ranges you'd expect between plates - mountainous areas tend to look like so much stucco - a perfectly flat plain covered with tons of evenly spaced pretty uniformly sized individual mountains, that stick up sharply from the flat... I hesitate to say: "valley" floor...

I don't recall exactly the point, relative to other events, when the infamous beigening(TM) occurred in the history of Elite planet gen, but as I do recall, originally the near surface ground normal maps in Horizons looked like so much perlin noise, with another finer-grained layer of the same added potential-theoretically in perpituity, as you zoomed in closer and closer.
The problem here was that each new layer of noise had the same character as the previous one, so it was indeed hard to tell the tiny cow figures on the table in front of you apart from big actual cows far away -- they looked pretty much exactly the same - no visual difference between a mountain and an anthill; And whilst I don't know whether the noise at the time, and zoom level, was generated procedurally, and unique for every square inch, or was in fact a pre-rendered tiling texture, that doesn't matter so much as with more distinct features -- it's noise; By its nature "bland", "same-y", and hard to distinguish meaningful patterns within. :7

Still, despite the "featurelessness" of the original, pure noise ground texturing, I ended up sorely missing it, when it was later (still Horizons) replaced by "traditional" "wallpaper" textures.
-With more interesting texture detail, comes, inherently, more obvious tiling, and limitations both on in variety and resolution -- not to mention you can no longer avoid noticing just how flat it is (quintuply so in VR) -- a normal map does not help when you are close-up and the texture feature is large; Good for still images, but as soon as you move, you can not help but notice that that thin edge on a stone that lights up believeably by the sun on its side, remains a thin edge as you move over there to look from the other side, instead of revealing the lit up surface -- here we would need parallax mapping, or even better: tesselation with heighmap offsets.

...and this normal map issue looks to me like it occurs with some sometimes metre-or-more-scale ground features in Odyssey: You stand very still, and see dark streaks that look much like the shadow side of depressions in the gravel, but then you walk over there, and right from the moment you start moving, you see right away that there is no depression; The ground is perfectly flat, and there is just a dark smudge of soot smeared over it, or what looks like a coffee cup stain, rather than a pot hole. Maybe they are intended to be just that, rather than shaded undulations - the latter sort could have some merit under certain circumstances - at least were there a water cycle in the area... I don't know...
 
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