High Metal Content Worlds: 2014 vs 2017 comparison!!!!

[Iskariot]

Allright, in this promotional video by Frontier from 2014, at timestamp 1:02 you can see a ship coming in to land on a high metal content world, an HMC:

https://youtu.be/8yd-m9AR7mY?t=1m2s

Here is the picture from the video of how the planet looks:


http://i.imgur.com/ETvgI2K.jpg


Now remember, this is from 2014, three years ago, but just look at that surface variety!!! There are a myriad of colors all across it's surface, raised plateaus, craters, this planet looks super interesting! It looks like something you'd see in our very own solar system, orbiting Saturn or Jupiter.


NOW, have a look at a so very typical HMC world from today, 2017, taken by me last week as I was flying down to land on it:


http://i.imgur.com/7WWqX2z.jpg


That is how the majority of HMC's look since 2.2: totally monotone, beige or a slightly off shade of beige, next to no color variation at all. 97% of them all look like this now!!!


WHAT HAPPENED???!!!!!?? WHY????!!!??? :S [sad]




Can we please get an answer from Frontier on whether or not this is intentional, or is it a bug that will be addressed in some future update? Just some official word on the matter?

I agree it is a bad, very, very bad change.
The argument that the boring and bland planets are more realistic doesn't fly with me .
I want the universe to look good and engaging.
Boring looking planets are boring and that affects me directly.
I am fine with a bit of exaggerated beauty in a universe I spend thousands of hours in.

 

[verminstar]

It was awesome before the console port *cough*

And yet the problem is exactly the same on consoles...ye should take some proper cough medicine, sounds nasty ^

The port over to consoles happened before the beige, and hmc were fine on both the pc and the bone...now they are not fine on either and this is the fault of consoles how exactly? Engage brain, thought you pc gamers were supposed to be smarter ^

And even if ye were right, that would mean FD officially lied to their players when they told us it was because of realism. Maybe remove that chip of yer shoulder hmm?

 

[Mengy]

Hypothesis

The Cobra Engine is running out of space in its texture buffer, as they add more into the game they have to scale back on the texture sizes......or...alternatively.....they are aligning textures for console.

I don’t think it’s the Cobra engine’s fault. Ice worlds and rocky ice worlds remained mostly unchanged since 2.2, they still have lots of color variations and great terrain generation variety. Rocky worlds too are mostly unchanged and still regularly have colored patches across their surfaces, with some of the best mountains and canyons on all landable worlds.

It’s the high metal content and metal rich worlds that were drastically beiged and plained down since 2.2. For whatever reason all of these two planet types were changed by Frontier. Whether on purpose or by accident we do not know.

It very much seems to me that the stellar forge surface generation routine for just these worlds was altered, in that both color variety and surface feature variety was severely reduced. It’s like the parameter ranges for what CAN be generated for these worlds was limited from a wide range of values to a very narrow range. On these worlds you can often see surface patches of ever so slightly off-beige coloring, barely a hair’s different shade of beige or brown. So, the stellar forge CAN produce areas of other colors, it’s just simply making those areas extremely similar to the beige that the rest of the planet is colored. Same goes for the mountains & canyons. Ice and rocky ice worlds always have mountains and canyons of varying colors compared to their surface, but with HMC and MR worlds the engine just doesn’t choose any color variety.

So the Cobra engine can do it, and back in 2.1 it did with regular gusto. It is only since 2.2 that only the HMC and MR worlds have been changed to be extremely boring, beige, mundane, and terribly un-interesting.


The major question that we still don’t know the answer to is: why?

 

[babelfisch]

Could anyone point me to the post where a dev says the current version is absolutely working as intended? Because that's not how I remember it.

 

[akaliel]

The port over to consoles happened before the beige, and hmc were fine on both the pc and the bone...now they are not fine on either and this is the fault of consoles how exactly? Engage brain, thought you pc gamers were supposed to be smarter ^

Now, don't be rude. Xbox One performance on planets wasn't good when Horizons first launched, there were complaints of frame rate drops especially when ships approached settlements. Experienced it myself. Runs much better now since 2.2 and things look simpler..

 

[Dakron Nova]

The major question that we still don’t know the answer to is: why?

And theres the question that everyone wants to know and FD are not addressing.

Perhaps if one of the Mods could somehow get hold of DB and wake him from his money stuffed mattress he could give the community some sort of response?

 

[Sacman]

Honestly, I think this was the real reason for it. Microsoft and Sony both have rules against devs saying that reductions had to be made to support their platforms. FD can talk about accurate star lighting, but as Obsidian Ant said, there was more to it than that. And oddly enough the Xbox Horizons version hit at around the same time (Xbox release happened with 2.1, beige with 2.2). I played the Xbox version between there and planet side performance kinda sucked.

Really? Didn't expect that to happen ... blame the console kiddies?

 

[Dakron Nova]

Really? Didn't expect that to happen ... blame the console kiddies?

Dont think its blaiming the console kiddies, I have two consoles and a PC. I think its FD not coming clean.

They've had months to come up with a believable lie and havent even managed to put in the effort to do that.

 

[verminstar]

Now, don't be rude. Xbox One performance on planets wasn't good when Horizons first launched, there were complaints of frame rate drops especially when ships approached settlements. Experienced it myself. Runs much better now since 2.2 and things look simpler..

Hard fer me to relate as I was one of those not affected by framerate drops in and around settlements on the xbone, but did feel it on my pc account. Not being contrary just fer the hell of it...I play both platforms and I know what the differences are ^

 

[akaliel]

Really? Didn't expect that to happen ... blame the console kiddies?

I'm not blaming the console kiddies. With 2.1 the Xbox One and PC builds were merged to ease concurrent development. That way they're not essentially always trying to build the same game twice. But the Xbox One has nowhere even close to the computational ability of a PC, and while the PC version can always have the option of higher res assets, etc, some graphical engine stuff can't be split off. We see it all the time, Watch Dogs, Witcher 3, etc. They've all had to make consessions for the console versions of the game. It's nobody's fault, it's just the price you have to pay when you're trying to make something multi-platform.

When Horizons launched for the Xbox there WERE performance issues, especially with planet landings. The changes made with 2.2 were probably in part meant to try and improve that.

 

[Sasquatch_Punter]

I'm not sure how accurate it is. In Elite since 2.2, practically every moon except the ice worlds are beige, even ones with stars like our own. The Moon is not beige.

Yeah. It's grey. So are most of the other airless planets, planetoids, and moons in our solar system.

Under reddish light it would be red. Blue light would make it look blue, etc... so you're right, it's not that accurate.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

What happened was that FD's planetary textures were originally very good, basically photorealistic, but we only had those when Horizons first launched. The issue was that these textures were slowing most player's machines down to a crawl during planetary landings to the point where you would see terrible texture pop-in even at relatively short distances. It wasn't just an issue of GPU power either because although the absolute top-end setups were managing well (i.e., 980 SLIs and such) the textures themselves were extremely resource intensive for some reason and there was apparently no easy way to fix them. As a result they simply downgraded them dramatically so that performance on mid-range machines wouldn't be so utterly terrible.

Owners of high-end rigs did complain around the time the textures were downgraded, but FD clearly decided that it was better to achieve adequate performance with low-res textures then to keep the high-res photorealistic ones in the game. The issue is that they never went back to try to optimize the original textures, they just left them in a very sub-par state instead and that is why we have shapeless, blurry planets that look like they were produced for a 1990's game instead of a game produced in 2017. Unfortnately with FD's excessive monetization of the game (i.e., selling one line of RBG code for $1.75) they are unlikely to invest the time needed to bring the planetary textures back up to par (or perhaps they will, but turn around and try to charge us $1.75 per planet or something).

This is a fallacy. I was using an AMD Fury and a very my old i5 2500k when horizons came out, I still have it. It ran horizons perfectly fine. Zero issues. The close up textures a far better now, it's just that the colouring is not that great for some reason. Hope fully they will sort it out soon.

 

[Sacman]

Dont think its blaiming the console kiddies, I have two consoles and a PC. I think its FD not coming clean.

They've had months to come up with a believable lie and havent even managed to put in the effort to do that.

Thats one of the disadvantages of a multi-platform development ... FDev has to make compromises and i blame the consoles for all the compromises and "bad" game design decisions.

 

[OnePercent]

The 2014 image was a placeholder texture for planets, And multiple HMC or rocky planets had that exact same configuation of textures

RE: My 2014 snap shots of similar planets:



As this is a different location but there were countless planets that have this same exact texture and these planets also weren't prepared to be landed on either, so it's a moot point OP.

The blandness appearance of current landable planets are simply due to tweaks that the devs made, There were plenty of tweaking to the graphics of planets, Mostly to save performance, When there are more interesting things to do on planets, I expect them to look a lot more vibrant in the future.

 

[Dakron Nova]

I'm not blaming the console kiddies. With 2.1 the Xbox One and PC builds were merged to ease concurrent development. That way they're not essentially always trying to build the same game twice. But the Xbox One has nowhere even close to the computational ability of a PC, and while the PC version can always have the option of higher res assets, etc, some graphical engine stuff can't be split off. We see it all the time, Watch Dogs, Witcher 3, etc. They've all had to make consessions for the console versions of the game. It's nobody's fault, it's just the price you have to pay when you're trying to make something multi-platform.

When Horizons launched for the Xbox there WERE performance issues, especially with planet landings. The changes made with 2.2 were probably in part meant to try and improve that.

Spot on, also The Division and Far Cry 4. The developers of these admitted the PC graphics were downgraded for console reasons. FD should just admit it or tell us the other reason if they want to stop this discussion popping up time after time.

 

[Sacman]

Spot on, also The Division and Far Cry 4. The developers of these admitted the PC graphics were downgraded for console reasons. FD should just admit it or tell us the other reason if they want to stop this discussion popping up time after time.

Its not only about graphics ... the whole design process is limited and based on constraints caused by consoles.
I blame the console kiddies.

 

[akaliel]

Spot on, also The Division and Far Cry 4. The developers of these admitted the PC graphics were downgraded for console reasons. FD should just admit it or tell us the other reason if they want to stop this discussion popping up time after time.

They can't. At least not without getting an angry phone call, maybe worse. And Frontier doesn't exactly have Ubisoft's weight. My friend works for EA Montreal, they sign forms promising to not say ANYTHING negative about the consoles they develop for. Telling everyone that the latest and greatest console is the reason why the game looks like rubbish would be included in that.

 

[Nutter]

And yet the problem is exactly the same on consoles...ye should take some proper cough medicine, sounds nasty ^

The port over to consoles happened before the beige, and hmc were fine on both the pc and the bone...now they are not fine on either and this is the fault of consoles how exactly? Engage brain, thought you pc gamers were supposed to be smarter ^

And even if ye were right, that would mean FD officially lied to their players when they told us it was because of realism. Maybe remove that chip of yer shoulder hmm?

Ok you have me confused... are you being sarcastic? "The port over to consoles happened before the beige, and hmc were fine on both the pc and the bone...now they are not fine on either and this is the fault of consoles how exactly?"

So they ported to xbone.... Tried to see if it would cope.... xbone lacking in FPS .... Next build ... OMG everything is nerfed and although the xbone FPS has increased they have been nerfed too!

hahaha - I did chuckle but still not entirely sure if you are being serious ?

 

[Sacman]

They can't. At least not without getting an angry phone call, maybe worse. And Frontier doesn't exactly have Ubisoft's weight. My friend works for EA Montreal, they sign forms promising to not say ANYTHING negative about the consoles they develop for. Telling everyone that the latest and greatest console is the reason why the game looks like rubbish would be included in that.

Really?
You are just joking...

 

[Dakron Nova]

They can't. At least not without getting an angry phone call, maybe worse. And Frontier doesn't exactly have Ubisoft's weight. My friend works for EA Montreal, they sign forms promising to not say ANYTHING negative about the consoles they develop for. Telling everyone that the latest and greatest console is the reason why the game looks like rubbish would be included in that.

In which case they need to grow a pair. Because basically we are now playing a console port on the very platform the game was released and initially funded on.