Do we have a ETA on the cure for the beige plague?

What does Io look like in the game?

Tl6COil.jpg


Which leaves the question how and when the textures of at least sol bodies will be improved.
 
Michael said it wouldn't be in time for 2.3. I would hope it's 2.4. I will wait until we get more info on 2.4 and 3.0 before I will start to complain.

Indeed. For me, 'not in 2.3 but we're working on it' implies 2.4 to me. If it is not in 2.4, then I'll be concerned. Nevertheless, a brief 'yes, it will be in 2.4', 'it may be in 2.4', or 'no, it wont be in 2.4' would clarify a lot already.
 
Michael isn't working on Elite anymore. He has moved on to Frontier's next project.
He was probably one of the only Frontier employees that would occasionally post anything exploration related.
We're doomed :eek:
 
Indeed. For me, 'not in 2.3 but we're working on it' implies 2.4 to me. If it is not in 2.4, then I'll be concerned. Nevertheless, a brief 'yes, it will be in 2.4', 'it may be in 2.4', or 'no, it wont be in 2.4' would clarify a lot already.

I honestly don't expect to see anything for it in 2.4, as I'm pretty sure the Thargoid stuff has the majority of the dev team tied up. I'd love to be wrong of course, but I'm not hopeful for anything on this issue until 3.0 at the earliest. So we have a long wait yet IMHO, hence why I'd love an official update on it.


If it gets fixed for 2.4 I think I'll literally cry tears of joy. Unless the fix sucks, or makes it worse, then I'll cry tears of incredible deep sadness and despair.
 
Michael isn't working on Elite anymore. He has moved on to Frontier's next project.
He was probably one of the only Frontier employees that would occasionally post anything exploration related.
We're doomed :eek:

We're currently working on a more flexible material system, and this will necessitate a fresh balance pass on these. That's not going to be in 2.3 though.


He wasnt doing that on his own, that is not his job. They are working on a new system.

I honestly don't expect to see anything for it in 2.4, as I'm pretty sure the Thargoid stuff has the majority of the dev team tied up. I'd love to be wrong of course, but I'm not hopeful for anything on this issue until 3.0 at the earliest. So we have a long wait yet IMHO, hence why I'd love an official update on it.


If it gets fixed for 2.4 I think I'll literally cry tears of joy. Unless the fix sucks, or makes it worse, then I'll cry tears of incredible deep sadness and despair.

Considering we dont have any info on what kind of DLC structure there will be, nevermind when it will arrive, I would find it not being in 2.4... disappointing. What I am most curious about though is what the new system would result in, beyond bring color back!
 
Last edited:

verminstar

Banned
Michael said it wouldn't be in time for 2.3. I would hope it's 2.4. I will wait until we get more info on 2.4 and 3.0 before I will start to complain.

Is micky still working at frontier? Thought I saw some thread or other saying he had gone on to greener pastures, so...anyone else at frontier care to fight our corner?

Im hoping against hope its in 2.4 but if its not, Ill be unhappy...way unhappier than I am now, now Im just a bit miffed and fed up with this forum in general...things certainly could get much worse in that respect but with no news, its like nails on a chalkboard...one can just either put up with it or leave and I already took 4 months out because of it to go play other stuff ^
 
This is a critical issue, but it's definitely not top of the list. What should be top of the list is compelling PvE content, quest givers that form a part of a larger story, epic quests that require more than one player and tactics and coordination to defeat. Then the beige planets, as a matter of urgency. I don't see how some were trying to justify it as being realistic at the start of the thread. It isn't obviously, but even if it was, are they seriously saying it's ok to land on the same planet over and over and over again in a game with several trillion of them? Essentially there are probably a trillion identical planets in ED galaxy after this bug. In reality, the number of identical planets (under the same judgment (or in game terms normalisation rules) to the same degree) is....probably none. But let's put that aside, and just say it isn't fun to land on the same planet again and again. As for the terrain changes, don't even get me started. Sort it out Fdev, first compelling PvE stuff, then the beige plague! Please! Also, isn't this thread already worthy of a dev post on activity alone? Please? Come on it's been a while since we had an update on this. Why can't you just roll back the old system? Better cracked planets than boring ones. Thanks in advance!
 

verminstar

Banned
This is a critical issue, but it's definitely not top of the list. What should be top of the list is compelling PvE content, quest givers that form a part of a larger story, epic quests that require more than one player and tactics and coordination to defeat. Then the beige planets, as a matter of urgency. I don't see how some were trying to justify it as being realistic at the start of the thread. It isn't obviously, but even if it was, are they seriously saying it's ok to land on the same planet over and over and over again in a game with several trillion of them? Essentially there are probably a trillion identical planets in ED galaxy after this bug. In reality, the number of identical planets (under the same judgment (or in game terms normalisation rules) to the same degree) is....probably none. But let's put that aside, and just say it isn't fun to land on the same planet again and again. As for the terrain changes, don't even get me started. Sort it out Fdev, first compelling PvE stuff, then the beige plague! Please! Also, isn't this thread already worthy of a dev post on activity alone? Please? Come on it's been a while since we had an update on this. Why can't you just roll back the old system? Better cracked planets than boring ones. Thanks in advance!

I agree somewhat but many would argue, meself included that the planets colour and terrain are the very definition of compelling content. Others will argue its quality of life features, although up until the promise of "soon", others argued it was intentionally done fer realism (haha) while others argued it was the fault of consoles...yeah really :rolleyes:
 
This is a critical issue, but it's definitely not top of the list. What should be top of the list is compelling PvE content, quest givers that form a part of a larger story, epic quests that require more than one player and tactics and coordination to defeat. Then the beige planets, as a matter of urgency. I don't see how some were trying to justify it as being realistic at the start of the thread. It isn't obviously, but even if it was, are they seriously saying it's ok to land on the same planet over and over and over again in a game with several trillion of them? Essentially there are probably a trillion identical planets in ED galaxy after this bug. In reality, the number of identical planets (under the same judgment (or in game terms normalisation rules) to the same degree) is....probably none. But let's put that aside, and just say it isn't fun to land on the same planet again and again. As for the terrain changes, don't even get me started. Sort it out Fdev, first compelling PvE stuff, then the beige plague! Please! Also, isn't this thread already worthy of a dev post on activity alone? Please? Come on it's been a while since we had an update on this. Why can't you just roll back the old system? Better cracked planets than boring ones. Thanks in advance!

Its seems there are many lists. C&P has been mentioned a lot too, NPC wings, extended missions, explorer mechanics, actual Thargoid gameplay, spacelegs, atmo worlds, you name it. Thats the problem with such a big game, it appeals to many different people with many different desires. :p
 


Ok but Io is a literal explosion of sulfur. As in it has a sulfur dioxide atmosphere, and for that reason I don't think it's landable in Elite. So it doesn't really have any relation to the types of planets we're talking about, which are atmosphere-less worlds.

Sulfur dioxid looks like this:
45703243.jpg

And this:

sulfur-fumarole-kawah-ijen-volcano-lg.jpg

Papandayan_03.jpg

Which is all the more reason to be hopeful/eager for the addition of planets with even minimal atmospheres at some point in the future. But again it's not all that relevant to the matter at hand.
 
Is micky still working at frontier? Thought I saw some thread or other saying he had gone on to greener pastures, so...anyone else at frontier care to fight our corner?

Im hoping against hope its in 2.4 but if its not, Ill be unhappy...way unhappier than I am now, now Im just a bit miffed and fed up with this forum in general...things certainly could get much worse in that respect but with no news, its like nails on a chalkboard...one can just either put up with it or leave and I already took 4 months out because of it to go play other stuff ^

I would be surprised if he was the only one working on it. I believe they have a whole team for planetary surfaces and planets in general.
 
What I am most curious about though is what the new system would result in, beyond bring color back!


My gut feeling is that they'll be implementing something like how Space Engine does it now, incorporating "biome" material regions onto planet surfaces with varying assigned material colors. The Stellar Forge does this now to a small degree, and maybe more than we realize, but from what Michael described the core of the problem is the lack of color variety for said materials currently. If they just widen the random color ranges and increase the "biome" diversity you'd get much more realistic looking and interesting planets. Something more like Earth's own moon rather than the plethora of monotone beige planets we currently have in game. Now on top of this if they adjust the terrain gen to increase variety and features (ie: increase the perlin noise they currently use to generate the height maps) then we'd have both more colorful and more interesting looking planets. Planets with larger mountain ranges and much more pronounced canyons, more diversified craters and much more pronounced tectonic regions.


This is what I hope they are doing now, or planning to start doing "soon".
 

verminstar

Banned
I would be surprised if he was the only one working on it. I believe they have a whole team for planetary surfaces and planets in general.

I wish I shared yer optimism, I really do...but I dont and wont until I hear that from the horses mouth so to speak. Not a reflection on you personally, dont take it that way, but I really wanna hear that from them before I start believing it. Ive been on the hype train before...wasnt a very happy outcome in the end so Im highly skeptical nowadays ^
 
I remember looking for barnacles on dozens of worlds before the beigoid virus struck. Although for the most part even then the variation was pretty limited, they still all felt like individual worlds and so peaked my imagination in different ways. I had some very intense and enjoyable experiences cruising round on some of these differing worlds where nothing happened, but it was still loads of fun. The colours and terrain variation of old lent allot of richness to planetary exploration. For a game that relies so much on imagination and specifically for explorers, this has been a big blow.

Having said that i fancy it's been a bit better since 2.4, the textures are looking amazing to at least anyway. I look forward to seeing if the devs are slipping a fix in for 2.4, fingers crossed. My dream of barren atmospherics for 2.4 has long gone now :(
 
They did. Then the same people that were complaining before are now complaining they dont believe it. So what is the point?

For me it's not that I don't believe they intend to fix it (well the colour issues anyway, I can't say that I've even seen any reference to the fact that every landable planet in the game is now essentially a proportionately identical version of a stock type in terms of the prominence of terrain features) I just wish they would have given it a higher priority. I would actually like a better idea of a timescale than 'not in 2.3' since that effectively means '2.4 or later', an utterly meaningless statement without an end point to the potential time period being included. It could mean next week or in Q3 of 2024.

Also note I'm saying 'I would like'. Not 'I demand' or anything similar.

Like I said, so much of the selling point of the game is the stellar forge and the proc gen galaxy yet the amount of variety diminishes with each change. Sure, you'll have a shallow canyon that zags instead of zigs or a trough in an ice world that bends right instead of left but you won't find a small world with a towering mountain or a deep chasm relative to its overall size, nor will you find the variety of colour which used to enhance those aspects of the terrain even further.

The whole point of exploration (for me at least) is to seek out the beautiful, the rare and the unique. It used to be that every time I landed on a planet I'd be marveling at the distinctiveness of that individual world, I could spend hours driving around just for the fun of it knowing that over the next hill could be something jaw-dropping.

Now it's like the Borg have taken over. It's rare that I bother landing other than to pick up some materials because the variety that used to motivate me to do so just isn't there any more.

I think it's worth bearing in mind here that planetary landings were actually the headline feature of the Horizons season. That's why I'm more than a little bemused about the amount of time that has been spent ing about with other aspects of the game when one of the absolute core building blocks of it is in such a woeful state of neglect.

If it was down to me, I'd be addressing it before Thargoids, the 176th balancing pass of shields, the introduction of 56 new engineers all of whom will make my heatsinks 10% more effective and God knows what else they may decide to focus on before finally sorting out the planets, which are after all pretty damn important in any space game, let alone the one that constantly trumpets how many systems it includes as a selling point.
 
Last edited:
I wish I shared yer optimism, I really do...but I dont and wont until I hear that from the horses mouth so to speak. Not a reflection on you personally, dont take it that way, but I really wanna hear that from them before I start believing it. Ive been on the hype train before...wasnt a very happy outcome in the end so Im highly skeptical nowadays ^

I agree. I want to hear it too, but I can wait until we see more of 2.4, which shouldn't be too long as it is coming this quarter. We should be getting beta at the latest the end of next month if they want it released by the end of september. For all we know, there could be reasons. It may not be ready in time for 2.4. It may well be. They may not know if it will be ready by then.

There could be good reasons why they don't want to show it. It may tie into exploration content down the line and won't be ready until then. I suggest someone ask the question at the next live stream.
 
Top Bottom