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

[[VR] Merkir]

I don't disagree there are tiling issues, but personally I really only notice them when they are painfully obvious, but it was the same in Horizons. Sometimes there were painfully obvious, other times they weren't.

But there are no repeating terrain tiles in Horizons (except perhaps for crater stamps). The pre-generated terrain shapes were introduced in Odyssey, as FDev have said themselves.

But again, are you talking about textures or terrain? This thread is about terrain (heightmaps).

 

[varonica]

But there are no repeating terrain tiles in Horizons (except perhaps for crater stamps). The pre-generated terrain shapes were introduced in Odyssey, as FDev have said themselves.

But again, are you talking about textures or terrain? This thread is about terrain (heightmaps).

Yes there are, and craters aren't stamps, they are part of the heightmap generated with the planet. The problem with Horizons planets is they were all so bland and colourless you didn't notice the tiling unless it was, indeed, really obvious. Odyssey tiling issue is obvious because of the better colouring of ground terrain, if Horizons planets used the same colouring it would be obvious there as well, I had to go a way back to find this. The tiling issue visible from orbit is caused by repeated terrain patterns, and no they didn't say they were introduced in Odyssey, the new tech better reflects the underlying geology, but it was always there.

The obvious ones in Horizons are clear from repeated craters as you noticed, but these craters are repeated because the height map, indeed the terrain, is repeated in tiles, but you don't notice it unless a body has a large numer of craters because it's all basically brown on brown. Again the craters aren't stamps, they are part of the heightmap generated when the planet is generated.

This issue is of course completely separate from the small scale repeated textures you sometimes see up close, but stuff seen from orbit is all terrain from the heightmap both in Odyssey and Horizons

 

[[VR] Merkir]

Sorry, but that's totally wrong. You need to read FDev's own words regarding Horizons and Odyssey:

FDev's own words:

"For Horizons, that terrain is generated entirely mathematically. There was a lot of effort put into representing the kind of shapes a hill or canyon makes, just using maths."

"For Odyssey, there's an entirely different approach for making these offsets. ... we're talking up 100km worth of terrain for example, which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed."

Q: What type of planet is this new tech going to be applied to?
"Every planet you could land on before, and the new ones opening up, will be using this approach. The old surfaces can't be represented in this new approach and you're going to get a larger variety using this new tech."

If the image above is supposed to show terrain tiling by those linear craters, that was a bug within crater placement that was fixed by FDev shortly after Horizons launch. So you won't find evidence or terrain tiling in Horizons. Others tried to, in this very thread, and failed. What was shown was that any repetition in Horizons was limited to, at most, chunks about the size of an SRV.

I suggest you read the whole transcript for yourself:

Planetary Tech with Dr Kay Ross: Recap

Greetings Commanders! Last week, we were joined on stream by the fantastic Dr Kay Ross to answer some of your questions regarding planetary tech and the changes coming in Elite Dangerous: Odyssey! If you missed it, you can watch the entire stream on YouTube - but we're also going to give you a...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[rOmiLaYu]

Like this?

Yeah. Or this.

 

[[VR] Merkir]

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?

Yes. All of the repeating tiles described within this thread have been heightmaps / terrain, not textures.

As you say, a texture is just a 2D image, like a jpeg. Textures are placed on (or wrapped around) the surface of the terrain to give colour and imagery, such as a pebbly-looking surface. Not the topic of this thread.

To elaborate, many of the examples shown in this thread have been top-down views, but there have also been examples shown on foot or low altitude highlighting the 3D heightmap far more obviously, eg: here's a post I made in the "early days" when I was still looking into the issue, with side-by-side identical hills:

 

[varonica]

Sorry, but that's totally wrong. You need to read FDev's own words regarding Horizons and Odyssey:

FDev's own words:

"For Horizons, that terrain is generated entirely mathematically. There was a lot of effort put into representing the kind of shapes a hill or canyon makes, just using maths."

"For Odyssey, there's an entirely different approach for making these offsets. ... we're talking up 100km worth of terrain for example, which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed."

Q: What type of planet is this new tech going to be applied to?
"Every planet you could land on before, and the new ones opening up, will be using this approach. The old surfaces can't be represented in this new approach and you're going to get a larger variety using this new tech."

If the image above is supposed to show terrain tiling by those linear craters, that was a bug within crater placement that was fixed by FDev shortly after Horizons launch. So you won't find evidence or terrain tiling in Horizons. Others tried to, in this very thread, and failed. What was shown was that any repetition in Horizons was limited to, at most, chunks about the size of an SRV.

I suggest you read the whole transcript for yourself:

Planetary Tech with Dr Kay Ross: Recap

Greetings Commanders! Last week, we were joined on stream by the fantastic Dr Kay Ross to answer some of your questions regarding planetary tech and the changes coming in Elite Dangerous: Odyssey! If you missed it, you can watch the entire stream on YouTube - but we're also going to give you a...

forums.frontier.co.uk

The terrains are still generated mathematically, no-one is hand crafting these terrains, the craters one was the obvious one, that's repeated terrain, there's nothing in that argument to rules out terrain being repeated even if they are generated purely mathematically, it's the underlying algorithm being used that causes issues. If I look hard enough through my old collection of screenshots I could pull out other examples of repeating terrain that weren't craters, and yes Horizons did improve but the issue was still there if you looked hard enough.

Your argument is like saying a house built in the factory and pre-assembled and dropped onto the site is not the same things as a house built on site from separate components. You still get doors and windows and corridors and rooms exactly the same. But if we look at that statement as in "100klm worth of terrain", sections of that size aren't, for the most part, discernible from orbit, for example what exactly does 100klms from orbit look like?

Well here's about 100klms;

This is the same area from orbit, and not a high orbit;

You can't even see the 100klm area, it's basically invisible. The areas you are highlighting from orbit as repeated terrain tiles can't possibly be blamed on repeated tiles 100klms in size, that's not the area where the issues are arising, those are at a much smaller scale, those areas you see and highlight are on a vastly larger scale than the terrain tiles they are talking about so while it's an issue, I don't think it's at the scale represented by the above discussion, I think it comes well before that happens at the point of generation of the planet in the stellar forge.

Your final point is the one you should be looking at, Horizons improved, but it certainly wasn't "shortly" after Horizons was released, it took quite a while and there are still issues if you look hard enough.

 

[[VR] Merkir]

Aside: The instant I re-posted that screenshot, I realised those terrain tiles are far larger than I originally highlighted:

 

[varonica]

ps. The instant I re-posted that screenshot, I realised those terrain tiles are far larger than I originally highlighted:

View attachment 284375

Agreed that is annoying, as in my above post those are the repeated tiles you get from the above discussion, not visible from orbit at all.

 

[[VR] Merkir]

If I look hard enough through my old collection of screenshots I could pull out other examples of repeating terrain that weren't craters, and yes Horizons did improve but the issue was still there if you looked hard enough.

Well if you can post an example of repeating terrain in Horizons larger than about 10-15 metres, that would be great. Nobody else has been able to (other than that well known line of craters issue which was fixed quickly by FDev).

Also, when FDev say the Horizons terrain is "generated entirely mathematically," note that they use noise functions to do this, using well know procedural generation techniques/algorithms. This guarantees uniqueness as long as the seeds are unique. Even using the same mathematical shaping function(s), terrain parameters and boundary conditions will result in different terrain as long as the seed producing the fractal noise is different. And creating unique seeds in a geo-based application is simple; just use the positional coordinates. What this means in practice is that even for a tiny heightmap area, say a 5m x 5m square area, the probability of the height data in the 2D height array being identical to any other 5m x 5m sized height array is miniscule, even across the billions of planets in the galaxy.

 

[[VR] Merkir]

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?

I'll try to answer as factually as I can from forum discussions, my own observations, and what FDev have told us regarding their new terrain tech.

Regarding "terrain that could be different or extreme with mountain or canyon etc," this has been discussed quite a lot on the forums. The general consensus seems to be that the highest mountains in Odyssey are about 5 to 6 km. This is a significant reduction from the extremes of Horizons which I believe had mountains over 50 km high (search Mount Neverest). (Very happy to be shown wrong on this point. Any players with higher mountains, please post!)

Similarly for canyons, but there are other players far better acquainted with canyons than I, mainly due to canyon racing being significantly affected by Odyssey. Needless to say, mountains and canyons are much smaller than before.

FDev's comments:
"Q: Will large worlds feature tall mountains or geological features?
This is an interesting question! There is a reason why the features are shallower on larger planets. With the increased gravitational strains you can't maintain as tall a natural feature with the strength the material is made out of. so you'll end up with shallower features. I'm afraid it's just how the maths drops out for those, there's a good range of planets but the tiny ones tend to be able to support the more extreme terrain because the large things aren't being destroyed by the gravity pulling it down."

Re, "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?"... the repeating terrain is apparent at a variety of scales, which you would have seen in the first few pages of this thread. Many examples are from orbit, hundreds of kms in size. Plenty of examples also from altitudes of 10-80 kms showing tiles of much smaller scales, 50 to 1000 metres in size, say, like the hills I posted above. You ask about "interesting places" and that's too subjective for me to comment on. Do note however that there is still a procedurally generated base layer of terrain, obviously far flatter than Horizons, but this procgen layer also overlays with the larger 5-6 km mountains, which seem to be separate from the more homogenous geomes - those sprawling similar-height hills regions for example.

Finally, here are the tallest mountains in our own solar system. It speaks for itself:

Tallest Mountains by elevation​

• Olympus Mons 72,000 ft (22,000 m)
• Equatorial Ridge 65,617 ft (20,000 m)
• Boösaule Mons 59,711 ft (18,200 m)
• Ascraeus Mons 49,000 ft (15,000 m)
• Ionian Mons 41,667 ft (12,700 m)
• Elysium Mons 41,338 ft (12,600 m)
• Arsia Mons 38,386 ft (11,700 m)
• Limb Mountain 36,089 ft (11,000 m)
• Skadi Mons 35,105 ft (10,700 m)
• Euboea Montes 34,449 ft (10,500 m)
• Mauna Kea 33,464 ft (10,200 m)
• Haleakala 29,856 ft (9,100 m)
• Mount Everest 29,029 ft (8,848 m)
• Pavonis Mons 28,543 ft (8,700 m)
• Teide 24,606 ft (7,500 m)
• Herschel Peak 22,966 ft (7,000 m)
• Anseris Mons 20,341 ft (6,200 m)
• Tenzing Montes 20,341 ft (6,200 m)
• Denali 20,310 ft (6,190 m)

 

[andrewg_oz]

Finally, here are the tallest mountains in our own solar system. It speaks for itself:

It does, but given you've already mentioned Mount Neverest at about 50km, it's an argument that Odyssey is closer to reality than Horizons when Horizons can generate mountains more than twice the height of the highest known mountain in our solar system.

Having said that, I've seen much worse examples than your stamped mountains in post #4256.

For me, Odyssey has greatly improved both the orbital-level view and the surface-level views of the planets. The big Horizons thing I did not like was the repeating areas of small hills patchworked with relatively flat terrain squares while driving around. These are not obvious until you're actually driving around. They are on practically every single landable Horizons planet. For that alone, I will take Odyssey over Horizons every day of the week.

 

[[VR] Merkir]

It does, but given you've already mentioned Mount Neverest at about 50km, it's an argument that Odyssey is closer to reality than Horizons when Horizons can generate mountains more than twice the height of the highest known mountain in our solar system.

Ah no. And to show you why, I'll ask a simple question. Since our own solar system (a single system) has mountains in excess of 20 km, do you really believe that is the maximum height across the entire galaxy? Or is it more plausible that when looking at the billions of other planets in the galaxy, the highest mountain would be at least double that, or even 3x or 4x times that height, or more?

Edit: Btw, the reason I said the tallest mountain list "speaks for itself" is that I thought it would be obvious to everyone just how strange FDev's decision was to limit mountains to such low heights. It's totally at odds with what we see even in our own single solar system, let alone the the rest of the galaxy.

 

[Alec Turner]

Regarding "terrain that could be different or extreme with mountain or canyon etc," this has been discussed quite a lot on the forums. The general consensus seems to be that the highest mountains in Odyssey are about 5 to 6 km. This is a significant reduction from the extremes of Horizons which I believe had mountains over 50 km high (search Mount Neverest). (Very happy to be shown wrong on this point. Any players with higher mountains, please post!)

I measured the mountain on Capoya 2 (coords 11.6470, -15.5515) as approx. 7km high.

That's the biggest I've seen in Odyssey so far. I agree with your conclusions tho that, if you're going for absolute realism, then the highest mountain extremes in the galaxy are likely to be considerably higher than the known highest. Besides, I'm not sure I want absolute realism anyway (it is a game after all and should be full of wonders). I like Mitterand Hollow, I'd like ridge worlds like Pomeche 2C back, and I'd like 50km high mountains back.

 

[Codger]

Do note however that there is still a procedurally generated base layer of terrain, obviously far flatter than Horizons, but this procgen layer also overlays with the larger 5-6 km mountains, which seem to be separate from the more homogenous geomes - those sprawling similar-height hills regions for example.

Thanks for your clear explanations on all this. And sorry for confusing textures with height maps. I understand the situation better now, I think.

How are mountains like these generated? They don't appear to me to be cloned copies of each other. Would these be part of the base terrain height map, or added later in some way?

I can see that the textures are stretched near the peaks pretty badly.

I did not think to measure their height when I was there.

 

[andrewg_oz]

Ah no. And to show you why, I'll ask a simple question. Since our own solar system (a single system) has mountains in excess of 20 km, do you really believe that is the maximum height across the entire galaxy? Or is it more plausible that when looking at the billions of other planets in the galaxy, the highest mountain would be at least double that, or even 3x or 4x times that height, or more?

Edit: Btw, the reason I said the tallest mountain list "speaks for itself" is that I thought it would be obvious to everyone just how strange FDev's decision was to limit mountains to such low heights. It's totally at odds with what we see even in our own single solar system, let alone the the rest of the galaxy.

Of course I don't believe 20km is the highest a mountain can be. I'm also not so arrogant as to believe I have seen all that Odyssey has to offer. I'm quite certain that there are extreme mountains and canyons out there, they just need to be found.

 

[DAYLEET]

I'll try to answer as factually as I can from forum discussions, my own observations, and what FDev have told us regarding their new terrain tech.

Regarding "terrain that could be different or extreme with mountain or canyon etc," this has been discussed quite a lot on the forums. The general consensus seems to be that the highest mountains in Odyssey are about 5 to 6 km. This is a significant reduction from the extremes of Horizons which I believe had mountains over 50 km high (search Mount Neverest). (Very happy to be shown wrong on this point. Any players with higher mountains, please post!)

Similarly for canyons, but there are other players far better acquainted with canyons than I, mainly due to canyon racing being significantly affected by Odyssey. Needless to say, mountains and canyons are much smaller than before.

FDev's comments:
"Q: Will large worlds feature tall mountains or geological features?
This is an interesting question! There is a reason why the features are shallower on larger planets. With the increased gravitational strains you can't maintain as tall a natural feature with the strength the material is made out of. so you'll end up with shallower features. I'm afraid it's just how the maths drops out for those, there's a good range of planets but the tiny ones tend to be able to support the more extreme terrain because the large things aren't being destroyed by the gravity pulling it down."

Re, "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?"... the repeating terrain is apparent at a variety of scales, which you would have seen in the first few pages of this thread. Many examples are from orbit, hundreds of kms in size. Plenty of examples also from altitudes of 10-80 kms showing tiles of much smaller scales, 50 to 1000 metres in size, say, like the hills I posted above. You ask about "interesting places" and that's too subjective for me to comment on. Do note however that there is still a procedurally generated base layer of terrain, obviously far flatter than Horizons, but this procgen layer also overlays with the larger 5-6 km mountains, which seem to be separate from the more homogenous geomes - those sprawling similar-height hills regions for example.

Finally, here are the tallest mountains in our own solar system. It speaks for itself:

Tallest Mountains by elevation​

• Olympus Mons 72,000 ft (22,000 m)
• Equatorial Ridge 65,617 ft (20,000 m)
• Boösaule Mons 59,711 ft (18,200 m)
• Ascraeus Mons 49,000 ft (15,000 m)
• Ionian Mons 41,667 ft (12,700 m)
• Elysium Mons 41,338 ft (12,600 m)
• Arsia Mons 38,386 ft (11,700 m)
• Limb Mountain 36,089 ft (11,000 m)
• Skadi Mons 35,105 ft (10,700 m)
• Euboea Montes 34,449 ft (10,500 m)
• Mauna Kea 33,464 ft (10,200 m)
• Haleakala 29,856 ft (9,100 m)
• Mount Everest 29,029 ft (8,848 m)
• Pavonis Mons 28,543 ft (8,700 m)
• Teide 24,606 ft (7,500 m)
• Herschel Peak 22,966 ft (7,000 m)
• Anseris Mons 20,341 ft (6,200 m)
• Tenzing Montes 20,341 ft (6,200 m)
• Denali 20,310 ft (6,190 m)

Thanks!

 

[alexzk]

I think this is correct thread to ask, when they will fix those "human crafted" rocks, 3 at once on small scene >:

https://imgur.com/1garrJi

Source: https://i.imgur.com/1garrJi.jpg

 

[fennster]

I think this is correct thread to ask, when they will fix those "human crafted" rocks, 3 at once on small scene >:

https://imgur.com/1garrJi

Source: https://i.imgur.com/1garrJi.jpg

I'm assuming that is the same rock that was being described here earlier...

2. The other example was a rock. When I first saw it, I thought wow, look at that unique rock! It had two flat sides jutting upwards and a hollowed out core, very cool. But then as I began to roam around looking for exo targets, I saw it again, and again. This same rock was everywhere, not very unique at all, I could see it multiple times just by turning around in one spot.
And I have seen that exact same 'unique' rock on several other planets as well. With the same problem, being that its quite clearly the same rock all over the place in slightly different size and orientation.

 

[Alec Turner]

I'm assuming that is the same rock that was being described here earlier...

That's certainly the one I was thinking of.

 

[whothe]

I'm assuming that is the same rock that was being described here earlier...

Thats the one! I am still finding it on other planets. I dont think calling it common would be a stretch, it really isn't hard to find. It's not alone either, after a couple days of exploring I am finding that most rocks on the surface of a planet that have some kind of 'eyecatching' feature can be found repeating nearby.