Coul FDev roll back the planetary update and shaders?

peteuplink

peteuplink
Since the launch of Odyssey the game has been plagued by serious performance issues. This coincided with the ability to walk on planets, but we've been driving around them in SRV's since 15 December 2015 without any issues, and the new walking mechanic is really just similar to SRV gameplay with a new player model and places to explore when you break it down to it's basic parts. So I can't see it's the fact we can now walk on planets that's the issue, rather it has to be the fact that the planets have had an "upgrade" in visuals along with some shiny new shaders and rendering. Why do I assume this? Well, the game now runs really badly in places where it ran perfectly fine before, such as in space stations and at the title screen. Even just driving around in the SRV is aproblem now, when it was fine before. For me, the title screen runs at 60fps in Horizons, and stays at this for the entire game. It intially starts at 60fps on Odyssey, but drops to around 30fps after a few seconds. But as you can see from the screenshots below, there are no major differences in model complexity or anything else that could lead to such a dramatic drop. The only thing that's changed is the lighting, slightly different colouring and sharper texture fidelity (most notably on the pipes at the top of the screen), which is probably connected to the new renderer and shaders being used.

So, why not, if possible, just roll back the renderer and planet tech to a version that actually worked and potentially solve the performance issues for many players? The game didn't look that bad in the previous version, and was still actually quite nice looking and capable of looking truly stunning in a lot of places. I think many of us would accept slightly worse visuals (which actually didn't look that bad anyway) over a poor framerate and technical issues.

Horizons 60fps steady
horizons50.jpg


Odyssey 32fps fluctuates between 30fps - 33fps (can't see a reason why... it's exactly the same title screen as Horizons which runs at 60fps. Could understand it if there was something more hardware demanding going on) Game runs at 60fps in space, 30fps when close to planet surfaces, bases and space stations.
odyssey30.jpg
 

Frop

Frop

So, frame-rates since the patch, how are yours?

My own experience so far is that planet surfaces minus any settlements nearby have gotten a little better, at small settlements a truly miniscule improvement when on foot (so small that i wonder if it's my imagination) but every other location, largely the same as before. At a settlement i can...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
 

peteuplink

peteuplink
TheRoninX said:
I am sure its not that easy to roll back the renderer and shaders.
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Maybe. However developers often have a way to revert a change just in case it breaks something. Though, TBH, I'm not really sure how FDev think when it comes to games development, so you may be right.

Basically, a shader is a piece of code that is executed on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), to manipulate an image before it is drawn to the screen. It's effectively a small program of sorts that tells the GPU what to do. Usually, at least from my experience, they're changeable without impacting the game code.
 
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Dragsham

Dragsham
I'm in VR playing elite. An overclocked 3060 and a g2 reverb. And I've no issues ingame with rendering, apart from the odd settlement that judders at points on the base but not all of the base.
No issues at space stations or other assets. Combat Is flawless.
So l can't see a reason for rolling it back sorry.
I guess some it works some it don't.
I'm no expert but l do think adjusting your settings downmost and then flicking 1 at a time up to see where it breaks.
I've shadows on med
The rest high or ultra.
Bloom n blur off.
AA on x8 and smaa.
Hmd and SS on 1.0
 

TheRoninX

T
peteuplink said:
Maybe. However developers often have a way to revert a change just in case it breaks something. Though, TBH, I'm not really sure how FDev think when it comes to games development, so you may be right.
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Yeah they are using some sort of repo but my point is that's the renderers and such are pretty deeply engrained piece of architecture. May not be that easy to separate those out. Mainly we don't know how deep the roots of those systems go as none of who can read that code have seen it.
 

peteuplink

peteuplink
Dragsham said:
I'm in VR playing elite. An overclocked 3060 and a g2 reverb. And I've no issues ingame with rendering, apart from the odd settlement that judders at points on the base but not all of the base.
No issues at space stations or other assets. Combat Is flawless.
So l can't see a reason for rolling it back sorry.
I guess some it works some it don't.
I'm no expert but l do think adjusting your settings downmost and then flicking 1 at a time up to see where it breaks.
I've shadows on med
The rest high or ultra.
Bloom n blur off.
AA on x8 and smaa.
Hmd and SS on 1.0
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Well I was waiting for that reply. "I don't see why the game should be changed because it works fine on MY system!". The old "it doesn't affect me so why should I care" argument that's so prevalent in society these days. Maybe the devs should stop patching it then, as it's clearly a waste of time due to the game working fine for you. You're obviously more important that everyone else here.

Would you feel the same if it did impact your gameplay and I was telling you that it shouldn't be changed because it was fine on my computer? I reckon you'd probably have a pretty strong opinion on that one.

Did the game look significatly worse in VR before the "upgrade"? Have you had to make any compromises to your visual settings to get the game running the way you want? Would your gameplay actually be any different if the game was cosmetically altered back to the previous visuals? Even for you it's not running the way it was due to the juddering, but even if you can live with that, surely it's not exactly going to cause your world to come crashing down or cause some catastrophic disaster to befall you if the game was tweaked to allow more people to actually play and enjoy it it at a decent frame rate.

Personally, I could care less what the devs decided to do with Odyssey, as I'm playing Horizons anyhow. I only boot up Odyssey to see if the latest patch has made any significant improvements. If it never becomes playable on my PC, then so be it. I'll get a new one at some point and it'll work then. However, I know that many more people are reporting technical issues with the game than there are people able to play it at a good rate, even with high end hardware, and I was just trying to float an idea that might improve things for a wider bunch of players, rather than playing the "Well, I play Horizons. The game works fine for me, so why should I care?" card.
 
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Andro

Andro
For the most part, I like the new lighting. If/when the merge happens, I would hope that all of the complaints are handled case by case. For instance, I don't like Odyssey's emissives and bloom compared to Horizons. They feel very weak and washed out compared to even what you can see in Store images for cosmetics. Compare the Halloween skeleton suits in-game to the store and it feels like something is a bit off.
 

peteuplink

peteuplink
Crank Larson said:
Just stick with Horizons until Odyssey is fixed. The new planetary tech needs work, but going backwards won't help.
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I do play Horizons. I was just floating an idea that might fix things for a wider group of the user base. If Odyssey never works on my PC, I don't really care. I'll have a new PC at some point in the next 12 months, or it may be released for consoles, so it'll probably work fine then.
 

lotusexcelle

lotusexcelle
OP's screenshots show one of my pet peeves - ship paint is broken. I have my whole fleet under the Azure paint scheme which was "neat" looking in Horizons and now it is a uniform flat blue. I think they broke things they can't fix with Odyssey. (How long did it take for culling to come into the rendering pipeline?)
 

Dragsham

Dragsham
Think you'll find that I'm not in a minority. That it works for me means It works for alot of others. So I'm not referring to just me. My mistake presuming you knew that. My bad.
Fact is.. lots of us are content. And don't want it changed.
But l get your passion and anger truly.

Yes l fiddled for weeks. Crashes and blue hmd screens aplenty. I persevered tested changed altered retested and I've got it working.
Am l wrong for that? No.
I'm not a teccy but l do experiment alot to attain flicker free judder free flawless gameplay.
And it works as per
 
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Frop

Frop
lotusexcelle said:
OP's screenshots show one of my pet peeves - ship paint is broken. I have my whole fleet under the Azure paint scheme which was "neat" looking in Horizons and now it is a uniform flat blue. I think they broke things they can't fix with Odyssey. (How long did it take for culling to come into the rendering pipeline?)
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Part of that issue is caused by the random lighting you get depending on where you view your liveries. I'm not claiming they look the same as in Horizons, but the main menu and some of the hangars just bring out the worst in them.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
There is no going back from many points of view. They can only go forward.

I must say though, i do like the new planets a lot more than the old ones. Yes, we've lost some of the more extreme types, and performance sucks for some, and more optimizations are needed, but the new planets are much better (in my opinion).
 

peteuplink

peteuplink
Dragsham said:
Yes l fiddled for weeks. Crashes and blue hmd screens aplenty. I persevered tested changed altered retested and I've got it working.
Am l wrong for that? No.
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I'm not saying you're wrong for that by any means, but given the choice of a nice smooth gaming experience, and all the fiddling about, trial and error and crashes, wouldn't you rather have the former? Sure the latter might look a bit nicer, but it's not really worth all the hassle for some slightly sharper looking textures. It's not even that much of a huge improvement over the previous graphics considering the performance drop.

Personally, I couldn't care less if Odyssey is fixed or not. I'm not playing it. I'm quite happy with Horizons. If Odyssey never gets fixed, I can wait until I buy a new PC or it comes out on next gen consoles. I'm really not bothered. I just thought it'd be nice to suggest something that might possibly alleviate some of the problems for a large number of people istead of just thinking that it doesn't apply to me so why care?
 
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