I am afraid I will have to strongly disagree with you there, the old planetary tech certainly didn't generate better looking planets!
New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
I am afraid I will have to strongly disagree with you there, the old planetary tech certainly didn't generate better looking planets!
When it does well, it does very well. When it fails, it really fails hard. It's a lot more extreme, both ways, than Horizon ever was.
Also, so far, all planets I've seen in Odyssey are, how should I say, generic ? Essentially, they follow the same pattern, we have a few patterns, but overall, all the planets belonging to one group look kinda the same.
Like the "chocolate" ice planet, the "dessicated clay" planet, and so on.
This is further magnified by the lack of RNG on assets like rocks, and how few of them there are in the database. More often than not, I find the same looking rock all over the place, and it's quite jarring.
Despite Braben being known for his work on procedural generation, the game use very little of it, and seemingly, even less now with Odyssey. While the planets are procedural, they all follow some pattern. And very little else is procedural.
There is also the feel Horizon had more details when far away from the planet. Enough to hide the repetition, like the infamous big crater. Odyssey doesn't, and we get to see all that repetition in all its glory.
There are also big issues with LOD and poor quality terrain/loading. A few examples :
"south" pole of the planet.
The weird glitch was moving around as I got closer, until it disappeared and the planet became "normal".
Or :
Very blurry, as if the planet was at a very low resolution. It's less visible on a screenshot, but it's quite jarring ingame.
Or this :
As you may notice on the upper left corner (it was also on the right, but it's harder to notice on a screenshot), the planet edge is VERY blurry. In fact, the entire planet started as blurry, but as I came closer the "blurriness" was pushed to the edge of the planet, and eventually replaced by more normal terrain.
This is only random observations I cared to screenshot in a few weeks with little time spend playing. The first screenshot was a planet I crossed when looking for G3 gear, the second was the one my FC was parked around, and the 3rd is a conflict zone from a recent CG (the one about the Emperor abductors).
Either I'm the most unlucky person in the game, or those are quite common.
And obviously, we have the few "pre made" planets, who still look like trash, like the one in my signature. I mean, that one is now puke green and not grey, since the "planet" patch a few months ago.
Well, that was a big fail all around, The first one you presented as an O problem wasn't a landable planet, it's a sphere with a wraparound bitmap, it doesn't generate what you are looking at using the terrain because there is none, trying to use this as an argument that the planets are different in H and O is ridiculous because they are the same planet. No change has been made to non-landables between the two, only landable with atmosphere!
I really think it makes the rest of your post irrelevant when you don't actually know what you are looking at, that appears to be a graphical artifact on your system. In fact all of these appear from the description to be an issue with the graphics on your system.
Can we just get back the Canyons from Horizons, please? The ones in Odyssey are far worse. Odyssey's planet tech homogenized the terrain far too much in my humble opinion.
So, you see a clear issue in a picture. One you can't deny. And your reaction is to wiggle your way around, so you can still blame ME for an issue the game has ? Not going to lie, that's impressive.
As for your claim of "no changes to non landable", do you have proofs ? With Odyssey they made a lot of change for the graphical aspect of the game, even for non odyssey stuff. Like lightning, skybox, ship textures, effects....
Also, it's obviously unintended, so even if they didn't change anything, a bug is a bug, and it can happen even on things you didn't change.
Maybe you should want bugs fixed instead of blaming people for reporting them ? I think that'd be a positive behaviour.
Horizon had LOD issue to, but much less drastic. It's not new, it's just got bigger.
Stop acting like it's me. I've seen that kind of glitches and artifact on a few youtubers and screenshots around.
Yep. Non landable atmospheres had that kind of glitch since day one, 2014 or thereabouts. Always been like that, some fundamental limit on how those are generated (pretty sure those are not wraparound bitmaps either, but their inner working escapes me).
You are talking rubbish, you presented a picture of a planet that has not been changed between H and O and claimed it was evidence of problems with O's planetary tech, yes it's your problem, mainly because you don't understand what you are talking about. That planet HAS NOT BEEN CHANGED, it is exactly the same in Odyssey and Horizons, so if you are seeing issues with it in O then maybe you should look at your settings.
You simply can't claim a planet that's not generated using the new planetary tech as evidence against the new planetary tech, that's just misleading and misinformation. yes there's an issue in the picture, but it certainly isn't an issue with Odyssey's planetary tech, it's just a bitmap that's unchanged from H to O.
So despite FDEV saying they were bitmaps wrapped around a mesh you are claiming they aren't bitmaps wrapped around a mesh? Interesting!
So despite me stating (and in a rather plain English, nonetheless) "pretty sure" and "but their inner working escapes me", in your excessively confrontational state of mind I am already at the "claiming" stage? Interesting! Calm down, or don't, whatever you feel it's best for you.
(And more on this anyway: if those planets were a case of a simple bitmap UV mapped on a sphere model, there would be no need for such a strange rendering artifact, so while the base texture may well be a simple bitmap wrapped around a sphere, there surely is more to their rendering than just that. And FDev will hardly get to you with an in-depth internal technical paper explaining it all.)
Pretty sure you are making a claim here, and one that is directly contradicted by what FDEV have stated they do. And yes FDEV did in fact post an hour long video explaining how they generated all the planets. The rendering artifact is probably to do with a LOD issue, I have seen it occasionally myself. The fact is you are making statements that are directly contradicting what FDEV have posted publicly and is available for all to see. In the early days when there wasn't an exclusion zone around non-landable planets (they were all non-landable then) some players flew down and found...a low res bitmap, and that's all it is.
I have a vague recollection of somebody hinting that non-landables are not even spheres, but just discs, shaded to look like spheres, but that must be me misremembering, because I believe we have seen planets clipping one another, which would look very different with a 2D mesh - I have certainly seen stars render as cubes in the system map, before subdividing and snapping to their spherical morph shape, on an occasion or two, and I think we can safely call stars non-landable. :7
"Strechmarks" would reasonably be when a patch of ground around the edges comes into view before its designated square of texture has been generated at greater LOD...
"Strechmarks" would reasonably be when a patch of ground around the edges comes into view before its designated square of texture has been generated at greater LOD...
Right, I'm going to be really un-popular in this thread;-
I've never really enjoyed exploring on the old Horizon's planets. The vast majority of them I found boring and quite repetitive after a while. I really gave up on driving around planets about the time of Beyond 3.1 (just after they got rid of the Beige Plague). Yes, there were dramatic canyons but those really are the exception, rather than the rule and after my 5000ly trip out to make sure I could get Palin, I swore off exploration. Originally, the Colin to Colonia (in a sidewinder) thing started well but about the 7,000 ly mark it really did feel like a chore. It was very rare that I even went down to a planet's surface before Odyssey.
However, since update 8 of Odyssey, I have restarted the Colin to Colonia thing, this time in a 27ly clipper, and I've really enjoyed it. I will admit that I'm not landing on the non-atmospheric planets because there's nothing really there to look for. Anything exciting on a non-atmospheric planet is either in the bubble or out in Colonia. However, by adding the plant scanning gameplay, that has provided the motivation to keep exploring and, now that I'm used to how the Scarb works on the new terrain, I'm quite enjoying driving and walking around the new planetary vistas. I'm out past the 10,000 ly mark this time and still going strong.
I know that the number one issue in the issue tracker is re-do the Planetary tech. Personally, I see two problems with that;-
A more valid compromise to fix the repeated terrain issue is create a lot more terrain templates for the non atmospheric planets. There was a similar issue with NMS right in the beginning. The creatures in that game began to look the same after a few planets because there wasn't enough variety in 'animal parts' for their procedural generation code to create new animals. I suspect it's the same issue with Odyssey, the proc gen system needs more options to draw from to make the planets feel more unique.
Anyway, I've ranted to much.
TLDR : Odyssey didn't kill exploration for me, in fact it got me in to exploring properly for the first time in years!
I've never really enjoyed exploring on the old Horizon's planets. The vast majority of them I found boring and quite repetitive after a while. I really gave up on driving around planets about the time of Beyond 3.1 (just after they got rid of the Beige Plague). Yes, there were dramatic canyons but those really are the exception, rather than the rule and after my 5000ly trip out to make sure I could get Palin, I swore off exploration. Originally, the Colin to Colonia (in a sidewinder) thing started well but about the 7,000 ly mark it really did feel like a chore. It was very rare that I even went down to a planet's surface before Odyssey.
However, since update 8 of Odyssey, I have restarted the Colin to Colonia thing, this time in a 27ly clipper, and I've really enjoyed it. I will admit that I'm not landing on the non-atmospheric planets because there's nothing really there to look for. Anything exciting on a non-atmospheric planet is either in the bubble or out in Colonia. However, by adding the plant scanning gameplay, that has provided the motivation to keep exploring and, now that I'm used to how the Scarb works on the new terrain, I'm quite enjoying driving and walking around the new planetary vistas. I'm out past the 10,000 ly mark this time and still going strong.
I know that the number one issue in the issue tracker is re-do the Planetary tech. Personally, I see two problems with that;-
- Obviously they've felt they had to redesign the planetary tech in a way that would help with future expansions. You can see that breaking a planet down to its certain geonomes would help as we head towards earth like planets. Otherwise we might get start wars planets (ie, Just a desert planet, or forest planets, etc) and I'd like to have more variety than that.
- The 'Baking' Process - If they do redo the planetary system, they will have to repeat what they called the baking process where all the existing settlements are in sensible places. That's how many settlements/ outposts and ports that will have to be checked?
A more valid compromise to fix the repeated terrain issue is create a lot more terrain templates for the non atmospheric planets. There was a similar issue with NMS right in the beginning. The creatures in that game began to look the same after a few planets because there wasn't enough variety in 'animal parts' for their procedural generation code to create new animals. I suspect it's the same issue with Odyssey, the proc gen system needs more options to draw from to make the planets feel more unique.
Anyway, I've ranted to much.
TLDR : Odyssey didn't kill exploration for me, in fact it got me in to exploring properly for the first time in years!
Exactly this^^ In fact it's what Braben himself flagged up as a problem with proc gen if it's not done right. He described this very issue.
Actually the non-atmo planets in Odyssey can have some pretty wild terrain and some very wierd and wonderful colours (far more eye-catching than the atmo planets)
I ignored non-atmo for my first 6-8 months in Odyssey, but around xmas I started landing on a few here and there, and they make a really nice change. E.g. sulphur yellow moons with towering mountains, that sort of thing.
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Now you've gone and done it.Issue Tracker: Planetary Tiling
Greetings Commanders, We’d like to take this opportunity to address the Tiling Planetary Features issue from the Issue Tracker. After spending some time to observe the effects of the issue while weighing-up the costs to resolve it, we have decided to focus those resources elsewhere...forums.frontier.co.uk
Gnashing of teeth, wailing, renting of clothes and lawsuit threats incoming...
Why that, are you too much of a cheapskate to rend your own?