It's still a picture. The only difference is that it's generated before you jump into a system. There's no realtime performance issues associated with that.
That's true vice versa. What's your point?
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FAO FRONTIER: List of Graphical Changes / Issues for since Patch 1.3
- Thread starter Obsidian Ant
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I never said it was perfect, but at least you could chill in the shadow of an asteroid then. Now they're like spirit rocks or something, jarring.
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And I want to take a moment to thank the dudes/dudettes behind:
-planet popping issue resolved in 1.3 finally
-transition texture of roid rings improved in 1.3, before it looked like this with super obvious tiling and blurriness
It just feels that sometimes FD take an easy way out of problematic situation.
-planet popping issue resolved in 1.3 finally
-transition texture of roid rings improved in 1.3, before it looked like this with super obvious tiling and blurriness
It just feels that sometimes FD take an easy way out of problematic situation.
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I was replying to tucker's point.
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Optimisation takes many forms and in a complex system it can have all kinds of knock on effects. It certainly isn't restricted to "routines"
The skybox was actually not generated from the galaxy data during the Alpha phases.
Sacrificing fidelity over perfomance isn't one of them, though.
Okay? That doesn't mean anything in terms of visual quality or performance.
"Fidelity" is an ambiguous term that has no technical measurement. Performance can be measured and benchmarked.
The sky map is an example of how the graphics have changed since the Alpha to implement the logic required to build the game. We have a situation of open development where users get to play builds prior to release, if we're pointing at those builds and highlighting them as examples of where the graphics have changed it's important to be aware of why/how they changed and as demonstrated, you were not aware of it.
What I meant was decreasing quality over performance. I'm not native to the english language - bad choice of words can happen.
This has nothing to do with the context of this thread. You were using it as an argument for increased quality, even though the end result is the same as with a static backdrop.
Again what do you mean by "quality"? It absolutely isn't the case that those ambiguous expectations can be maintained during development. The graphic artist will provide high poly count assets at the start of a project, for example, but those will never been used in the final game. It's a normal process to reduce the complexity of graphics to get the desired performance during game development and that may very well come under optimisation.
The background change is a completely relevant example. How can we point at things in previous builds and say that they have been downgraded without understanding the full story behind the changes?
If it's simply a case of shouting console console evil evil! Without having discussion, logic or fact then count me out anyway.
That does look good. The lightning is clearly superior to what we have now.
Apart from the fact that they were. Didn't you see the comparison shots between the different builds of the game, including post release?
Dude, visually, there's virtually no difference between low and ultra settings, apart from the fact that ultra runs slow for some reason. What's the point of having high end hardware when you can't take advantage of it?
I'll quote your original post here:
You make it sound like there's a difference in what the skybox was and is now (which it isn't), and that it has some relevance to the visual appeal of the rendered objects in the game, which is the bone of contention of this thread. It doesn't. It's a consistency thing.
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Man I do hand it to all of you on your in-depth analysis of this situation with FD. I wish I had the patience to type out my thoughts as eloquently, but all I can do is agree, nod and post short acknowledgements.
That being said, I paid for PC Beta not being a Beta-tester for future platforms. FD please hire people to bug hunt your games, or pay us!
That being said, I paid for PC Beta not being a Beta-tester for future platforms. FD please hire people to bug hunt your games, or pay us!
Then don't bug hunt the game. Accept that when you buy a beta, there are going to be bugs, but you don't have to raise tickets.
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The idea behind Elite Dangerous was always that it was going to be built with the backing of players. We were going to contribute funds to get it off the ground, and we were going to help by beta testing it and giving (constructive) feedback. It was also understood that this game was going to take a number of years to develop into a full-featured product.
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Where I think Frontier went wrong in this relationship is to involve players into the development, but to then not involve them: not communicate with them, give lots of feedback, make them part of the technical discussions and balances of consideration that are part of the process (e.g. the lengthy team discussions about how to light planet rings, the various trials on how to paint stars in the sky box, the pros and cons of CQC for the console, the difficulties in getting all the ships out at launch). Of course that only works by having a good discussion lead and by forum members making mature and constructive contributions, but I think that could have been managed.
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Basically Frontier can't have it both ways: they cannot launch the game as a community funded/backed effort and then go their merry own way and not involve the community. Communications have been a little bit better (but from my perspective not great) and I appreciate that they've been trying harder but I still get the sense of the team being a bunch of Sheldon-esque guys with poor social skills, genuinely not understanding what people are so upset about. The whole recent ruckus around Sarah-Jane Avory, the only team member who makes the members feel involved (and it is typical that she is also a writer --a skilled communicator) suddenly being moved off a project that is close to the membership's heart without as much as a word of explanation is another example of how Frontier does not get the community involvement bit: that with its advantages in terms of funding and free beta testing there are also obligations and responsibilities beyond simply coding the game, to involve members, or at least inform them of management decisions that normally would stay in-house.
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This is not a Frontier-is-evil criticism. I believe that they are genuinely working hard, and want to do their best to deliver a good product in Braben's vision while trying to keep it financially viable in the long term. I just don't think that they understood the nature of the transaction (relationship wise) they went into with the community when they put this project out to Kickstarter. I think a lot of developers don't. I think this is something they need to give some thought.
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The idea behind Elite Dangerous was always that it was going to be built with the backing of players. We were going to contribute funds to get it off the ground, and we were going to help by beta testing it and giving (constructive) feedback. It was also understood that this game was going to take a number of years to develop into a full-featured product.
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Where I think Frontier went wrong in this relationship is to involve players into the development, but to then not involve them: not communicate with them, give lots of feedback, make them part of the technical discussions and balances of consideration that are part of the process (e.g. the lengthy team discussions about how to light planet rings, the various trials on how to paint stars in the sky box, the pros and cons of CQC for the console, the difficulties in getting all the ships out at launch). Of course that only works by having a good discussion lead and by forum members making mature and constructive contributions, but I think that could have been managed.
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Basically Frontier can't have it both ways: they cannot launch the game as a community funded/backed effort and then go their merry own way and not involve the community. Communications have been a little bit better (but from my perspective not great) and I appreciate that they've been trying harder but I still get the sense of the team being a bunch of Sheldon-esque guys with poor social skills, genuinely not understanding what people are so upset about. The whole recent ruckus around Sarah-Jane Avory, the only team member who makes the members feel involved (and it is typical that she is also a writer --a skilled communicator) suddenly being moved off a project that is close to the membership's heart without as much as a word of explanation is another example of how Frontier does not get the community involvement bit: that with its advantages in terms of funding and free beta testing there are also obligations and responsibilities beyond simply coding the game, to involve members, or at least inform them of management decisions that normally would stay in-house.
.
This is not a Frontier-is-evil criticism. I believe that they are genuinely working hard, and want to do their best to deliver a good product in Braben's vision while trying to keep it financially viable in the long term. I just don't think that they understood the nature of the transaction (relationship wise) they went into with the community when they put this project out to Kickstarter. I think a lot of developers don't. I think this is something they need to give some thought.
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Yes, good thread. I was wondering myself why the graphics has been down graded? the ship texture is now pretty simple compare to beta, and the planets LOD are just not up to the job.
I don't want to blame the XBONE version to be the guilty one, however it seam strange that we see these kind of down grades. If you check the sound, we have only seen a steady improvement, it is getting better and better (how long can they make it better) however the graphics are getting more and more simple by the looks of it.
+Rep @OP.
I don't want to blame the XBONE version to be the guilty one, however it seam strange that we see these kind of down grades. If you check the sound, we have only seen a steady improvement, it is getting better and better (how long can they make it better) however the graphics are getting more and more simple by the looks of it.
+Rep @OP.
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Lighting (which was probably altered to be more plausible) is far less of an issue than the degree of geometry pop-in we see in more recent builds.
The game does perform much better now than it did in earlier builds. I recall some situations that used to bring comparatively powerful systems to their knees, even on a single display. I think it's more of a balancing act between making the game accessible and making it look good than it is about any specific concession for XBox. Indeed, I would not be terribly surprised to find out that the average PC running Elite: Dangerous was not substantially more powerful than an XBox One.
As for sound, I hear crackling as of 1.3 that I never heard before...
Sorry, but if you actually played the Alpha and you didn't notice the graphical change between the painted sky dome and the procedurally generated one that replaced it, which was heavily discussed at the time, then you can't sit there and tell me you are noticing graphical changes now. It was one of the main discussions during the Alpha. Here is a video I made around that time. It's painfully obvious that we don't have those green painted nebula now and the star density is massively different.
I guess what it all comes down to is whether you are prepared to believe that the changes are due to mundane everyday reasons that don't excite forumites and allow them to get excited:
The subjective "quality" isn't locked in, the team probably has very few regression tests that can measure this "quality" and any optimisations and bug fixes they make can affect the graphics in a game like this that has so many possible variations. Replacing one of the shader "functions" you talked about from say an O-log-N operation to something cheaper might make a huge frame rate improvement. Perhaps they have to change something to stop the game crashing out completely on an entire range of current generation hardware. Those kinds of changes could almost certainly have knock on effects that are hard to test. The results under certain circumstances appear in the Forum and the developers are forced to make further improvements yet can't go back to the previous changes because the measurable implications are far worse than subjective loss of "quality".
Or you can simply conclude that Frontier don't use source control or branches for hardware targets, and are painstakingly trying to make a single build of the game that runs on both PC and console.
Or you can simply conclude that someone at Microsoft is paying Frontier (and a host of other developers on the early access program) the millions of dollars required to silence an entire dev team for life (even when they leave Frontier) and make very small changes to the PC version of the game to bring it in-line with the X-box version. Therefore securing an almost insignificant number of sales for those that have access to both the PC and console and don't care about all the extra peripherals and advantages of the PC version but do care significantly about missing dust in an asteroid field under certain lighting settings. We have to conclude that Microsoft think that massively small subset of gamers (if they exist) are so important that they want to invest probably more money than Frontier make on the game in the first instance for a almost non measurable return on whatever small percentage they get on these obscure early access titles.
Or you can come up with some more scenarios with better logic to back up your arguments.
No, I'm getting tired of this. Nibble on a rep cookie, and consider this over. Cheerio
nom nom nom
Sure it performs better now, however the difference between maxed out and medium settings are barely noticeable. At least there should be a larger difference don't you think?
FD say you can run the game on 8k if you want, however the resolution is only a tiny part of the graphic experience. I don't know how this Cobra engine works regarding raytracing and PBR HRD and what not. The experience remain that we see in some situation a lesser quality than before. Sure there has also been improvements like the sky box.
My point here is, we are currently not in Beta. When the Beta test server is up I can choose to install and test or not. When I do, I Beta test and am fine with it but when I'm on live not so much. To me it is hard to believe that with set minimum and recommended requirements they do not have employees that play test the game. Most current bugs can be observed in one normal gameplay session.
What are the bonuses of having in-house testers?
You have a baseline reference of specs on the lower end as well as upper end.
You can setup a Lan to monitor net traffic between specific computers and its effect on the game using software that mimics common network issues.
Complicated bugs are easier to target because of first hand experience.
Play testers have a direct line to development for swift resolution.
Other than that, I do agree with the rest of your reply about the need for more communication. Wholeheartedly.
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