Questions should be addressed directly to Dr Ross.
New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
Too bad, I wanted to go out exploring with the news planetary tech in place once they iron ut the blurry textures, but if the planets are generated like that it sounds like waste of time 
The buck stops with Braben. His developers are only given so many resources and time to implement things. They do their best.
Its about money money money, and how to milk us for as much of it as they can. The remit was obviously; cut corners, drop ideas a b and c, skimp on this and that. And do it as quickly and cheaply as possible to release a minimum viable product. Ramp up the hype, get those pre-orders in, and bank the cash. Job done.
This is me...Too bad, I wanted to go out exploring with the news planetary tech in place once they iron ut the blurry textures, but if the planets are generated like that it sounds like waste of time
I held off with my trip in Horizons because of Odyssey. I even purchased a set of sticks and VR for the next exploration trip.
Well, not if these are the planets I have to look forward to
This is insultingly lazy. What now for exploration? Good grief, Odyssey just keeps getting worse, when i think of the quality product Horizons was, the difference is night and day. Ah...pfshwlglglglg....i'm lost for more words.
This is me...
I held off with my trip in Horizons because of Odyssey. I even purchased a set of sticks and VR for the next exploration trip.
Well, not if these are the planets I have to look forward to
its weird cause I could swear the alpha planets were better... I have bunch of screenshots here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/12TbZM8Co4HK6pkLz7WD0T_qNn5wDB2BZ
And this folks is why you should never PRE-ORDER!!
Well at least we can still laugh!
It's that, or cry.Honestly throw the entire expansion out at this point. The graphics “improvements” are a straight downgrade even if they had optimizations, the UI is beyond a trainwreck, the on foot gameplay is boring and repetitive even to watch, the shining planetary update is now revealed to be fake, atmos feel plastered on and don’t change the flight model, and the expansion has hit horizons too.What I'm about to show you will be the final straw in cementing the new planetary tech system into a failure.
I remember Dr Kay Ross stating on stream that their procedural heightmap system made use of handmade terrain that would then be randomized across. I was worried when I heard this.
Check this out - I'll let the images speak for itself:
Literally all terrain features both from high orbit to low orbit are repeating, hand crafted, and break every little bit hunger for exploration. There is absolutely no desire to go down and explore since all you're looking at is the "randomly" organized set of hand crafted height map bits the developers have made.
Horizons gives a REAL sense of wanting to go and explore. Find planets with unique features.
Planets in Odyssey are no longer unique. They are just reorganised sets of the same features.
These planets were designed with one goal: look acceptable from an on-foot perspective or when looking from a twilight perspective with a setting sun for the atmo effect.
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I have never requested a Steam refund until five minutes ago.
I was willing to suffer through the tech and rendering issues, figuring they'd be smoothed over eventually. But as mainly an explorer, I find this game-breaking and unfixable. This tiling is clearly fundamental to Odyssey and is not something that can be patched over. Words cannot convey my disappointment.
500+ hours played on Horizons.
I was willing to suffer through the tech and rendering issues, figuring they'd be smoothed over eventually. But as mainly an explorer, I find this game-breaking and unfixable. This tiling is clearly fundamental to Odyssey and is not something that can be patched over. Words cannot convey my disappointment.
500+ hours played on Horizons.
Too bad, I wanted to go out exploring with the news planetary tech in place once they iron ut the blurry textures, but if the planets are generated like that it sounds like waste of time
Same. I had a HUGE trip planned to try explore the new system and (hopefully) snag some amazing screenshots. Let's hope this is a bug in the tech, or a temporary measure to help deal with the performance issues and it will be fixed at some point.
Here is another example - one from the steam page pic another - random pic I found here on the forums...
There are clearly very similar pattern in the terrain. Anyone that did a lil bit of exploration can recognize this pattern.
But please tell me how great this new system is and how fdev did a swell of a job
...
There are clearly very similar pattern in the terrain. Anyone that did a lil bit of exploration can recognize this pattern.
But please tell me how great this new system is and how fdev did a swell of a job
...
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yeah, i accepted his apology the other day, but i retract it because i hadn't seen this. Random planets were one of ELite's main draws, and it seems they are gone, making elite no different to any of the competition. I too want an answer directly for this issue.
I did too. Denied. Having Launcher open to wait for the servers to get back to "OK" counts as playing and put me >2hrs of gameplay. I hope you pulled the plug earlier than me.
The flight model is one of the few things that 100% does NOT need to be changed tbh
Please take your time to restore the procgen the game is famous for.
The new atmospheric effects do look very nice, but there is certainly a noticeable degradation to the quality of the terrain features in Odyssey compared to Horizons. I hope this can be sorted out going forward.