New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
Like you've had your 'Ready Brek' this morning?
I'd forgotten I had that skin on... But in the darkness it did look fun!
Don't see any tiling or repeating patterns...
We'll have to take a closer look.
Yeah, that's not Odyssey at its best. I'll have to post some tonight from out here on the rim.
![[VR] Merkir](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/141/141091.jpg?1553527154){kind=avatar}
You would have missed my edit, shortly after my original post:
Edit: Turns out I'm only about 2000 Ly from that first system. Might hop on over to take a look.
No thanks. I just wanted to see how obvious they were on your first planet (answer: very obvious). I don't need to investigate further. Every landable planet uses these pre-generated terrain shapes, so every planet you posted will be the same - thousands (or millions) of repeating tiles.
And therein lies the problem. Until Odyssey, I've been able to explore and appreciate the uniqueness of every planet in the galaxy. But now, what we have is every landable planet using the same preset terrain tiles. And there are very few tiles - they're stored client side after all - just a few GB. That's why we see the same terrain tiles pop up on so many planets.
I fully accept that some players don't care about this issue. I'm a little surprised though that some dedicated explorers find this acceptable, or hand wave it away with "I don't notice". It's not just the noticing, it's the knowledge. Because it's now known that the terrain tile you're standing on right now is repeated not just on the current planet, but literally on millions (probably billions) of other planets across the 400 billion systems of the EDO galaxy.
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I think this is where we differ.
If I don't notice it, then it's good enough for me to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the game as a simulation. It's only the stuff that gets "in my face" that bothers me, because that takes me right out of the game.
You notice this stuff a lot more than I do, so of course you are less happy. It's "in your face", right?
But I find even the examples you posted to be more than realistic enough for me. If you had not circled the repeating textures I would not have noticed. Now that I've noticed, I still think it's fine. And I think it's a huge cut above anything I ever saw in Horizons. That's my opinion, just one of many in this thread.
Anyway, I'm a happy CMDR.
I think this is where we differ.
If I don't notice it, then it's good enough for me to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the game as a simulation. It's only the stuff that gets "in my face" that bothers me, because that takes me right out of the game.
You notice this stuff a lot more than I do, so of course you are less happy. It's "in your face", right?
Firstly, thanks for replying in good spirit... it's appreciated.
And the answer is yes, it's definitely "in my face". It takes the best part of a minute to descend from orbit to planet surface, and during most of that time (altitude 150 km to 3 km, say), the repeating terrain is absurdly obvious to me. I'd literally have to shut my eyes not to see it. It probably doesn't help that I code procgen "worlds" as a hobby, after decades of scientific/business software engineering.
And here we differ again (nothing wrong with that ofc). The thought that every planet in the galaxy is now repeating the same terrain tiles turns me off exploring, and the whole game if I'm honest. Other players have said it's lost its soul - the whole raison d'etre as extolled by David Braben when explaining the ED procgen galaxy so many years ago.
And I've seen no good reason given by FDev for why it's been done this way. Nothing I see in the new finer detail pre-generated terrain couldn't have been done with procgen in real time (with the exception of some of the erosion/alluvium we see right now, but which could have been approximated with known simplifications). It would have been a great project for software engineers and as post grad theses. IMO FDev have gone for the quick and nasty solution - and it shows. They're a business first and foremost after all.
Yeah, I can see that, for sure.
But I feel like it's leaving out a lot of what makes a place unique. Even if the textures are recycled, the locations themselves are still unique.
Each planet or moon has a different look because of the system it's in, what kind of star it orbits, whether it has rings or moons of its own, what the content of the surface is, what kind of atmosphere it has, what the lighting looks like, plant life, geological formations...that kind of stuff.
The textures are not the whole story, if you see what I mean.
I think there is still a huge uniqueness to our little simulated galaxy. It's limited by hardware and software and probably know-how and money, but it's pretty darn good.
There are sights to see that no one has ever seen. I plan to see some of them.
Maybe it's my age. The first "space" game I ever saw was Asteroids, which was a wire-frame, 2-dimensional, black and white game in the local Arcade. I thought it was awesome. It had inertia! You had to thrust in the opposite direction to slow down or stop!
We've come such a long way from there. The graphics now are stunning to me, in most games, this one included.
Asteroids also feature cut and paste asteroids, but was still an awesome game... I have no idea how many coins I put into the slot on that game (yes young'ens we had to put coins in a slot to play a computer game in the old days).
Just clarifying, this thread is about terrain, ie. the heightmaps. It has nothing to do with textures. It could be you're just accidentally misnaming here?
But the terrain is the geological formations. It's precisely what's being repeated, over and over and over in Odyssey.
Again, I assume you mean terrain (heightmaps), not textures?
I agree. I have no issue describing Odyssey as "pretty darn good" too. It's just that I see such a missed opportunity to have done it better, and in the spirit of what ED is (or rather, was).
It's not your age. When I was in high school we learnt about computers with a Canola punched card unit, and a friend's dad had a Mini-scamp. But in my senior years the school purchased a single Tandy TRS-80 which they ended up giving me, as they were purchasing a dozen apple 2's the following year. Good memories.
Hi, you seem to be the one who knows whats going on so im asking you; Im an explorer and what i used to do was look for peculiar terrain as i transition from orbit to land and go toward a patch of terrain that could be different or extreme with mountain or canyon etc. Trying to find views and different artifacts of terrain generation. Is this gone with the new tech or it's just the tiling from orbit that is cheap and once you get low enough you can still hunt for interesting places? TY
If i can indulge; im only here because i learned of FC interior(don't own Odyssey yet) and i wanted to ask if ship interior were at least being talked about by the team?
oops i forgot to quote, let me find how to delete this post and do it properly. can you even delete a post?
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I must be confused, then. I thought the heightmaps were generated by the stellar forge, and they had to re-do them for Odyssey to allow for on-foot stuff.
They went on about how big a process it was, and how they'd never do it again, and sorry we changed the terrain.
The textures are what's laid over the heightmaps, I thought. And that's what I thought was being repeated. That's what it looks like to me, anyway.
So you're saying there are additional heightmaps that are being re-used, rather than textures?
