sigh
I am not discussing whether random data is essential in QA, I am informing you that it is. If it 'doesnt make sense' to you and you want to believe your exploration data is useful and relevant here, be my guest.
New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
I am not discussing whether random data is essential in QA, I am informing you that it is. If it 'doesnt make sense' to you and you want to believe your exploration data is useful and relevant here, be my guest.
- has there been any official word recently on planetary tiling issues? seems like ages since Frontier have mentioned it.
- also, is this the final version of the planet tech? do frontier plan on improving it at all after the feedback or are we just stuck with this one attempt forever? i think we can all, including frontier, now admit odyssey was released too early. also concerning that Dr Kay Ross has now left the company - she was the brainchild, hopefully someone can finish off her outstanding work.
I really like odyssey's new lighting and first attempt at the new planetary tech, but there are many things they can improve on in terms of variety. all of the planets feel a bit too similar so far. for example, it's exceedingly rare to come across planets with lone mountains, i rarely see a mountain on it's own, it's now just either flat or very similar looking mountain ranges that go on forever and have no standout features.
- also, is this the final version of the planet tech? do frontier plan on improving it at all after the feedback or are we just stuck with this one attempt forever? i think we can all, including frontier, now admit odyssey was released too early. also concerning that Dr Kay Ross has now left the company - she was the brainchild, hopefully someone can finish off her outstanding work.
I really like odyssey's new lighting and first attempt at the new planetary tech, but there are many things they can improve on in terms of variety. all of the planets feel a bit too similar so far. for example, it's exceedingly rare to come across planets with lone mountains, i rarely see a mountain on it's own, it's now just either flat or very similar looking mountain ranges that go on forever and have no standout features.
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The last update was in the November issues update:
There'll probably be something similar in January's equivalent post (December's skipped due to winter break, of course)
I wouldn't expect this one to be solved at all quickly - changing all planetary terrain is a disruptive process, so they can't just incrementally tweak it into shape, and while I do miss some of the more spectacular elements of large-scale Horizons terrain, it's a more minor problem in that regard than the performance issues and bugs have been.
(The obvious time to release terrain upgrades, if they've got them ready by then, would be with the console release and the Horizons/Odyssey instance merger. But it might take longer than that.)
Thanks for the update, yeah that's what worries me, just really hope there's plans to improve it.
absolutely, they improved the colour palette with one of the latest updates. that plus the lighting change where the light is tinted by the atmosphere and star colour have really helped brighten the new planets up.
but i'm mainly interested in hearing if they plan to add better features like canyons into the game rather than the homogenous "cracked surface" ones we get now that don't really resemble canyons like the Grand Canyon for example or the old horizons ones. same for the old giant mountains we used to get. would be nice to see features like Olympus Mons from Mars. Real actual gigantic mountains like we used to have in horizons on rocky ice worlds.
That does look promising, is it anywhere near the bubble?
Any chance you could take higher altitude shots of these places to give a better sense of the overall world terrain?
It's close to Colonia, unfortunately. I've recorded video and will post it shortly. (If you search Youtube for 'Odyssey on Modest Hardware' you should find the whole series.)
Point is, I think many Odyssey cmdrs might be looking primarily at atmo planets when exploring (I know I do) because they look nice with the sunsets, etc. I've landed on many with large mountains, and a few with canyons, although none really deep and narrow and running for hundreds of km.
But the non-atmo planets might be where we eventually find horizons-style canyons.
I'm been trying to pick a still from the video to share, but mountains just don't pop in a still image. If you have similar colours, when you're perched up high the mountaintop and the ground far below sort of blend.
I'm inclined to speculate that other than underlying and informing continental plates, it is now stamps (EDIT: ...and tiling textures) all the way down (including the craters), crafted to be somewhat plausible for each level of scale (I do happen to think that whilst I have a host of issues with much of the terrain, a mountain far away is now a good bit more distinguishable from a hill close by, than they used to be); And that the only remaining procedural "creation" element (as opposed to the procedural placement and scaling of "stamps") is something in the vein of perlin noise, with most algorithms producing more "organised-", or "structured-" -looking things deprecated. Would love to be proven wrong.
I don't think I have seen a single crater with a central peak since the change, by the way... They used to be argueably way too common, but now... Are they all gone?
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![[VR] Merkir](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/141/141091.jpg?1553527154){kind=avatar}
No need for speculation. That's exactly what they're doing, for landable planets. The pre-generated terrain tiles are repeated at all scales levels, some large enough to be seen from orbit, some just tens or hundreds of metres across. There are thousands of repeated tiles per planet (actually millions of repeats for the smaller tiles). They overlay and merge into the underlying 2D perlin/simplex procedural terrain. Fortunately, that underlying procgen still produces some unique features, including mountains, although apparently they now have a much lower maximum height than Horizons.
NoVR - What_The_X_F_Dev
Banned
EDO planetary tech behaves like a shipyard sex worker if you slip them a stack of twenties, aye, it sucks THAT much, lets not overlook the fact that it looks like melted icecream when you are near it, and or it shifts like an acidtrip as seen recently on reddit.UPDATE: Planetary terrain prefabs are now also being discovered to be reused between planets:
UPDATE:
Looking at the high number of reported planets. I have gone ahead and created an issue tracker for this one. I urge everybody to go ahead and tick "can replicate" with as many examples as they can provide.
Thanks everyone!
ORIGINAL:
What I'm about to show you will be the final straw in cementing the new planetary tech system into a failure.
I remember Dr Kay Ross stating on stream that their procedural heightmap system made use of handmade terrain that would then be randomized across. I was worried when I heard this.
Check this out - I'll let the images speak for itself:
Literally all terrain features both from high orbit to low orbit are repeating, hand crafted, and break every little bit hunger for exploration. There is absolutely no desire to go down and explore since all you're looking at is the "randomly" organized set of hand crafted height map bits the developers have made.
Horizons gives a REAL sense of wanting to go and explore. Find planets with unique features.
Planets in Odyssey are no longer unique. They are just reorganised sets of the same features.
These planets were designed with one goal: look acceptable from an on-foot perspective or when looking from a twilight perspective with a setting sun for the atmo effect.
I really wish they'd left planet stuff alone and fleshed out Legs.
NoVR - What_The_X_F_Dev
Banned
Forgot to say - "YAY! we can go play capture the flag on those goofed up planets! Right on, What the FDEV!"
Why does EDO still need VR when you dislike it all so intensely?
![[VR] Bac Ho](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/74/74720.jpg?1553527113){kind=avatar}
Maybe its to do with the poorly way Fdev implemented VR in EDO, or the lack of deep gameloops for non combat focus game play, (yes looking at you biological sampler), or it could be something to do with the lacklustre FPS design straight from the early 2000's
.Anyway EDO is a good screenshot generator if you like the melted ice cream look!.
The question you should be thinking is, why so many die-hard ED CMDR's & Elite focused Youtubers have dropped ED after Odyssey?.
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NoVR - What_The_X_F_Dev
Banned
Dude, will you take five minutes and read this? There's a lot of things that are intertwined that coalesce into why I am so brutally critical of Odyssey and so determined to get VR into a game that I seemingly despise. I know on the face of them those two postions might seem paradoxically opposed to each other, but I'm going to explain to you why they are actually two sides of the same coin, but it's a complex issue so it's going to take a good few words to explain, especially if I am to describe it in such a way that anyone reading this, be they a VR player or someone who has never donned a headset will understand..
Odysey has a lot of faults, and the current VR implementation exacerbates them:
- Having the on foot stuff rendered in a floating FLAT screen in 2D that looks like looking at a through a letterbox from inside a brightly light room, that is often brighter than the scene on display, actually hinders playing the game.
- Because of the fact the floating flat screen is rendered at a distance it doesn't fill the field of view, it is thus effectively much lower resolution than native VR would be.
- As a result of the virtual flat screen's effective downsampling of the game scene a lot of the details are little more than a blurry mosaic, lassuming you could see them with the eyes natural dynamic range being saturated by the overly bright "grey burqa". This creates the potential for players to experience eyestrain trying to squint through the mosaic and or the dynamic range.
- The limited perceived resolution arising from the floating flat screen, combined with Odyssey's inherent system demands creates a scenario where you are roasting your PC and still the on foot sections look something like a PS1 game. This happens because VR is inherently demanding, and Odyssey is so seriously un optimised its like demanding cubed.
- It's made worse by the fact that this Grey Burqa --> "virtual flat screen" doesn't move with head motion creating the very motion sickness it was meant to prevent, so it isn't doing any good.
The alternative of having to tab out of game screen to main menu into settings, disable the VR, remove the headset, play the on foot stuff on monitor, go to ship, settings, enable vr, don headset, spend 5 minutes faffing about to get it back in the optical sweetspot and recentred, then go fly, next planet / star port when I want to leave the pilots seat, go back to menu and start this whole rigmarole again. You can probably picture how much fun that would be over a couple of hours of mission running? Yep, it's a massive impediment to the enjoyment, so even this option is detrimental to my game experience.
A final option is to just play the game on monitor, for all it's faults VR is immersive AF, and really puts you in the game, leaving VR behind moving forward with Elite would be a massive downgrade in experience.
Whatever way I look at it, as a result of the way VR is implemented in Odyssey playing Odyssey is not an enjoyable experience, and that is why I am so disdainful of EDO.
So now we've covered the reasons behind the "hate", lets close this out by asking why I keep bleating on about how they should give us proper VR headlook on foot minus hand controls. I believe that a decent VR headlook on foot would solve most of those problems I listed earlier. Specifically, in order:
- Doing away with the floating screen and its grey surround resolves the dynamic range issue
- Rendering the game view direct to headset as first person headlook removes the current effective downsampling we experience
- Removing the floating flat screen and its associated perceived downsampling of the game removes the eyestrain inducing need to squint through the mosaic currently experienced by VR players
- Actually seeing the game rendered at native resolution would make the unoptimized unrealistic system demands more palatable
- Restoring actual headlook, with head tracking would resolve the nausea triggering disconnect between the head movement of the player and the absence of movement of the rendered view portal into the game world.
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sigh
I am not discussing whether random data is essential in QA, I am informing you that it is. If it 'doesnt make sense' to you and you want to believe your exploration data is useful and relevant here, be my guest.
And I am trying to tell you that system generation isn't random, it's procedural, that's an entirely different thing and using any system will have the same result as using a random system selected from the galmap because the procedural key is run every time the system is viewed. There's no advantage in using a randomly selected system from 400b, the same process happens every time! If you are making changes and want to see what effect it has on the system, you run the procedural key, gather all the data then make the changes, run the key again and see what has changed. It doesn't matter if it is a system the key has already been run on before because the results will be exactly the same. The difference is for an already run system FDEV already has the data stored from the running of the key by me jumping in, it's not MY exploration data that matters, it's the data running the procedural key sends to FDEV and is stored in the database, which is way more than the data I get when exploring, I probably only see a tiny fraction of the data actually generated from running the key.
And this is a discussion forum, seems rather strange to claim you aren't here to discuss, you're wrong by the way, this is why when FDEV produce videos showing new stuff it's usually on known planets and not randomly selected ones.
Mate, now you are confusing selection with generation. But anyway, it's clear you are going to insist you know better than literally everyone in all industries, so good luck with that.
Holidays just begun, so whoohoo anyway.