Issue Tracker: Planetary Tiling

[londonx]

I guess what I'm struggling with is ... imagine an extension to the tech that adds a whole load of new tile sets allowing for more variable, intricate, narrow and harded edged valley and ravine systems. If they're unwilling to re-generate the galaxy of Elite (by which I assume they mean planet surfaces) then how can they apply that extension without upsetting existing topography and thus requiring a fresh bake-in of surface installations etc? I guess that's why I wanted them to improve things now while it's not entirely too late. The only other possibility I can see is that they open further types of (currently unlandable) planets in the future and are free to add enhanced topography to those without upsetting the existing ones.

I would guess that ultimately that is what we will have to wait for, access to new planet types to visualise more of what the tech can do. I was hoping to see a steady stream of art asset updates to the existing planets but I guess priortity will always be headline content.

The new planet tech was basically about giving the planets a realism pass, the insinuation being that Horizons wasn't realistic enough for the game ideology. I buy that. I recall the Horizons tech being proud of the crater placement and macro effects such as mineral/chemical composition as bestowed by Stellarforge on the birth of the System, but Odyssey went further and talked about vast and infinitely divisible geological regions and macro formations. Which is what causes the rare tiling artifacts but it oozes potential.

The end result was that extremes were toned down and large "plains" formed, which is what drove much of the initial horror, but I like the direction and the ideology of the new planet tech and noted that the bigger picture was hardly talked about. I liked the Horizons planets, it is what made me buy the game, but standing on an undulating desert terrain with sandy dunes and a mountain range in the distance in Odyssey, knowing that the complete picture isn't a staged prop, hits on another level.

So if we are pushing more toward realism then we would expect more different terrain experience where there is more potential for erosion, dense atmospheres and volcanic activity. I am particularly curious to see if such ice planets will then end up more like the concept art back in 2016.

 

[Thatchinho]

I guess what I'm struggling with is ... imagine an extension to the tech that adds a whole load of new tile sets allowing for more variable, intricate, narrow and harded edged valley and ravine systems. If they're unwilling to re-generate the galaxy of Elite (by which I assume they mean planet surfaces) then how can they apply that extension without upsetting existing topography and thus requiring a fresh bake-in of surface installations etc? I guess that's why I wanted them to improve things now while it's not entirely too late. The only other possibility I can see is that they open further types of (currently unlandable) planets in the future and are free to add enhanced topography to those without upsetting the existing ones.

Yeah, it’ll be the last bit IMHO.

The kind of rework that’s been described would only be done with a view towards how to optimally get towards the long term vision.

I mean, for EDO itself a full rework of the planet gen tech wouldn’t really have been that necessary and would likely have been a massive overinvestment. Which means it’s been done with a view to the future.

(It also strongly suggests that the Horizons planet gen tech was a dead end when it came to bodies other than airless ones, but that’s a slight aside.)

 

[MacIntoc]

I have spent about £115 on this game since I started playing. That includes pre-Arx cosmetics, the Odyssey deluxe alpha pack, and Arx. Doesn't include the base game and Horzions as my friend gifted me those. I haven't bought any equipment specifically for this game; I play with a mouse and keyboard on a flat-screen monitor (I spent £300 on a VR headset but don't use it for Elite).
How much is my opinion worth? (Hint: it doesn't matter.)

It worth what you want it worth. You have 6 votes on issues, use them as you want. It's a stupid rule but that's not my rule.

Complain to those who don't care enough to vote instead of complaining that not everyone votes like you.

 

[Vi7ER]

Go FDev

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

It definitely doesn't inspire me to buy Odyssey. Though after playing those "other space games with planets" (you've seen my pics in OA's Discord), I tend to not visit planet surfaces in Elite unless I have to, even in Horizons. These days I'm more interested in how Elite's planets look from space. If the very obvious tiling seen from orbit has been fixed, well that's something at least. Like you, there are other things that bother me about the new planet tech, like Odyssey's popcorn stucco mountain ranges as seen from space. And like you, I doubt anything in planet tech will change going forward.

But I also see the other side of the argument, in that if the new tech can generate amazing planets, even if they are rare, that would at least give me something to look for as an explorer. I already weed through dozens of boring systems looking for those needle-in-a-haystack planets in Horizons, so I could in theory do this in Odyssey Lite as well. And if Frontier is serious about fixing performance and bugs as this thread suggests (though I have my doubts), eventually Odyssey might cross my personal threshold of "not inspired" to "inspired".

I'm actually finding far more amazing looking planets in Odyssey then what I did in Horizons. And when down in the ground, they look even more spectacular, most of the time.

 

[aRJay]

...

On the other hand maybe I'm reading too much into that and they really did just mean tiling specifically so perhaps we may still one day get improvements to the tech that generates mountains like this.

(and yes, I apologise for using that example after promising I wouldn't when someone fooled me with real world mountains that look just like it ... it's still ugly tho right?)

Yes it does look 'ugly'* but the alternative is all planets or terrain in the game are pretty or better which is so fake or gamey that it would be much worse. Ugly has its place if only to make other stuff look better.

*Apart from the dreary colour I wouldn't actually use ugly for that, clumsy especially the overstretched 'z' axis which makes it look quite fake.

 

[MartinG]

I'm sure pre made stamps and planet pattern really helps for variety over random gen.

Depends on what kind of variety one is after, I guess.
I, for one, was always disappointed that rocky ice worlds in Horizons were not at all distinct from icy worlds.

I've seen the "fake volcano". Seen them ? Speaking of the one that are shaped kinda like a volcano. Sometimes the hole is misaligned. It's... bad.

Yes, a cone with a weirdly off-centre caldera. Looks strange, but also shows there is a good dose of randomness in Odyssey’s terrain generator.

Or the neverending lava fountain that disappear 50cm away from it.

Sounds like a bug in the terrain renderer, not generator.

Or the impossibly U shaped canyons that are the bread and butter of Odyssey worlds.

Pretty sure I’ve seen a lot of U-shaped canyons in Horizons, too.
As for the impossibility of their shape, well, I think that’d take someone with a good knowledge of planetary science to judge. Let’s keep in mind we are dealing mostly with low-g icy worlds here.

I did geological studies. University and all. Odyssey is no better at it than Horizon. It's a different kind of suck.

I have no reason not to believe you. The more one knows about geo stuff, the easier it is to see the flaws. I have the same kind of problem with astrophysical stuff in ED (and unlike planetary terrain, that is the kind of stuff that, in general, cannot be fixed without starting fresh).

Geological accuracy is not a big deal to me, I know I'm one of those rare people who likes rocks and why I'm not invited to parties anymore. But you can't claim it's better^^

Well, I am not really qualified to judge geological accuracy myself; I rely here on the opinions expressed in other threads by other people.

However, as far as the relationship between the size plus composition of a body and the overall terrain looks goes, I do claim Odyssey is better than Horizons. Again, it has been explained well by someone else in another thread.

[on erosion features]
Heightmap can't for some, while random gen probably can. Like caves. Or anything with any kind of overhang. It's just a limitation of heightmaps. Nothing that can be done besides doing it manually.

Caves and overhangs are not what I had on mind.
The very first picture in that mega-thread on the subject clearly shows erosion features that are not possible to generate with an on-the-fly terrain generator without some kind of template.

There are things Odyssey terrain does better. There are others where it does worse.

Agreed.

EDIT : I don't want to be rude toward Dr Ross or imply she lied or whatever. I believe her and I think she is right. I also believe the current tech we have is NOT the one she made, at least in a "full" version. Whether it's bugged, nerfed or whatever, it's a less good version.
The planet patch we had about a year ago made it closer, but it's still not it, by some margin.

I think the current tech is the one Kay made, but she ran out of time to finish and balance it properly (and perhaps to make more terrain templates) before the Odyssey release (which I think we all agree was badly rushed). For example, I can guess (based on my knowledge of random terrain generation algorithms) there is a function that governs how rough the terrain is. In Odyssey alpha that function was too much biased toward high roughness values; in the release it is too much biased toward low values, hence too much flatness everywhere.

 

[MacIntoc]

*Apart from the dreary colour I wouldn't actually use ugly for that, clumsy especially the overstretched 'z' axis which makes it look quite fake.

And yet...

 

[Ian Skippy]

edit: who cares

 

[aRJay]

And yet...

Yes it looks a lot better when not rendered in that dreary colour and doesn't look quite as stretched as before.

I know that is real but it looks fake to my eyes as that is not a terrain type familiar to me

 

[Alec Turner]

I was about to write ...

Well this is something of a first for an internet forum (I wonder if I should contact the newspapers?).

Recent comments from londonx, thatchino, MacIntoc and others are starting to sway my opinion. Perhaps ...

... I've been hasty in my condemnation of Odyssey planet tech?

But then I decided to finish with a humorous P.S. about missing crater nipples, went looking through old screenshots for an example and found so many images of awesome Horizons mountains and canyons that I've seen nothing like in Odyssey that it made me very sad and cross all the above out again.

 

[rootsrat]

I was about to write ...

Well this is something of a first for an internet forum (I wonder if I should contact the newspapers?).

Recent comments from londonx, thatchino, MacIntoc and others are starting to sway my opinion. Perhaps ...

... I've been hasty in my condemnation of Odyssey planet tech?

But then I decided to finish with a humorous P.S. about missing crater nipples, went looking through old screenshots for an example and found so many images of awesome Horizons mountains and canyons that I've seen nothing like in Odyssey that it made me very sad and cross all the above out again.

To me the new surfaces are both better and worse. When Ody surfaces work, they can be much better than EDH. But the parameters used to generate them in Ody look like they are from the extreme sides of the spectrum very often, which can produce weirdly looking terrain. And not in an "alien aka mysterious, not seen before" kind of way, but rather "wrong and unrealistic in the context of the game world".

But hopefully this is something that can be adjusted without rerolling the galaxy.

 

[MacIntoc]

But then I decided to finish with a humorous P.S. about missing crater nipples, went looking through old screenshots for an example and found so many images of awesome Horizons mountains and canyons that I've seen nothing like in Odyssey that it made me very sad and cross all the above out again.

For me, this is precisely the problem with Odyssey. Not the credible appearance of the planets. Nothing in Odyssey can't be found on Earth or in the solar system. Which is a shame when you have a galaxy of potential.

 

[Alec Turner]

For me, this is precisely the problem with Odyssey. Not the credible appearance of the planets. Nothing in Odyssey can't be found on Earth or in the solar system. Which is a shame when you have a galaxy of potential.

Apologies if I've misunderstood but I'm not sure I'm even talking about particularly other-wordly landscapes. It's more about variety and complexity and the way Horizons planets lure me to explore them because it's so apparent that there are amazing landscapes to be explored over each horizon (whereas Odyssey worlds give me the sense that it's all going to be just more of the same).

Here's a few random examples of what I mean.

Spoiler

 

[Rubbernuke]

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

Exploration is pretty much dead then. Since only explorers really care if planets look good and interesting.
Odyssey is a serious downgrade in how planets are generated, gone are the unique procedurally generated planets leaving us with planets with simpler height maps and hand made assets just scaled and rotated at random to try and look unique, often resulting in the obviously 'tiling'.

Those that only play the 'space' part of the game won't care because they rarely go low enough to notice.
Those that actually have hardware capable of playing the Odyssey ground content seem happy enough to just run around shooting NPC clones at the dozen different layout cut-n-paste 'settlements', they won't care.

Odyssey offers only an insult to explorers anyway with the bare minimal effort biological scanning tool and the pointless ( and worthless ) grind for ex-biology.
So with this announcement, exploration is dead.

Speak for yourself, I didn't explore before odyssey because there wasn't anything interesting to do on the Horizon planets. Yes, occasionally you'd find an interesting canyon world but for most of the time, it was pretty boring. Beige Plague anyone?

With the atmospheric worlds that came with Odyssey, I'm finding exploring much more enjoyable. The plant scanning gameplay is great in a chilled out way (Although I do wish you could do something more than just scan them eg. Harvesting for mats) and some of the vista's I'm comig across are great, especially since the art upgrade in update 8.

As I've said on the show many times, although Horizons does generate some fantastic planets but those are the outliers; the vast majority of Horizon planets are even more flat and boring than Odyssey ones. The main problem I have is having the performance to see them at their best. Some of the planets look great in Horizons because my graphics card can handle Horizons at Ultra, but it can only handle Odyssey at Mid. Of course the planets, Guardian ruins, etc are going to look better in Horizons.

I'd love to upgrade the graphics cards but thanks to covid, the superconductor shortage, Bit coin miners and scalpers; what would have been an affordable graphics card for this upgrade is out of reach.

 

[Northpin]

As I've said on the show many times, although Horizons does generate some fantastic planets but those are the outliers; the vast majority of Horizon planets are even more flat and boring than Odyssey ones. The main problem I have is having the performance to see them at their best. Some of the planets look great in Horizons because my graphics card can handle Horizons at Ultra, but it can only handle Odyssey at Mid. Of course the planets, Guardian ruins, etc are going to look better in Horizons.

Indeed, but i have yet to find Odyssey planets with impressive terrain features.
Most mountains i've seen in EDO are 1000 meter or so. Rarely 2000.

And i still fondly remember the very nice mountain near Dav's Hope in Horizons. And many many other more or less impressive features that are no longer present in EDO.

Sure, some of the atmo planets are really beautiful once you land.
A 500m mountain looks huge from on-foot.
The colors are beautiful.

But from space? that planet with 500m mountains suddenly doesnt look that nice anymore.

 

[MacIntoc]

Most mountains i've seen in EDO are 1000 meter or so. Rarely 2000.

I found one that was almost 8 km high. But from the ground, it looked like it was barely 3~4 km. It's really hard to get a good sense of distance without a proper volumetric atmosphere.

A 500m mountain looks huge from on-foot.

I have exactly the opposite feeling. I often feel like i'm looking at a model rather than a landscape. Something that don't happen to me with Horizon.

 

[MartinG]

The new planet generation seems to have taken the seamlessness of a planetary system out of the equation:
[attempt to get an SRV into orbit]
Vow. Many realism. Grate artiste. Very applause.

AFAIR that whole “taking the SRV to orbit” thing was just exploiting a hole in ED’s FOR system (which is as full of seams as it has always been). Well, it seems FDEV has fixed that bug in a not untypical heavy-handed way (see also POI farming).

Nothing to do with terrain generation, though.

What worries me, is that you may very well be correct. I don't want them to kill my favourite game, but that's exactly what seems to be happening.
FDEV as a whole will (already has?) recover(ed?) from the EDO disaster, but I'm afraid E: D will not.
I hope I'm wrong, and there's still will to get the mess sorted so that E: D survives.

“Reports of the death of E:⁠D are greatly exaggerated.”
While the announcement that started this thread was negative, it was nowhere near a blow to the future of E:⁠D, the way cancelling EDO on consoles was. Rather, it was an admission that fixing the problem is way too much work for quite limited gain. As I already said, to me it was not at all unexpected.

Honestly, for a lark I gave EDO a try this week on my vastly below min spec laptop + the most basic and completely free GFnow service. 60 FPS almost constantly in the tutorial, lows at 50fps. High settings, 1080p. For a tenner a month I could play this, and all my other games, in ultra on an ancient crap laptop with onboard GPU and shared 8GB memory. I could even play it on my tablet or phone in ultra, or cast it to my TV and pretend I have a console with EDO.

Now that is interesting. Could you give more detailed specs of that laptop?

If this tiling is as rare as people claim (different people claim different things, so I have no idea what the truth is), could Frontier offer to manually change specific planet "seeds" for those very few broken planets? I honestly don't know how difficult this would be, but in theory it might be very easy. In other words, if tiled planets are just a bad roll of the dice, players could report those specific planets and ask Frontier to roll the dice again for that specific planet. It might be as easy as Dav writing a little script where he enters the system name and planet number and script generates a new seed for that planet, thus instantly fixing the planet.

Yes, it surely coudl be done; in fact something like this was done for that moon in Pomeche so that it has huge canyons and mountain ranges it has been famous of. However:

• someone would have to manually check all the planetary ports and settlements, to see if they are sensibly placed;
• it may be necessary to boot all ships landed there (outside hangars/pads) to orbit;
• there may also be other issue we are not aware of.

For these reasons, I do not think FDEV will want to invest resources in fixing single bad cases.

Or stick a tourist beacon on them and put them into the lore, could have a Codex for ticking off curious repeating patterns in the natural world.

Tourist beacon, maybe (although FDEV may be reluctant to do that, to leave the option of improving the tech someday open).
Codex, only for manual entries by FDEV, because recognizing “curious repeating patterns” takes a human being (and the above caveat applies, too).

Plausible I guess I'm OK with - but that's typical of what I see everywhere. That's common. The mountains that look like mountains (to my mind), those are the ones that seem rare.

Keep in mind that most landable worlds are very low-g, and mountains on those are likely to look different.

By the way, we do not have many close-up pictures of low-g worlds in real life; even pictures from the surface of the Moon are restricted to the areas where landing is likely to succeed.
(We do have close-up pictures of a couple of asteroids, but those are extremely low-g.)

I guess what I'm struggling with is ... imagine an extension to the tech that adds a whole load of new tile sets allowing for more variable, intricate, narrow and harded edged valley and ravine systems. If they're unwilling to re-generate the galaxy of Elite (by which I assume they mean planet surfaces) then how can they apply that extension without upsetting existing topography and thus requiring a fresh bake-in of surface installations etc? I guess that's why I wanted them to improve things now while it's not entirely too late. The only other possibility I can see is that they open further types of (currently unlandable) planets in the future and are free to add enhanced topography to those without upsetting the existing ones.

That is how I see it, too.
Then again, “unlikely to change in the future” does not mean it will not change when (and if) fully atmospheric worlds arrive.

 

[Erei]

I have exactly the opposite feeling. I often feel like i'm looking at a model rather than a landscape. Something that don't happen to me with Horizon.

There is something off with the sense of scale ever since Odyssey.
This is an engineering settlement seen at 280km :

I can literally see the overall shape of it, and it's taking about 1-2mm on my screen. The settlement itself is relatively small. Perspective is ridiculously off.
Try it at Deciat, I think, the engineer with the huge communication/radar looking tower. You can see that thing from hundreds of kilometers away, and even the outlying building.

You can even see the light and some limited details from near orbit. It's crazy.