Elite Dangerous: Odyssey Update 6

[photomankc]

@sallymorganmoore - Please bring back the option to use CAS. FSR is, to my eye, so much less appealing. I’ve not gained any performance using it beyond what CAS gave and Ultra Quality performs worse. I’ve lost control of the level of SS beyond broad quality settings. I’ve lost any sense of realistic appearance to low angle terrain with shimmering noise in the background. Stations in the dark are aliased up messes. Text is harder to read.

This is the most unenthusiastic I have felt since update 4. It’s been rather downhill for me since then but at least CAS looked good.

 

[Sakashiro]

I'm getting the impression that Odyssey is very broken at some very basic fundamental level, and that can't get fixed by slapping neverending patches on top. That needs an at least partial rewrite of the whole thing.

The impression I'm getting is that the developers are working on a codebase they are not familiar with, and that there is no internal QA whatsoever.

 

[Cori]

Pretty sure the bug with those was they were spawning when they shouldn't, and now they are working as intended, and rare.

You can - eventually - find one or two if you hunt around on Inara for Odyssey settlements in the correct states, like Infrastructure Failure. But they're nowhere near as common as they used to be, sadly. I know they "fixed" it, but it does seem to have made them a little too rare.

For now the best alternative I've found is to carry out a raid mission on settlements owned by pirate factions, which has the additional perk of being able to nick the power regulator at the end too.

 

[Old Duck]

I think that as to do with the new PBR, they probably have to do recalibrations for every single material (however, i'm not an expert, but i think that something like that had to be done even with the previouvs system)

What's everyone's opinion of this new PBR system? Is it really that much better than Horizons? From watching the streams, I just don't see how this new system was worth all the headaches (bad performance and lighting) that comes with it. Couldn't Odyssey have been just as beautiful using the simpler Horizons lighting, or is this PBR needed for the new fancy planets?

 

[Darth Ender]

The impression I'm getting is that the developers are working on a codebase they are not familiar with, and that there is no internal QA whatsoever.

probably more like the developers are working on a code base they hate using tools that are garbage compared to the engines they do know, with a versioning / code management system that is not git ...and half of the stuff they need to do requires engine work (which they can't do themselves because they're not programmers, they're game developers)....so they reach out to the engine developers ..which consists of like 3 people who are still trying to learn what cobra is while they implement unoptimized proof of concept functions that will have zero chance of ever becoming more than that as they simply dont know how to optimize it because by then they have to merge in with everyone else's changes and the code management system they're using is not git so the rest of the time before release is spent trying to handle conflicts (which undoubtedly undo various fixes and introduce new regressions). So they spruce up their resume because dealing with this all the time is soul killing and not fun ...so fdev hires new grads to do the job. Then the cycle continues.

 

[LKx]

Probably still 3, 5, 8 updates further down the line, or perhaps never. I'm getting the impression that Odyssey is very broken at some very basic fundamental level, and that can't get fixed by slapping neverending patches on top. That needs an at least partial rewrite of the whole thing.

There must definitively something gone wrong with it, since 2 months and six patches in they still did little steps ahead about the optimization (well, sometimes they walk forth and back)... and no, FSR or CAS are not optimizations.
I hope that they are trying to reingeeniring things under the hood and what we see are just little adjustements made in the meantime, but it'll certainly take time.
Well... maybe it's better on the trunk......

 

[Sakashiro]

Even statements like, "We're checking lighting here, here, here, and here" feels wrong. It feels like they are applying specific filters to every individual scenario (in cockpit, in station, on planet A, on planet B, etc) instead of fixing the lighting system as a whole.

Which is ironic, because the whole point of PBR is to get renderer and assets on a common baseline, so that this sort of micromanagement is no longer necessary. To ED it seems the introduction of PBR had the opposite effect.

 

[Cori]

Hmmm.

New FSR upscaling:

Built in (normal) upscaling:

And that doesn't even show what it did to the ship UI. I'm going to leave it turned off, thanks.

 

[LKx]

Hmmm.

New FSR upscaling:

View attachment 253543

Built in (normal) upscaling:

View attachment 253544

And that doesn't even show what it did to the ship UI. I'm going to leave it turned off, thanks.

I guess the second image is native resolution...

 

[Bedooine]

4 sallymorganmoore to pay attention, pls.

Have to report a weird mission conclusion here.
The mission was "Grab the Ship Schematic from crash site"...

So I found the crash site, killed 4 criminals there, opened a crate and took the needed schematic...
All went well, I boarded the ship but did not depart - I exited the game. After entering the game again - my ship was levitating over the ground so I flew to the mission giver to finish it.
After entering social space and pressing negotiate key, I saw this (see screen 1).
Ok, I pushed a blank space where something like "OK" should have been stated...
Bytheway, no any sound was produced (I mean a specific sound of successful mission fulfill) after opening of that window at screen 1...
And then, when, eventually, I opened my Backpack - I found the mission Schematic there! (see screen 2).
Moreover, when I went to the bartender, I successfully could sell that thing there. (see screen 3).

Pls, make a proper decisions here.
Thx in advance.

 

[Cori]

I guess the second image is native resolution...

Probably? I don't pretend to understand upscaling in any depth. Quite deliberately the only setting changed was turning it on and off.

The point I wanted to make, really, is that the FSR doesn't look good. It's something I'll only turn on if needed, rather than something to have on by default.

 

[MartinG]

OK, my 0.03CR worth of feedback on AMD FSR upscaling.

So far I’ve tested only the hangar and concourse of a surface port (performance bottlenecks tend to be quite noticeable in certain places there), and I must say it worked pretty well in general. Even with Supersampling set to Ultra-Quality I’m getting about 30% FPS increase (compared to Normal upscaling and supersampling set to ×1.0), which in many cases is the difference between “unacceptable” and “acceptable”. Picture quality is indeed quite good (though not with supersampling set to Performance), with one caveat: quality of any text that is not an overlay (i.e. ship HUD, nav/sys/etc. panels, on-foot terminals) is visibly degraded. Even at Ultra-Quality the degradation is noticeable (though acceptable); at anything lower, smaller text (e.g. some parts of on-foot terminals, latitude & longitude on the HUD) becomes barely legible.

Thus, for now it seems the best option for me is to play with supersampling set to Ultra-Quality.

 

[MartinG]

Probably? I don't pretend to understand upscaling in any depth. Quite deliberately the only setting changed was turning it on and off.

Then you probably had supersampling set to “performance”, which is indeed not good. I suggest you try setting is to “Ultra-Quality” and compare again. (See also my post above).

 

[Cori]

Then you probably had supersampling set to “performance”, which is indeed not good. I suggest you try setting is to “Ultra-Quality” and compare again. (See also my post above).

Actually, it was set to "quality" (I did check). Didn't do a screenshot on ultra quality, but the HUD elements at least didn't look any better to me than on quality (diagonal lines and text were noticeably jagged, etc).

 

[LKx]

Probably? I don't pretend to understand upscaling in any depth. Quite deliberately the only setting changed was turning it on and off.

The point I wanted to make, really, is that the FSR doesn't look good. It's something I'll only turn on if needed, rather than something to have on by default.

I agree that it shouldn't be turned on by default (mine defaulted to performance..........), it's kind of a stunt on their part.
However FSR is SUPPOSED to look at least a little worse than native, it can't do anything about it.

 

[alexzk]

with one caveat: quality of any text that is not an overlay (i.e. ship HUD, nav/sys/etc. panels, on-foot terminals) is visibly degraded.

yeh, because UI should be rendered after upscalings using native final resolution, then all could work

 

[CMDR Yates]

Sorry this is a bit dark but, it appears features are distorted beyond intent on some planets. Shown are craters that look like absymal holes to the nether world while other times small hills look like spires to the heavens. Note the crater at the top-center of the pic.

I think these are not supposed to be craters, but rather pits, as seen on the moon and other bodies of the solar system.

In the game, they appear to be features of a certain type of terrain / geome. Much like the shield volcanoes and "pimple hills" that occur in some areas.

IRL these are the collapsed roofs of underground lava caves. Some are just pits with straight or steep walls (as we see in-game), but some likely open up into subsurface cavities.

Odyssey's terrain generation system doesn't allow for caves, however, so we don't see that latter type here.

 

[Drelthar]

The colours and terrain height are different but the feature shapes are identical

Yeah, they only said they were fixing colours, and improving texture quality on foot.

 

[Martind Forlon]

I really wish to have available that CAS setting for my 1080p monitor again. All texts (and mainly HUD) looked better with it. I have all on ultra for now (testing how game works on 1070 Ti), but texts are visibly worse when compared with Patch5:

 

[CaptainPugwash]

The key is having your OS and GPU parameters set properly.

Could you give a few pointers?