New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)

Just

Just
BlackMaze said:
Something I hope they improve on is the "canyon" walls that appear incredibly stretched out because their height map or texture system doesn't really account for it properly.
Phm4td1.jpg

High preset with max terrain work and model draw distance
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I agree there is a problem,
but disagree with SOME of the conclusion.

As I have already mentioned "high is the new low" is the issue.

What has to be improved is
not as much "quality" of the surfaces new engine can generate,
as "performance" problem which prevents most of players to use ultra/ultraforcapture settings.

I just checked several videos I have recorded flying in canons in EDO, and it never looked that BAD as on your examples.
BUT it was on mostly highest settings, AFAIR (ultra/ultraforcapture),
that is just not playable on anything below RTX 2060/2070 ("pain threshold" is estimated).

Changes FD made to game engine resulted in so bad impact on performance,
that on low/medium even high terrain settings you have next to none quality benefits of new tech,
with a lot of visual downgrades instead, which were needed co compensate for higher hardware demands
and resulted in barely acceptable peformance on low-medium GPUs anyway with some ugly graphic artifacts,
like stretched, blurry textures on slopes.

Below are some examples of what I experience in game.
And those are NOT high or even normal quality in-game screen captures,

those are stills from youtube videos, recorded while flying (fast)

so distant textures are in some cases not preloaded completely.

Therefore what you see is actually a bit worse then what you can get in real time on RTX 2070s when you stop rushing forward,
and before two passes of video compressing (recording+youtube) that this graphic has been exposed to under way.

BTW: link to playlist with my EDO recordings is in signature, in case someone has to check how game REALLY performs on ultra/ultraforcapture settings.
Not every video is on maxed out settings though, they are made for testing purposes and as such I change some settings occasionally.

K0nzGhw.jpg

mSZW3F0.jpg


NK5hy9m.jpg


UFdcJgz.jpg
 
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Erei

Erei
Even when the texture are not stretched you can see a problem.
Example from this thread :
op1b254vjhp.png

The canyon top is full of noise. It's spikes and spikes. It's very random and doesn't make much sense. Then the canyon walls are absurdly flat themselves, and the canyon valley is also terribly flat. The entire canyon feel like it's a cake and some kid decided to put his hand in the middle to grab a bite. It's very linear, no branching no nothing.
You get a weird thing where the noise feel it was applied on top to make it look like it was noisy, but not elsewhere. It's extremely unnatural. Feels like someone's first map in an editor, quite frankly.
Now, a rare canyon like that I'm ok with. But the majority of those I saw look like that.

Next :
UFdcJgz.jpeg

Let's disregard textures stretching. We have several others issues there. First, the textures are not placed according to terrain, and are wrong. They are fake, and that's true everywhere. See the black textures on the left ? It's elsewhere but more visible there. It's "fake" rough terrain. It's 2021, why don't we have actual rough terrain instead than a texture ? It's full of fake cracks and so on. When it's on the ground you can just walk on top of it and see it's just 2d.
And it's even worse because it was placed on a canyon wall, where it's nonsensical. Especially since it's place randomly, like a pattern in a blanket, you get random "rough" patch repeating around. With no sense of altitude variation or anything.

Then you have the limit between canyon wall and valley on the left. It's nearly a 90° angle. And perfectly delimited, no rocks no nothing, it's this : I_. It's completely unnatural, and feel like, again, a poorly drawn map.

Look mum I made a canyon : ^^^^^^I____I^^^^^^^.




While current planet generation suffer a multitude of bugs, which eventually will be fixed, I assume, it also suffer from several core issues.
-texture to represent terrain feature, making it 2d and fake
-very poor terrain representation "here you have a mountain, there a canyon, and I add very random noise on top to make it look not obvious"
-a lot of planet are excessively flat and boring, with sudden raise in terrain
-even without mentioning the repeating tiles, a solid 30% of the non atmo world comes with the same giant crater copy pasted.

While the new planet gen certainly is better for atmo (I mean, we had nothing in horizon for that), and have a potential for "pretty", it's also a downgrade in several aspect. And I truly hope it's not intended. But stuff like texture instead of actual feature makes me doubt for some of it. You don't do that by accident.
 

Just

Just
Erei said:
Even when the texture are not stretched you can see a problem.
(... a lot, lot of text ...)
Click to expand...
So.... I just wanted to show that this really ugly stretching is an aftermath of desperately tweaking new tech for acceptable performance,
not a "perk" of the new tech.
So, instead of stretching(!) this to several other issues, I will just paste a few more "not so stretched" canyon textures.

uS6nNiy.jpg


jcDL3Kp.jpg

4rt6cMn.jpg
 

Erei

Erei
Just said:
So.... I just wanted to show that this really ugly stretching is an aftermath of desperately tweaking new tech for acceptable performance,
not a "perk" of the new tech.
So, instead of stretching(!) this to several other issues, I will just paste a few more "not so stretched" canyon textures.

uS6nNiy.jpg


jcDL3Kp.jpg

4rt6cMn.jpg
Click to expand...
Yup, and as I said, while the stretched texture is an issue by itself, there is also a core issue with how it looks. The limit between canyon wall and "floor" is nonsensical most of the time.

Stretched texture will likely be fixed. So we talked about it, and I think there is no more need for that. But I'm more concerned about the core issues.

As for textures, when you have simplistic textures, and you use them instead of noise, it's for performance or lazyness. Since Fdev is not a new indie company, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it's for the former, not the latter.
 

roryclague

roryclague
So from what I am seeing, there are a few things that just definitely need to be fixed. We should consider compiling a list of the highest priority items and ensure there is a ticket in the issue tracker for them. Reasonable people can have different priorities, of course. But we should try to come to a few items we can all agree on, whether you are someone who thinks the new system is mostly okay or whether you are someone who wishes the whole new system should just go away. It isn’t going away, but what are the issues you need to see fixed in order to be satisfied with the new system?

As for myself, I guess my highest priority items are as follows (in order of impact):

1. Fix the error that causes the Mie scattering (the volumetric fog you see on planet surfaces) to not appear in the sky. It seems like it shows up below the horizon, kind of ‘painted’ on the landscape, but it doesn’t seem to affect the sky. When I dismissed my ship in the alpha, I would see a shadow of my ship in the volumetric fog in the sky. You also see these shadows in rings. In the release build it isn’t showing up in the sky on planet surfaces anymore. But the effect of the fog does s show up in distant mountains. I think this is just a case of a bug.

2. Make adjustments to the noise function that creates rough terrain. This is just a matter of taste, and therefore a lower priority, but something about the changes made between the alpha and the release build yielded large areas of pimply mountains is certain ‘geological provinces’ (for lack of a better word). It seems like these provinces were created with an older parameterization of the noise function in mind and now they don’t work as well. Again, the effect has not been to eliminate all mountains. I have found some massive ones that look fine in recent travels (6-7 km tall from the surrounding plains). But in many areas on planets the noise system generates these small hills with steep sides that look almost like ‘miniature’ mountains. It is as if the height map dictates that certain smaller hills should exist, but the noise function resolves the hills from one another so that they don’t blend in a way. Instead of hills with broad bases and short heights, their foot print is tiny, giving them steep sides.

3. Bring back more of the beautiful rock scatter we saw in the alpha. I think this was turned down in the release build to make it easier to drive SRVs. I personally think they went a little too far.

4. Adjust the lighting system to look a little brighter and more contrast on the day sides of planets. I understand that shadows won’t look dramatic at noon, but these are tenuous atmospheres. There should be some more contrast in the textures in bright conditions. Of course with a dustier atmosphere (getting back to point number 1) this contrast should be attenuated. As it should with dimmer stars farther out,

5. Fix whatever is going on with certain ice planets. I feel like subsurface scattering was turned up too high in the alpha (it looked like some icy rocks were actually glowing) but now I barely see subsurface scattering also they need to fix the spilt ice cream look in certain places. I think this last point is just as honest bug.

6. Some combination of textures and the terrain noise system is causing some textures to be stretched too much. Especially on the needle hills I described. I think this stretching might be fixed by optimising the terrain noise, but if not they need better ‘cliff’ textures. Horizons had special textures for cliffs when terrain was steep. I think Odyssey does, too, but it seems like they were created for the previous terrain noise. They need to tune this a bit.

I’ve said before that the new system is capable of delivering far better results on average than Horizons. They just need to fix a few things.
 
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Just

Just
Erei said:
It should be obvious to everyone that extremes are always 2 faces of the same coin, and neither are healthy. Extremes are destructive by nature.

But hey, here we are.
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I blame it on emotions.
We just love this game too much.

And jumping from love to hate or denialism are typical reactions/mechanisms when target of your affection is not what it used to be anymore :sneaky:
 

Alec Turner

Alec Turner
BlackMaze said:
I've come back with another comparison. I mentioned the loss of Taylor Keep before. That was a beautiful INRA base in a crater, in a crater, between the central pillar in the crater.

I've just gone to check out a Guardian Site in Vela Dark Region JS-T b3-0, planet A 3 and it had the guardian site set in the most incredible location, with the circle overlooking the vast terrain much lower:

Horizons:
unknown.png


Horizons:
unknown.png


And here is the same location in Odyssey. To no surprise it looks like every other planet:
unknown.png


unknown.png


Wow... Just wow...
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Don't know if it's been linked already but I made a separate thread on this subject today.

Has Odyssey trashed the idea of scenic surface POI's?

Apologies for the slightly clickbaity title but I wanted to discuss another concern that's becoming ever more apparent in Odyssey as we get to visit more and more of our favourite Horizons POI's. So as people will know by now, the regeneration of planet surfaces that was necessary in order for...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
 

Sunyavadin

Sunyavadin
M_72 said:
Identical terrain features on two different worlds, apparently.

I don't want to believe it. Would love frontier to say something about this. Is it true?

Source



View attachment 238802
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Presumably because the entire terrain feature there as a whole, the ridge from start to finish, is a single prefab, and so will appear somewhere on probably billions of worlds.
It's the fundamental core of how the new planet tech works.
 

M_72

M_72
Sunyavadin said:
Presumably because the entire terrain feature there as a whole, the ridge from start to finish, is a single prefab, and so will appear somewhere on probably billions of worlds.
It's the fundamental core of how the new planet tech works.
Click to expand...

So the galaxy no longer contains unique locations, as no matter where we land, potentially millions of other worlds will have the identical geological layouts and features as those we're standing upon?
 

Sunyavadin

Sunyavadin
M_72 said:
So the galaxy no longer contains unique locations, as no matter where we land, potentially millions of other worlds will have the identical geological layouts and features as those we're standing upon?
Click to expand...
Essentially the way this system works is like all the planets are made of lego. The bricks can come in a wide assortment of sizes and shapes, but you will keep seeing the same bricks in different combinations making up different planets. The fewer the total different types of bricks, the more you see repetition.
 

M_72

M_72
Sunyavadin said:
Essentially the way this system works is like all the planets are made of lego. The bricks can come in a wide assortment of sizes and shapes, but you will keep seeing the same bricks in different combinations making up different planets. The fewer the total different types of bricks, the more you see repetition.
Click to expand...

They just killed their own 1:1 scale galaxy then. That 'feature' of Elite Dangerous has no more meaning. Its a sham.
 

CMDR Fnool

CMDR Fnool
M_72 said:
Identical terrain features on two different worlds, apparently.

I don't want to believe it. Would love frontier to say something about this. Is it true?

Source



View attachment 238802
Click to expand...
I have been for a while now under the impression that this indeed is what happens, it's truly terrible compared to the randomised planets of Horizons, a real butchery of something that was previously much better. There was an official video not long ago on Youtube where their spokesperson Harry/Arthur (please forgive me as i cannot remember the correct name right now), said something along the lines of, we hear the fans about planet tech but we're still looking to see how the reaction from the players goes, before we change it because it would be such a massive undertaking, In other words, if there's a big enough hoo-ha about it we may change it, but if we can just let things be we'd prefer that'.

That's what i took from his comment at least, and i have a feeling a few despairing explorers like us on this thread won't be enough. Frankly, the excitement David Braben had for his project in the early years, well i cannot see it anywhere, because the old David would never have thought this new tech was an improvement on the Horizons system of finding truly new topography every time. I'm still in a state of sort of disbelief, because this was a very big feather in Elite's hat, that appears to have been plucked out and and thrown away.
 
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BlackMaze

BlackMaze
Honestly I've been waiting for someone to post this. Beyond tiling terrain features on a single planet.... This is the next step. We now have copies all throughout the galaxy. Maybe with a different terrain texture pattern or a different rock scatter or noise pattern overlayn. Maybe another terrain feature gets mixed in but in essence... It very much still is the same, non-unique feature that you'll find... all over...

This is the death of exploration should this not get fixed.
 
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