I thought something with the label Update 12 had been ruled out by Frontier. Something is coming, but what, where and when is still a complete mystery.
In a game thats mostly about flying a spaceship, driven by a BGS that responds to your behaviour (or not, in this case)?
I'm not saying don't look at the issue, but as far as severity is concerned its very, very low down on the list.
Landable surfaces in ED are not curated levels- 'world design' in this context is setting rules that provide enough variation. For most people this seems to be enough, and ED seem to have come to the same conclusion.
How does having some repetition become 'bad gameplay' though? Since you have near infinite worlds to explore why not just go elsewhere? If 50% or more of the worlds were bland or identical then maybe people have a point. If its the odd badly formed moon and the occasional (as in, one valley formation) repeated, is it honestly worth redoing the entire system and re-rolling the entire galaxy again? In the meantime:
Powerplay has had nothing for six years
CQC has had nothing for six years
C+P is busted
Real bugs
Placeholders all over
Actually your quote makes it sound as if the split will now remain forever.
Good to see Frontier have got users fighting over which flaws need to be addressed with the limited resources that are apparently now available.
Actually your quote makes it sound as if the split will now remain forever.
Well what did you expect? FD and ED are not charities- at some point they will have to make a choice.
Its ironic too that people seem to be in a flap over surfaces when they should be arguing for more to do on those surfaces. If you are obsessing over having two similar hills its pointing to the fact there is not enough to exploration other than Sunday walks to nowhere.
For you. Your opinion, while valid, isn't community consensus.
More arbitrary "most people" claims. Change that to "For me this seems to be enough" and you'd be correct.
A big part about exploration gameplay is finding good looking planets or systems. When you come across a planet with the same repeating mountain range several times on the same planet, it ruins it. Minecraft wouldn't be as good a game as it is if you kept coming across the same mountain several times over as it ruins exploration.
It's also not a case of "go elsewhere" as the prefabs are reused and repeated across all planets. ED:H exploration was literally going where no-one has gone before and ED:O is going where many people have gone before across many planets. Ruined what was special about Elite's exploration.
The same is true for your opinion too- in the end its up to FD and they've made a choice.
Well how many people out of the thousands have said this is a crippling problem? Its only here where people have a problem while on reviews on steam other issues like performance and things to do that rile.
It seems the problem is there is nothing to do on the surfaces, rather than the surfaces themselves. "A big part about exploration gameplay is finding good looking planets or systems" should only be a small part of it- NMS planets are samey after a while, but they also have extras over the top while ED is solely valley gazing with the occasional static prop.
And to me, all of it is the same driving over it in either EDO or EDH. Its why I hate exploration in ED because its just finding the extremes of a heightmap and not finding anything really new or unique.
I think what bothers me about the "prefabs" is that they are so unique, shape-wise, that when you see the "stamp" on multiple planets across the galaxy, it screams repetition. It's one thing to see circles everywhere (craters), because a circle is not unique. If you go to multiple planets and see the American East Coast over and over again, down the the minute details of the Cape Cod and the Florida panhandle, that's an entirely different situation. And no, rotating and stretching that very unique stamp is not enough to make it "different". Had Frontier used more generic terrain stamps, I think this tiling and repetition would be less of an issue.
Either that or use literally thousands of unique stamps, so that the odds of a single explorer "being struck by lightning twice" go down considerable. Does anyone have any idea of how many unique terrain stamps / prefabs Frontier is using? Is it hundreds, or just a dozen?
ADDENDUM / EDIT
It dawns on me that looking at the "tiling ruins exploration" thread is not the same as a single explorer going out and seeing things for him / herself. The odds of dozens of explorers being struck by
Last edited:
42?
To all the people saying it was a minor problem which didnt affect many people - it was the top voted issue on the issue tracker. It suggests many people actually cared about it. Why would it be the top voted issue if it was so insignificant that nobody noticed or cared?
Edit: By disregarding the concerns of that part of the community you are just driving more and more people away from the game
Edit: By disregarding the concerns of that part of the community you are just driving more and more people away from the game
Last edited:
Only one thing: when people notice repeating patterns, then your generation system may simply be bad. When you still don't care... ok. Some more people will move on once again.
In the end only some remaining fanboys will still say "Well, it's ok for meeeee...." while the servers are being shut down.
In the end only some remaining fanboys will still say "Well, it's ok for meeeee...." while the servers are being shut down.
Unfortunately, not even that...
The problem here is the "birthday paradox".
If you can see, say, 25 regions from a decent "high orbit" position (which seems to fit with the sizes of repeats people point out) ... then there needs to be over 625 large-scale terrain stamps for someone to have a mere 50:50 chance of not seeing any duplicates. On any one planet.
If you then want to get it down to the odds where someone won't see duplicates if given a random selection of 20-50 planetary views and also have different sets of terrain for rocky, icy, low-G, high-G, etc. it requires having millions of distinct terrain stamps (maybe rather more than millions; the calculation is more than I have time for right now)
(The distinctiveness does make it trickier, also - the rock scatter in Odyssey is way more varied and interesting than in Horizons, but everyone always remembers seeing Sandwich Rock before. But apart from that it is way more interesting than in Horizons for different sorts of rocks, rock density matching up to the landscape, rocks looking like avalanche results, etc.)
My opinion is backed by the issue tracker and a big fat thread detailing the issue with 247 likes, 185k views and 4k replies (i.e one of, if not the biggest, ongoing issue thread on the forum). Your opinion is backed by ... what? A few people here and there voicing their opinion and Fdev who only decided this wasn't a priority because cost cutting has tied their hands. I know which side of the argument is closer to community consensus ...
Well we're talking about at least 1000+ going by the votes on the tracker and forums and going by the notion that apparently "nobody uses the issue tracker" the number is probably far higher.
You say you hate exploration because you don't find anything unique and then also question ...
And then also claim
I think this is another case of "I know thousands of people want this fixed, but I don't care about that portion of the game so they should only fix and improve the things that I care about." You are downplaying the severity of the issue because you don't care about exploration. That's fine, just don't complain when people that don't care about C+P or Powerplay try to downplay those issues.
Last edited:
Number 4 was like data for theme park like setups for motion feedback. How many of those are about?To all the people saying it was a minor problem which didnt affect many people - it was the top voted issue on the issue tracker. It suggests many people actually cared about it. Why would it be the top voted issue if it was so insignificant that nobody noticed or cared?
Edit: By disregarding the concerns of that part of the community you are just driving more and more people away from the game
Isn't this a problem wang tiling and other methods like it are supposed to solve? It's sometimes pretty obvious (during glide pop-in) that the game uses these at higher levels of detail. It should also be possible to use tricks like rotation and mirroring to make existing tiles not look as repetitive for essentially free if memory is an issue.
At first I assumed the tiling issue was due to a genuine bug related to that where the tiling rules aren't enforced properly due to the development being rushed.
If it is a problem for a lot of people then I wholly support it. Probably more than you imagine since Elite is a sim. Unlike you guys, I am not making fun of and belittling those people for having an issue I am not affected by.
Last edited:
Which is why I question the use of prefab stamps to begin with. I do understand why the technology is used to upgrade Horizons' planet generation algorithm, but a more elegant solution would have been using procedurally-generated templates instead of prefabricated ones. That's actually what I thought we were going to get when Dr. Ross was talking about planets being formed using equations that take plate tectonics and other geological influences into account. Instead artists sat down and whipped up a bunch of templates in Photoshop based on "that looks geological" rather than actual procgen variables, or at least that's how appears.
The issue tracker is meaningless, if you read what other things are on it. A lot of it reads as wishes rather than actual game breaking problems that keep being ignored.
And this forum, sadly, is not a big slice of the players as it used to be. If it were, surely FD would have had a different opinion? Exploration in these forums is one massive echo chamber.
Exploration for me is not finding new and exciting heightmaps. 'Exploration' in ED is sightseeing with little ongoing purpose like surveying new systems for the BGS, or selling mining finds, or capturing new animals to sell found at remote locations.
So you are saying then, after all these years (with exploration having lots of content updated and added) other aspects are not as important that have seen nothing, and should be quiet again because some OCD people see two identical lumps in the soil and FD should redo the lot as a priority?