Agreed, the first step for me would be the flight model and fixing current stuff. My point was that volumetric clouds are not cutting edge technology these days.
Any news on heavier planet atmospheres?
- Thread starter Gordon Freeman IV
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Well, occlusion culling isn't either.... (EDO release flashback).
EDO is way more performance hungry than it should be for what it is technically. At the absolute worse, the scene is about 24 AI shooting each other in a small settlement, with no weather, no large scale vegetation and with half a dozen ships fighting above. Perhaps a fire to.
It's not really that much nowadays. Yet, here we are.
Volumetric cloud are hardly new technology, but they can be demanding, especially if you don't do it properly. And so far, it seems Fdev have been scraping the bottom for every FPS they can find.
I’m certainly not going to deny that there are existing (serious) performance issues, but this thread is supposed to be speculating on potential future updates regarding atmospheres .. ;-)
Seems more like a we have no idea what's happening thread.
Two posts before mine predicting a) no further development and b) server off, so yes a doom thread just before I posted, it seems to have picked up a bit since, but how long will that last?
One post in 26 turns it into a doom thread?
Perhaps a tiny bit of paranoia creeping in here?
When I posted it was 2 out of 14...perhaps a tiny bit of counting needed there?
That's still a wee bit of a minority view in the overall postings.
I always suggest 'server off' to the terminally disillusioned posters...
Oh man, bears would be awesome!
And lions and tigers, oh my!
Lagrange clouds?
Indeed it is. And volumetric cloud can be quite demanding in performance, depending on optimization. Considering they just dropped console for performance issue, I'm having a hard time imagining they'd had yet another feature dropping people's FPS.
Did Frontier actually announce it was performance issues?
Perhaps last-gen consoles were considered too small a market (and current gen also - with availablilty issues ongoing) to spend any appreciable amount of Dev cost producing the port?
It is assumed to be performance issues, but none of us are privy to the machinations of Frontier's internal politics.
Seeing as we are specifically talking about planet tech, the whole point of the "years" was to redo the planet terrain engine to be able to more easily create different planet types compared to the Horizons segregated proc-gen tech (pretty sure you know that already). Seems pretty obvious then that the overall aim is to enlarge the game by allowing access to other planet types not yet accessible. It was even let slip a couple of times that access to other planet types is in the pipeline.
The only thing that is not clear is from a Marketing angle, accessing other planet types makes for uncanningly useful gating of content. So will they want to sit on the current Odyssey major feature set for a bit longer and expand it in different directions e.g. new ships/new missions for free content updates and later promote another DLC with access to a unique set of planets or will Odyssey itself get access to another planet type? If the former then yes we will have to wait until Odyssey has matured in the eyes of Marketing.
Either way they wont have to reinvent the wheel in terms of "fixing it", fixing in this context is more a linear progression. The pressure will be on creating new art assets and unique gameplay.
With specific regards to atmospheres, again we already know that the tech for generating all those different atmospheres is in the game, you can see it in the System map, its not like with the Horizons planet tech where all they ended up with was a specific tech for negligible atmopsheres. Hint they created a brand new global lighting system, I will bet that wasn't actually just to make the cockpits look different to Horizons (despite the accusations of the mob), it was to work with any atmosphere generated by Stellar Forge down to chemical compostion and different densities.
It is now a matter of, I quote, "tweaking parameters" to make the atmospheres feel differentiated to the player, for example for Odyssey they decided not to let the negligible atmospheres impact the flight model quite late in the day. It wasn't a ship interior "no plans" statement. I don't see why slowly ramping up atmospheric density would be a big deal for the next step, ie thin weather systems, they could be very static in relation to chemical composition and distance from stay/type, terrestrial versions of Largange clouds that have been in the game since 2016. Likewise with large-scale pools of liquid, they will be new art assets integrated with the terrain, something that the new planet tech was specifically created to handle.
I agree that dynamic weather systems and very dense atmospheres with "rain" and dynamic flooding offer more challenges, gameplay, art asset workload (especially the more terrain variety from weathering) as well as technical, but in terms of the games journey that will be a bridge to cross when it gets there. However I would bet that there have been tech demos of all that lying around since the game was launched and there is a lot of the required art generation being done since the launch of Odyssey, I doubt they will get to those bridges, completely wet behind the ears.
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Currently, the Odyssey planet tech for atmo world, concerning said atmo, is basically Horizon but with a colored skybox.
That's all there is to it. People can dream about flight atmo, weather, wind, fog/atmo effect, but we still have none of that.
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I gotta say, all these thin atmospheres leave me cold.
Nope.
As others have said, Dr. Ross said pre-release that the planet tech was changed from EDH so it was ready for whatever was coming next. She also implied the planets in the initial EDO release were just the initial planets, giving the impression more were to come later. Which could all have been abandoned now, who knows.
In terms of the planet tech, the current EDO version CAN do more foggy deeper looking atmospheric effects, but currently only when it's a glitch it seems. But from pre-alpha and the occasional glitch, we know it works, it's just not currently meant to be there.
Weather water etc has never been mentioned with respect to EDO, so far. I imagine it would be an additional dlc if we get any additional dlcs.
And ship interiors imo will be waaay at the end if they ever come, and thats fine with me.
Dr Ross doesn't work for Frontier, and hasn't done for over a year. So whatever she did or didn't say when she did, is essentially moot and null & void.
Even if it wasn't, and they somehow still had vague plans to do any of the things she said, all her knowledge has left the building and not accessible to Frontier any more.