This I have noticed. I have seen whole groups of planets suddenly teleport across my field of view...
Anyone experiencing invisible planets in SC until you get very close to it?
- Thread starter ferus
- Start date
Its crazy how they expect their player base to get caught up in the narrative of Galnet etc and be immersed in this galaxy and yet they have glaring immersion breaking bugs like this for months on end. Its just farcical. Lets focus on being able to interact with the bar tender, rather than have a working galaxy.
I think this is new, I've tested it myself, there seems to be some sort of parallax error with the planet markers. When you are more than a certain distance away it's not actualy planet you are looking at because it's to small to really represent on screen with pixels, so FDEV put a pixel marker where it should be. If you fly directly towards the planet these markers should stay in the correct place, but as somebody else mentioned if you fly at an angle they are drifting away from the location of the planets at the moment, so when you are close enough and the markers are swapped for the actual planet images it appears they jump suddenly to a new location. The planets themselves aren't moving, it's just the markers are incorrect.
It was definitely happening while patch 11 was live and when I say groups of planets I am actually referring to a planet with a bunch of moons I guess. So you see a clustered line of bright varying coloured 'stars" representing the planet and its moons reflecting the light of their star. One minute they are in one place and then "pop!" they are suddenly in another place.
I have seen this since Update 11 iirc.
What I think is happening is that all bodies in a system are being drawn on the skybox, from the perspective of the primary star, rather than rendered at their real locations until you get close. Then the skybox is updated and the bodies appear where they should be but if you fly past them, then once out of range they appear on the skybox again - ahead of you! (i.e. in their original position).
It is most obvious when approaching secondary stars or gas giants with many bodies orbiting them but all celestial objects in the system are affected.
What I think is happening is that all bodies in a system are being drawn on the skybox, from the perspective of the primary star, rather than rendered at their real locations until you get close. Then the skybox is updated and the bodies appear where they should be but if you fly past them, then once out of range they appear on the skybox again - ahead of you! (i.e. in their original position).
It is most obvious when approaching secondary stars or gas giants with many bodies orbiting them but all celestial objects in the system are affected.
Go outside after dark and look up: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, all of them will be perfectly visible from a lot farther away than 65 Ls
(Atm:
Mercury: ~491 Ls
Venus: ~682 Ls
Mars: ~668 Ls
Jupiter: ~2460 Ls
Saturn: ~4596 Ls)
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If this is really true, it's beyond stupid.
Why do FDEV do their damnest and make these idiotic changes (another, not only, being FSS colours)?
I just don't get it.
I have an extremely hard time imagining local bodies are being rendered in- and out- of the skybox like that. Looks to me like it is rendered during hyperspace transit, and remains unchanged until the next jump, no matter how far you travel in system.
I could more easily imagine the lightpoint that is used at a distance (...and replaced by the actual body, on approach) being rendered dark, or with an incorrect transform, that places it 180° or something off... except one imagine the "full planet" would use the exact same matrix for its positioning.
I could more easily imagine the lightpoint that is used at a distance (...and replaced by the actual body, on approach) being rendered dark, or with an incorrect transform, that places it 180° or something off... except one imagine the "full planet" would use the exact same matrix for its positioning.
It's funny, I always thought that the bright dot indicating a body at a distance was a bug in the rendering on dxvk/wine/linux.
Still now it seems really broken, as you see the dot at a distance and then it just disappears before appearing again.
Still now it seems really broken, as you see the dot at a distance and then it just disappears before appearing again.
But they are though. And depending on the configuration of the system and your distance to bodies, the placeholder dots might move around more than once. I've found a few systems along the way which displayed fairly consistent (broken) behaviour in that regard.
How do you tell? Maybe by seeing them become lowres when reducing the skybox resolution, or something?
For instance, as other users illustrated, once you enter a system any distant placeholder dots are located in the right direction, but at a seemingly infinite distance. If you move above or below the plane, you will see that a destination marker will indicate the correct location of a target body or station, but the placeholder dots remain stationary in relation to the skybox. Once you move within a certain distance threshold, the placeholder dots will be redrawn at a different location. Then once you arrive at the distance where the placeholder dots should slowly be replaced by rendered bodies (just boot up Horizons for a reminder of how it should look), the misaligned placeholder dots suddenly disappear at the same time that the bodies crudely pop into existence. Turning off orbit lines helps to notice these transitions.
If I find a good example again, I'll try and record it.
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Hmm, guess I'm going to have to have a look. This could probably still be a transform problem with the "dot billboards", mind, rather than them being plotted into the skybox, which seems like it would be an extraordinarily strange way of doing things... Does anything else change in the skybox bitmap?
Not that I noticed, and I don't think they're actually rendered into the skybox. It just seems that way because the incorrectly calculated distances are probably massive.
If I had to wager a guess which item in the U11 patch notes might be related to this bug, I'd go for the following:
I guess "no work" does eliminate "unecessary work"...
I had a go with a reduced "galaxy background" texture size anyway, and noticed that the starfield no longer seem to be part of that texture - only the galaxy and nebula elements go blurry, but the stars do not.
I guess the starfield could now be a separate skybox texture layer of its own, with its own resolution (...and star count) paramenters, or maybe the galaxy elements could first be rendered at their own "galaxy background" resolution, and then composited into that starfield skybox texture, or maybe the starfield could have changed to actually being plotted every frame, rather than rendered into the skybox... or something different altogether... Would be fun to know, if anybody has a clue. :7
THIS IS IT! I've only played a few months starting out with odyssey and I was wondering why there were lights in the skybox just vanishing and reappearing randomly, and how I can't see planets at all in super cruise which really makes space travel boring. Went to Horizons and it works fine... This a is huge immersion breaking bug and it's been my first impression of the game, it's been around for months I guess? How isn't it fixed?
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I hate stealth planets
I didn't even notice it at first until I swapped to Horizons for VR, I just assumed that's how the game was supposed to look until I researched the vanishing lod lights. Now that I have it just sucks the immersion out of space travel for me completely, so I don't play Odyssey.I really hope this gets finally fixed with U13. We seem to be getting unwanted downgrades that have a tendency to stick around for far too long.
Best hopes for U13. I do like Odyssey a lot even if I'm just dipping my toes into this game, but for now I've just been trying to enjoy the space travel aspect and even that doesn't seem polished right now.
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