Development Update 1 - June

I know, Which still doesn't change what I said earlier, that we're discussing a subjective opinion about how the game looks. Which to me is fine. Different than it used to, but fine.

Many people seem to simply not like the fact it looks different and are demanding it should look like it used to. I can understand that some people don't like change but end of the day, things do change and we either deal with it, or we don't.
But a big part of the question is, was the change intended or not?

A lot of FDevs responses indicate that the changes were not intended. Or at least, not to the extent that they have changed.
 
I know, Which still doesn't change what I said earlier, that we're discussing a subjective opinion about how the game looks. Which to me is fine. Different than it used to, but fine.

Many people seem to simply not like the fact it looks different and are demanding it should look like it used to. I can understand that some people don't like change but end of the day, things do change and we either deal with it, or we don't.
I'm dealing with it - not buying EDO and deciding in a year if I'll buy it or not - but certainly not at full price - this chance for them is gone. Meanwhile I'm enjoying my new games. And if they mess up EDH as well with this awful lighting, I'm going to uninstall ED for good. That's dealing with it.
 
Oh boy, is this all the updates you've given us regarding the "FUTURE OF ODYSSEY"? As always, FDev never fails to disappoint. You could have easily written this for like four weeks ago, and you made the community wait for this insignificant "update regarding the FUTURE OF ODYSSEY". Odyssey itself is lacking in content already, and this "FUTURE" isn't really far from that truth.
 
  1. Degraded terrain textures compared to Horizons (https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/32854)
    • Pathways have been identified to improve this and a team is actively working on this area.
  2. Planetary features that appear to repeat (https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/34834)
    • We understand this is an important topic within the community. As mentioned at the start of the article, we want to share the challenges as well as the positives. Investigations are still ongoing, however, it must be said that this is proving to be a very significant technical challenge. At the current time we do not have a workable solution. BUT, investigations will continue and we will keep you updated.
So no actual information then aside from "we are working on it".

What is the "significant technical challenges" here? The planets were much better in horizons and are copy paste in Odyssey. Why can't you roll back the planet tech even if it means disabling access to some worlds?
 
I can't really believe the shareholders are reading this forum :ROFLMAO:
The forum, no. But official communication ?

I think you misunderstood @Cryvern - there is no keybind for internal cockpit lighting, only for the ship's "headlights" (which are stupidly dim in Oddity).
I'm talking about that :
noLight.jpg
 
I'm dealing with it - not buying EDO and deciding in a year if I'll buy it or not - but certainly not at full price - this chance for them is gone. Meanwhile I'm enjoying my new games. And if they mess up EDH as well with this awful lighting, I'm going to uninstall ED for good. That's dealing with it.
So you don't actually own Odyssey? Sorry, I thought you were telling me about how bad it looked on your system earlier, my bad I guess.
 

Deleted member 182079

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OK never mind then.... Some high end CPU's satureate the GPU with needless file transfers because broken render skeduler which keeps loading textures from disk, by slowing down the CPU it gives the GPU time to draw pictures as it's not swamped with file transfers the game is asking for.
Spotted this by accident, I just tried it and yep... lowering CPU to 60-70% brings GPU utilisation right down to 70-80% (normally at 98-100% for me). It also lowers the framerate not sure if that's supposed to happen but this doesn't make a lot of sense to me...

Incredible though.
 
"Here are the fixes you'll see in tomorrow's update anyway, and here are some pending defects."

This is a bug fix report disguised as a development update, which is the same category of mistake that was made with the roadmap that was not a roadmap.

We're being asked to bear with Frontier on the basis that they're busy working on the fixes in the updates, which I have no problem doing.
However, if instead we were given some information about the kinds of features Frontier are planning but without being given any timeline, then asked to bear with Frontier while the timeline is being remeasured due to prioritising the updates, that would have been far more appreciated. That would have been something.

As it stands, this post is the equivalent of trying to plug a hole with water.
 
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So you don't actually own Odyssey? Sorry, I thought you were telling me about how bad it looked on your system earlier, my bad I guess.
Nah, I'm not careless enough to buy it before I have seen it, sorry. But I have carefully watched those streams and because I wasn't under any stress, I could focus on certain aspects like lighting or texture issues and stuff like that. I might have seen more flaws than you playing it.

I said during the alpha already, that this game isn't finished and not ready to release - a lot disagreed, but in the end I was right with it. I said as well that the game is lackluster and lacks variety, and a lot said, there would be much more to come and we would just see a slice of it - well, and who was right with this as well?

And now I say, they are not any near to being able to get the console version approved - this is a guess of course, I just consider their general behavior and this is the what I'm making out of what I see. A bunch of excuses because they need all their staff to get the console version any near to be somewhat finished - so I have as well no hope for that there will be something significant changing in the next few months in the PC version, because I think not many are working on it currently. Let's see if I will be right with this as well. I think the odds are in favor of my guess though.
 
Which to me is fine
You don't see the difference between gamma and brightness.
we're discussing a subjective opinion about how the game looks
This is not a subjective opinion. Every industry has standards. In the odyssey, visual standards are completely violated.
Any argument that this is okay is extremely silly.
I can understand that some people don't like change but end of the day, things do change and we either deal with it, or we don't.
You don't see the difference between quality changes and design mistakes.

Do you still have questions?
 
So no actual information then aside from "we are working on it".

What is the "significant technical challenges" here? The planets were much better in horizons and are copy paste in Odyssey. Why can't you roll back the planet tech even if it means disabling access to some worlds?
To me it means just one thing - let's say a team of 20 software engineers can solve this in a week - then it might take 2 working on it 10 weeks. IMO it takes them so long, because not many are actually working on finding a solution - not even talking of implementing it yet, just finding. That text just means they haven't even found the cause of the issue yet - or they know well where it is, but have no solution to redesign it in a way, which could easily be implemented.

These pattern repetitions might be intentional but shouldn't be that obvious. Unfortunately they are - so what now?- If it is intentional design, they need more patterns and a way to integrate them so, that it's not that obvious anymore. Or make a redesign, which might be a lot more complicated to do. I'm not saying it is intentional design, but it could well be intentional and would require some redesign - and that takes time - especially if not that many are working on it. IMO they need their software engineers working on the console release and just a marginal staff is caring about the PC version at this point in time - I could be wrong though, but I think not being that far from the truth.

From observing streams it looked to me that some features seen from space disappear when the ship is approaching the surface - so they used quite an amount of hacks with the new planet tech - that is what that means to me. Using predefined patterns and distort them to be less obvious might be one of those hacks, This is why I think, this is eventually a design decision and not really a bug, but just a poorly implemented hack.
 
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100% happy? Which features? Flesh out EDH systems more? But folks are conveying the impression that EDH systems and planets are amazing....you'd risk that? Add meaningful content? Remember how they added multi-crew and wing stuff? Sounded great...but they did in a way that barely anyone used it. Multi-crew used to show the number of ships available to be boarded, etc. They removed that when noone wanted crew, since all the numbers were always at 0. Do you think if they added 'meaningful' anything, it'd be in a way you'd like? They'd market it, buy ED now with more meaningful interaction, and all it'd be is the picture of the faction leader making an expression after the mission, you know? And we'd be like "thats what they call meaningful interaction"?

There'd be pages and pages of complaints and suggestions. That is the true constant here, even if not intended.
I missed your post before, sorry, but now I read it anyway.

I will tell you what I actually think about the future of ED. IMO the train for being able to compete with the concurrence has left the station a long time ago already. All that stuff, Mr.Braben was dreaming about can be found in other games already - and they are working fine. NMS has a weird art design imo, but man can you do a lot of stuff there, which is too complicated for FDev to do. NMS is so far ahead of ED, it is not even funny anymore - like a ferrari compared to an amish horse and buggy. The flight model in NMS is arcade like, ED's is better, at least for those loving it, but when it comes to planetary exploration and things you can do on those planets, no comparison - ED is far far behind.

So imo ED would do better to flesh out what they have and where they still have some advantage instead trying to do something what takes them an eternity to do, whereas others do that in weekly or monthly updates - and for free, it doesn't cost anything extra. For FDev this train has left the station and it's not going to return. ED had a future once, but FDev with their snail paced development has missed the opportunity - well, that is what they can do best - missing an opportunity and wasting potential.

This is certainly not a popular opinion - but I wanted to be clear about what I think about it - and why I think it would be better for FDev and ED, to flesh out what they have instead trying to do something, where they will never be able to compete, because they are too slow and are invested in too many different things at a time.
 
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You don't see the difference between gamma and brightness.

This is not a subjective opinion. Every industry has standards. In the odyssey, visual standards are completely violated.
Any argument that this is okay is extremely silly.

You don't see the difference between quality changes and design mistakes.

Do you still have questions?

Yeah, do you get out much?
 
I missed your post before, sorry, but now I read it anyway.

I will tell you what I actually think about the future of ED. IMO the train for being able to compete with the concurrence has left the station a long time ago already. All that stuff, Mr.Braben was dreaming about can be found in other games already - and they are working fine. NMS has a weird art design imo, but man can you do a lot of stuff there, which is too complicated for FDev to do. NMS is so far ahead of ED, it is not even funny anymore - like a ferrari compared to an amish horse and buggy. The flight model in NMS is arcade like, ED's is better, at least for those loving it, but when it comes to planetary exploration and things you can do on those planets, no comparison - ED is far far behind.

So imo ED would do better to flesh out what they have and where they still have some advantage instead trying to do something what takes them an eternity to do, whereas others do that in weekly or monthly updates - and for free, it doesn't cost anything extra. For FDev this train has left the station and it's not going to return. ED had a future once, but FDev with their snail paced development has missed the opportunity - well, that is what they can do best - missing an opportunity and wasting potential.

This is certainly not a popular opinion - but I wanted to be clear about what I think about it - and why I think it would be better for FDev and ED, to flesh out what they have instead trying to do something, where they will never be able to compete, because they are too slow and are invested in too many different things at a time.
No problem.

My take on it is that they seriously dont want to use any server time. So they implement these things they said they would, and they do actually work, but they're so annoying to use, that noone uses them. The result? Folks buy the game $$. Folks dont use the things that cause server load, so they save $$.

The other reason things could suck is that it's just very hard to add anything without it breaking other things. Is that because of the way systems are designed? It could be everything is just stretched to their limits already, let alone adding more. We only have 128 bookmarks, or some finite number, which seems small, but if there were more the systems may not load, or would load with x number less things. Why cant they just add comets? Maybe it just breaks it all.

NMS is something this gets compared to a lot, and I just dont see it in the same boat at all. Could it be? I'd say yes, but why isn't it? And what boat am I talking of? Not the stuff you can do, because in NMS, that is so fun...can bore through planets? Elite cant have overhangs? What? But the 'wow' visuals. Flying to a planet in NMS looks so unreal where flying to one in Elite looks amazing. NMS has this distinct look, but far from real. Could they in time change that? Couldn't they just make the planets look sweet like in EDO? Cant they just go through the assets and 'bump' them up a notch? Or does it break if they do that? To me, it seems they have a system, as you say, where they could do that and it wouldn't break up. So why haven't they?

There's another game called SC where they cant make one system, but they have a crazy high level of realism. Is that maybe the thing? EDO can only barely work at the level they're at because going higher just breaks the whole thing up? I dont make games, but Im at this point of "why dont these things happen"? Are there valid reasons? I see the snails pace, but why the snails pace? To make it go faster, dont you just add more snails? Or is it they're going fast, but they have so many holes to plug, what should take a week takes months?

These last 2 years, I actually thought they were going to put ED into a whole new engine. But now you see they've used the current one but probably have taken it to it's maximum. To me, its fine, as Im enjoying how the planets look and I do like the FPS. But it still seems like if they fix thing #1 then things 6, 14, 18, 24 break and they have to fix those which means things 32, 46, 89, 1599 break, etc. That may be just how tough it is to work with the current engine. (if it's not a thing in making games, I'd love to know but it's the only thing that makes sense for the time it takes). So my hope is maybe they realize they need a new engine...squeezed this one till its dry.

ED future? New Engine. How about making one that's editable for f*ck sakes? Maybe a new Elite? Take my money.
 
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