Frontier - what has happened to your Planets? (Episode 2: Beige Strikes Back)
- Thread starter Obsidian Ant
- Start date
BTW ObsidianAnt, I used your beginner's guide (this year's) when I started this game a few months ago, and I thank you for that. Kudos! [up]
Yeah, being aout exploring again and there is way too much Beige going on. Icy Planets are really the only ones still holding up the candle for Colour Variation.
My 2 cents:
In the second video OA added in the OP, it seemed to me like the planet looked better in the 2.2 version?
Now, I have honestly not spent much time on the surface of planets in Elite....
My reason being, funnily enough, that planetary surfaces (at least on non-atmospheric solid-ground worlds) really didn't strike me all that exciting and start to feel the "same" after a short while (plus I just hate how SRV-surface-vacuum-material-gathering works). They're much more fun to *fly* over in my ship than to land on, and at that point I'm usually happier just doing a flyby in supercruise.
So it kind of tickles my funny bone, that my complaint *before* 2.2 was that landable planets all kinda looked and felt the same, despite how much many of you have enjoyed Horizons...and now we've traded viewpoints, where I now think it looks better & many of you here in this thread have found an apparently disturbing amount of Beige coloring on your former favorite haunts.
I wonder, though, if planets you ignored or that seemed bland to you before - or new discoveries, for that matter - might not have some of the variation & uniqueness you're all after?
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Cotton candy & canyons, what's not to like...? [wacky]
In the second video OA added in the OP, it seemed to me like the planet looked better in the 2.2 version?
Now, I have honestly not spent much time on the surface of planets in Elite....
My reason being, funnily enough, that planetary surfaces (at least on non-atmospheric solid-ground worlds) really didn't strike me all that exciting and start to feel the "same" after a short while (plus I just hate how SRV-surface-vacuum-material-gathering works). They're much more fun to *fly* over in my ship than to land on, and at that point I'm usually happier just doing a flyby in supercruise.
So it kind of tickles my funny bone, that my complaint *before* 2.2 was that landable planets all kinda looked and felt the same, despite how much many of you have enjoyed Horizons...and now we've traded viewpoints, where I now think it looks better & many of you here in this thread have found an apparently disturbing amount of Beige coloring on your former favorite haunts.
I wonder, though, if planets you ignored or that seemed bland to you before - or new discoveries, for that matter - might not have some of the variation & uniqueness you're all after?
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Cotton candy & canyons, what's not to like...? [wacky]
Having spent 3 or 4 more hours out checking planets (hunting geysers/volcanoes), I'm starting to wonder if the color issue is due to a lighting angle/color interplay?
Last night I found an ice planet with an obvious green tone down in the fissures, looking from orbit. As I fly down, the green color slowly shifts to a lower saturation yellow color. So then I drop out of the cargo hatch in my SRV, and sure enough, the shadow of my Keelback on the ground has that stronger green tone, while out in the sun, it's low saturation yellow.
Same thing on planets where I've been hunting for geysers along the terminator (thinking that heating from the sun would trigger geyser activity). The colors are far more saturated and rich there. I fly out to the mid-day part of the planet, and things again seem more desaturated, or even "washed out".
I also noticed that if I'm in an area where the sun is at a steep angle, and the terrain has a rich color, if I toggle the headlights on... The terrain often appears to take on that lighter, desaturated tone where the headlights illuminate it.
Not sure if it's just my graphics settings, but I have observed a few times that when I'm in a bright sun part of a planet and the terrain is kind of "washed out" looking, if I hover my ship just 2 or 3 meters above the surface the dust being kicked up will often have a far brighter, more saturated color tone than the terrain I've above. Most obvious was a case where the terrain was a sand color, and the dust kicked up a bright red. Which makes me wonder whether the lighting is not doing the same magic on the dust effects as the terrain surface.
Last night I found an ice planet with an obvious green tone down in the fissures, looking from orbit. As I fly down, the green color slowly shifts to a lower saturation yellow color. So then I drop out of the cargo hatch in my SRV, and sure enough, the shadow of my Keelback on the ground has that stronger green tone, while out in the sun, it's low saturation yellow.
Same thing on planets where I've been hunting for geysers along the terminator (thinking that heating from the sun would trigger geyser activity). The colors are far more saturated and rich there. I fly out to the mid-day part of the planet, and things again seem more desaturated, or even "washed out".
I also noticed that if I'm in an area where the sun is at a steep angle, and the terrain has a rich color, if I toggle the headlights on... The terrain often appears to take on that lighter, desaturated tone where the headlights illuminate it.
Not sure if it's just my graphics settings, but I have observed a few times that when I'm in a bright sun part of a planet and the terrain is kind of "washed out" looking, if I hover my ship just 2 or 3 meters above the surface the dust being kicked up will often have a far brighter, more saturated color tone than the terrain I've above. Most obvious was a case where the terrain was a sand color, and the dust kicked up a bright red. Which makes me wonder whether the lighting is not doing the same magic on the dust effects as the terrain surface.
I sure hope this is an unintended bug that gets fixed. The first pictures make exploring look fun and exciting. The second set make me want to gag.
Sol - Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons is much different now. The deep blue ice canyons are gone.
Before and after shot: http://imgur.com/a/iOAwR
Enceladus from NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/m15-155b.jpg
Before and after shot: http://imgur.com/a/iOAwR
Enceladus from NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/m15-155b.jpg
It's sad that this has happened to our game.
Mr Ant.
I agree that some of the new colors on the planets are changed and a few planets are too uniformly beige from space. But it's not a universally true nor it is a wholly bad thing. In fact, some of the planets are quite lovely as result of the change. I would say more realistic in most cases. The last video you posted with the 2.2 vistas are quite lovely and accurate imo. Planets could use a bit more variation on a global scale (look more like the planets in Sol for instance), but up close the textures and colors are massively improved over 2.0. I visited Mitterand Hollow for the DW reunion and that planet is very much improved. The varied terrain on the list race course set up by Fleetcom was stunning tbh.
I agree that some of the new colors on the planets are changed and a few planets are too uniformly beige from space. But it's not a universally true nor it is a wholly bad thing. In fact, some of the planets are quite lovely as result of the change. I would say more realistic in most cases. The last video you posted with the 2.2 vistas are quite lovely and accurate imo. Planets could use a bit more variation on a global scale (look more like the planets in Sol for instance), but up close the textures and colors are massively improved over 2.0. I visited Mitterand Hollow for the DW reunion and that planet is very much improved. The varied terrain on the list race course set up by Fleetcom was stunning tbh.
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The problem is that none of this was announced nor has it been mentioned by the devs yet. We still don't know if the colour change was intended or some kind of side effect.
A little explanation from the devs would be nice instead of a non commital "we'll look into it.". 2 months since 2.2 and that's all we have from them on this. I personally think we deserve better than this.
If course they did, but they can't expect everyone read every announcement. In beta thread where there was massive praise for the new surface texture, they did mention that this was step-wise upgrade to planetary textures and colors and that this updated was considered "minor" compared to the more advanced changes they had planned.
I get why some of the uglier plain brown planets aren't being heralded, but some of the comments in this thread seem to be anti-change. That is something I don't understand because of course these planets will need to change in both color and texture. How else can Frontier issue upgrades?
If you don't like a particular planet, then find a new one. There are literally uncountable billions of them waiting for you to find them.
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But I think the point is, the landable planets are predominantly beige unless they are ice planets.
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Maybe they should have put it in a newsletter or a sticky if they felt it was important for people to know. Digging through pages and pages of forum beta threads isn't exactly what I'd call good communication about the fundamental changes affecting their game.
Anti-change for anti-change's sake is indeed silly but I think a fair few players are coming at it from the angle of why change something for the worse? Plenty of really beautiful planets and vistas from pre 2.2 were ruined. Which is ironic since FD used player suggestions for remarkable places to visit for their passenger missions only to make some of those places unremarkable upon the launch of said passenger missions.
To say "don't like it, find a new one." is a bit disingenuous. Especially coming from a member of SEPP such as yourself who felt so screwed over by having some of your systems be claimed by a PP power. Plenty of people told you much the same thing, "don't like it, find a new home somewhere else. How else can Frontier establish a new power? Of course unnocupied by PP systems will need to be used." Surely you of all people can understand how some of these 'anti-change' guys feel about there being no need for a change to something worse in their neighbourhood so to speak.
Of course there will need to be change as the game gets updated but it's Frontier's job to make sure the new stuff is better than the old stuff. Otherwise we're all paying to make aspects of the game (and thus inevitably the game as a whole) progressively worse off than what it was before.
Tan, beige or whatever, it's everywhere. I thought I was just in a particular area with clustered system types because most of them looked the same. Beige. I, for one, would gladly sacrifice accuracy here for gameplay, QOL, improvement. Which, IMO, the more colorful planets were. Now, when you enter a system it seems like all the surfaces are greatly influenced by the main system star because the beige acts like a projector screen and really carries the stars light color too much.
Purple star? Purple planets, mixed with sand.
I do like the new planets improvements, excluding color though.
Purple star? Purple planets, mixed with sand.
I do like the new planets improvements, excluding color though.
They aren't all beige though. Here's a landable adjacent to a neutron star 
Pretty much. I'd just like a bit of variety in the HMC's and MR's, the color variation we had pre 2.2 was very nice and provided some spice and variety to the multitude of landable planets out there. Since 2.2 they've all just been so homogenized that it's honestly bland and boring.
Is that a HMC or a MR? Probably not. And if it is, then look at it's dark side to see how beige it is.
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I checked some icy planets today, and of course they can appear quite brightly colored.
And they also can show a nice depth of darkness and still keep relatively bright colors:
But I still suspect that even on icy worlds, the star 'highlight' effect on the surface is imparting a good bit of "tan" color. Check how the gray terrain in direct sun highlights has a slight tan sheen:
And here it's quite notable on a very green/blue ice world. The shadow line runs foreground to background in this shot, and all in the highlight side, there's a slight "tan" coloration compared to the shadowed area:
Maybe I'm just seeing things, but the star color seems prominent in the highlight effect. In these icy world screenshots, I see no real problems with it. But I've got to wonder if that highlight color happening on the sandy/metallic color planets might be behaving differently.
Oh, and I've also noticed that some of the "fog" effects in 2.2 seem reduced, as others have mentioned. Yet when I drop the external camera below the planet surface, there will sometimes be a thick fog inside the planet. As though it's there, but just not reaching out enough to break through the surface.
In any case, some of the latest close-up planet surface details are really great.
And they also can show a nice depth of darkness and still keep relatively bright colors:
But I still suspect that even on icy worlds, the star 'highlight' effect on the surface is imparting a good bit of "tan" color. Check how the gray terrain in direct sun highlights has a slight tan sheen:
And here it's quite notable on a very green/blue ice world. The shadow line runs foreground to background in this shot, and all in the highlight side, there's a slight "tan" coloration compared to the shadowed area:
Maybe I'm just seeing things, but the star color seems prominent in the highlight effect. In these icy world screenshots, I see no real problems with it. But I've got to wonder if that highlight color happening on the sandy/metallic color planets might be behaving differently.
Oh, and I've also noticed that some of the "fog" effects in 2.2 seem reduced, as others have mentioned. Yet when I drop the external camera below the planet surface, there will sometimes be a thick fog inside the planet. As though it's there, but just not reaching out enough to break through the surface.
In any case, some of the latest close-up planet surface details are really great.
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my bug report regarding this is here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/310871-Planet-textures-inconsistent
For me it looks like it sometimes doesnt load the planetary surface textures. Sometimes I see a beige planet surface, sometimes a detailed (stone-like, grey) surface. I have no idea what the reason is, my best bet is it´s due to the wind direction.
For me it looks like it sometimes doesnt load the planetary surface textures. Sometimes I see a beige planet surface, sometimes a detailed (stone-like, grey) surface. I have no idea what the reason is, my best bet is it´s due to the wind direction.