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

[jojon]

You do know that any sphere projected on a plane leads to heavy distortions in some way or another?

Yes, of course - hence centuries of many different projections of the earth, that more often than not warp continents well out of proportion, depending on each map's use case (such as producing the nice and orderly parallel meridians, for navigation, with the vertical cylinder of the Mercator projection -- it's a little more complicated to get by with just ruler and protractor on one of Buckminster Fuller's "Dymaxion" unwrapped icosahedrons).
I have also, myself, on occasion experienced the joy of trying to unwrap a complex triangle-mesh 3D shape with a lot of concave bits, into a contiguous, tiling, UV map, with as little distortion and size variation per tri as possible (...with an honorable shoutout to the inherent consequences of quads fundamentally being two tris put together).

It's a little unfair to call them "just" discs, etc, because the solution they came up with at the time is kind of brilliant.

Yes, they did great. I usually tend to wrap the word "just" with quotation marks, exactly in order to take the diminishing edge off the word, when using it to say something relative in nature; Naturally, the second I forget to do this, I duly get drawn and quartered for it. :9


So, we now have an acknowledgement of the problem, a decision, and the reasoning behind said decision -- that is good at least! I just hope that by not dealing with the matter, Fdev do not paint themselves into a corner for the future; Presumably, while the topology of existing planets is now "frozen"; Repetition and "bland-ness" on coming planet types can be made less... "egregious", using the same procgen engine unaltered, though growth of the library of predefined shapes, and tweaks to new procgen rules.

 

[Mogen Teras]

Well, it's obvious that after the first half of the FY2022 results were analyzed in December 2021 they cut a lot of resources from Elite.
The almost 3 months silence, dropping console dev, now basically abandoning any attempts at fixing the brand new planetary tech - well, tilling, but i dont expect to see any improvements, we will be left with a mostly bland terrain punctured by occasional shark teeth popping out of nowhere.

I'm really curious where the next cuts will happen

I doubt anything bad will happen to their niche reputation, since as we've seen since last year, many users are more than happy to pretend like nothing is wrong and that any complaints is just "whining."

 

[Jack Winter]

I'd imagine the response on the forums depends on how the problem is presented. I'd think that most anyone here would acknowledge that there are plenty of problems, in my case it's the drama and the whining that puts me off. Apart from graphics and FPS issues on my hardware (and possibly due to using wine/linux), I really do enjoy odyssey..

 

[danteuk]

So they gave up on VR, they gave up with Optimisations ( because if they thought they were going to succeed they wouldn't have had to cancel consoles ), so they gave up on Consoles, now they have given up on the Planet tech.
With no improvements or further work on the planets that basically means they've given up on exploration too.

Elite is reminding me of the TV show Heroes - Heroes gradually lowered the quality season by season till we were grateful it ended. ( Sheldon quote from The Big Bang Theory )

 

[cmdr chequers]

So they gave up on VR, they gave up with Optimisations ( because if they thought they were going to succeed they wouldn't have had to cancel consoles ), so they gave up on Consoles, now they have given up on the Planet tech.
With no improvements or further work on the planets that basically means they've given up on exploration too.

Elite is reminding me of the TV show Heroes - Heroes gradually lowered the quality season by season till we were grateful it ended. ( Sheldon quote from The Big Bang Theory )

I am out exploring in Odyssey at the moment and for exploration it's far far better than Horizons, better and more varied planets and more to do.

 

[danteuk]

So, we now have an acknowledgement of the problem, a decision, and the reasoning behind said decision -- that is good at least! I just hope that by not dealing with the matter, Fdev do not paint themselves into a corner for the future; Presumably, while the topology of existing planets is now "frozen"; Repetition and "bland-ness" on coming planet types can be made less... "egregious", using the same procgen engine unaltered, though growth of the library of predefined shapes, and tweaks to new procgen rules.

I see two problems with this:
1) FDev unerring ability to make things worse - they took their Renderer and made it worse for performance and worse for lighting - to the point that some players get unplayable frame rates and so far most of their attempts to fix the performance have been at the expense of quality - ie bolting on AMD's upscaling tech, adding checkerboards and turning off a bunch of other effects that means that now Horizons ( in space ) looks a lot nicer than Odyssey and Horizons ( on the ground ) still runs 3 to 4 faster than Odyssey - and by cancelling Consoles they are admitting they are next going to get close the performance of Horizons ( even with reduced effects ).
2) Whilst they could do a lot more handmade assets to help hide the repeats and tiling for the next set of planets to be made landable - but this assumes they will eventually get to planets with atmospheres - this requires weather effects, water and LOT more vegetation - can you imaging the impact that would have on performance ?

FDev's only hope is to hire a new team of skilled programmers to re-write the renderer - today I strongly suspect they have no programmers left from the original team that wrote that core renderer - hence their inability to fix it and hence the terrible job they made of bolting on PBR.

Maybe they can add the ability to fly through the atmosphere of gas giants - that was something David Braben always wanted in the game.

 

[StuartGT]

1) FDev unerring ability to make things worse - they took their Renderer and made it worse for performance and worse for lighting - to the point that some players get unplayable frame rates and so far most of their attempts to fix the performance have been at the expense of quality - ie bolting on AMD's upscaling tech, adding checkerboards and turning off a bunch of other effects that means that now Horizons ( in space ) looks a lot nicer than Odyssey and Horizons ( on the ground ) still runs 3 to 4 faster than Odyssey - and by cancelling Consoles they are admitting they are next going to get close the performance of Horizons ( even with reduced effects ).

Odyssey looks far better than Horizons, has more graphical detail, therefore is more demanding on hardware. It runs fantastic on my 3060Ti, thanks FDev, keep it up

 

[DYSEQTA]

I am out exploring in Odyssey at the moment and for exploration it's far far better than Horizons, better and more varied planets and more to do.

It's amazing the difference that a player's attitude has on game enjoyment.

I agree that Odyssey, warts and all, is a big step forward for Elite. Some could rightly call it a stumble forward rather than a step, but its forward none the less.

I focus on the things that are good and my enjoyment levels are high.

If you spend all your time hunting for flaws in and being negative about a thing then surprise, surprise your experience of that thing is going to be overwhelmingly negative. That rule is universally true; it holds for everything, even yourself.

 

[Ian Skippy]

I see two problems with this:

Oh boy, this is gonna be insightful!

1) FDev unerring ability to make things worse -

Ah, I see you just simply ignore the improvements.

FDev's only hope is to hire a new team of skilled programmers to re-write the renderer

lol.

Cant wait for your next rant!

 

[nanite2000]

Odyssey looks far better than Horizons, has more graphical detail, therefore is more demanding on hardware. It runs fantastic on my 3060Ti, thanks FDev, keep it up

Now if they could just fix coloured lighting, restore volumetric fog, and correctly render stars behind the nearest planet, we’ll have achieved feature parity with Horizons (and we’ll likely all be on next-gen hardware by then too, so it might even run smoothly!).

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

It's amazing the difference that a player's attitude has on game enjoyment.

I agree that Odyssey, warts and all, is a big step forward for Elite. Some could rightly call it a stumble forward rather than a step, but its forward none the less.

I focus on the things that are good and my enjoyment levels are high.

If you spend all your time hunting for flaws in and being negative about a thing then surprise, surprise your experience of that thing is going to be overwhelmingly negative. That rule is universally true; it holds for everything, even yourself.

That's really ignorant of how badly odd runs if you are below the actual system requirements, say a 2070.

You can't validly claim that without addressing frontier sold the game at target system requirements, not actual, and have now given up attempting to meet them.

You have to believe something if you are not able to experience it, but without the brute force ability the odd experience is not even civilised. This is not being stupid about it either, assume the most extreme min maxed settings permutation for a given machine.

Ps. The Planet tech at ultra is still a massive downgrade from space. I highly down when people praise it it's a universal praise. The positive is a reference to the on foot perspective only which often looks better absolutely.

 

[DYSEQTA]

That's really ignorant of how badly odd runs if you are below the actual system requirements, say a 2070.

I run 4K with FSR on the Quality setting, Ambient Occlusion on Medium, Anistropic Filtering on 8x and everything else on the highest it will go. I play on a GTX 1080Ti.

My son runs similar settings at 1080p but without FSR or any other scaling on a GTX 1060 6GB.

Both of us are happy with performance, mine does perform better as would be expected. We could be happier, there's always room for improvement but perfectly enjoyable.

You can't validly claim that without addressing frontier sold the game at target system requirements, not actual, and have now given up attempting to meet them.

Come on now. ED was sold from the get-go as a title that would be actively developed and expanded upon over many years. You can't possibly be sitting there with a straight face saying that you expect that to be possible without ever requiring updates to player hardware. It should be noted that recommended or minimum system requirements for games are not ever quoted for every-setting-maxed-out configurations, not for any game ever.

 

[Erei]

Odyssey looks far better than Horizons, has more graphical detail, therefore is more demanding on hardware.

Empty random gen planet are not very demanding. Unless is poorly made.

Ever used a benchmark ? They don't have massive empty world. They have crowded scene with stuff like light scattering, heavy vegetation, weather, special effect (smoke, explosion, fire), fog, physics...
Now, that stuff is demanding.

An empty world, not really. Yes you can add the dozen rocks and plants if you want to.

It runs fantastic on my 3060Ti, thanks FDev, keep it up

I'm glad it's running smoothly with a GPU 2 generation higher than recommended, and currenly valued at 460€ in my country (it was 600€ last year, had to buy one for my mom PC who died).
I mean, yeah !



Also, LOD issues are everywhere and really nasty. Since I saw you on Reddit, you probably saw that screenshot someone posted. I knew it was horizon right away, even if it's not mentioned.

Meanwhile, a similar shot which is fairly representative of what I have in odyssey :

It's not even the worse, it's actually relatively good compared to many of my screenshots.

Now before some keyboard warrior get all nervous, this is a "good" Odyssey planet, when it's not all blurry and without details. Yes I play fair.

Don't mind the FPS counter, that stupid stuff and the orbit line doesn't go away with the rest of the UI and I never notice before it's too late^^
Anyway, this is a relatively good world. The horizon planet feel like it has more details, but the guy who posted that obviously took one of its prettiest shot and all that, so I'll let that slide.

Unfortunately, most of the planet I see are more in the blurry category than in the "good" world.



On the ground, we have lots of mostly LOD related issues. But even without them, there are pros and cons for both horizon and odyssey worlds. It certainly doesn't feel like a straight upgrade.

Horizon get better and more varied landscape, more unique to
Odyssey have more varied colors
Odyssey have pretty atmo
Odyssey have some "biomes" variations
Horizon have less derpy formation like the odyssey "melted hills", "smooth mountain", U shaped canyon, and so on

 

[nanite2000]

Both of us are happy with performance, mine does perform better as would be expected.

That's a highly subjective statement without any actual numbers to qualify it. I run a similar setup to yours at a similar resolution to you and I am not at all happy with performance, yet I bet we are likely both getting nearly identical framerates.

One man's "performance is fine for me" is another man's "performance is terrible for me".

Come on now. ED was from the sold get-go as a title that would be actively developed and expanded upon over many years. You can't possibly be sitting there with a straight face saying that you expect that to be possible without ever requiring updates to player hardware. It should be noted that recommended or minimum system requirements for games are not ever quoted for every-setting-maxed-out configurations, not for any game ever.

There are several problems with this:

• I doubt people would be complaining so much if there had been a significant improvement in graphics to justify the increase in performance requirements. As it stands, graphics in Odyssey are either equivalent to, or only marginally better, than those in Horizons. And yet, the game engine has several broken features (volumetric fog, coloured lighting, antialiasing, rendering LOD issues, etc...).
• Even on top of the range next-gen hardware, the game can barely push past 60 FPS on foot. That's unjustifiably poor by any measure.
• There are lots of other games with significantly better graphics that are able to run better than Odyssey.
• Even now, nearly a year later, it is still not possible to get Odyssey to look as good as it does in it's own game store promotional video (which is labelled as 'Actual In-Game Graphics').

Simply put, Odyssey may have moved the game forward in terms of gameplay, but it has also objectively taken a step backward in graphics and performance.

 

[DYSEQTA]

That's a highly subjective statement without any actual numbers to qualify it.

That's it right there. I don't need a number to tell me if it's OK for me to be enjoying something or not. Game play does.

There are lots of other games with significantly better graphics that are able to run better than Odyssey.

You mean games that are remotely like ED? So Star Citizen? There is no other game that has all the features that ED provides that could even come close to claiming significantly better graphics than ED. It runs better than ED does it?

Simply put, Odyssey may have moved the game forward in terms of gameplay, but it has also objectively taken a step backward in graphics and performance.

And what matters the most to a game? You said it. Game play.


P.S. I just realised there is a major flaw in ground CZ game play. The drop-ship rides to and from the battle give you way to much time to play forum warrior

 

[Northpin]

I doubt anything bad will happen to their niche reputation, since as we've seen since last year, many users are more than happy to pretend like nothing is wrong and that any complaints is just "whining."

Dont get me wrong, i'm quite happy with odyssey (even tho i can easily find stuff to criticize especially when it comes to planetary generation) and weird enough, i can still enjoy Horizons on XB.

I'd imagine the response on the forums depends on how the problem is presented. I'd think that most anyone here would acknowledge that there are plenty of problems, in my case it's the drama and the whining that puts me off. Apart from graphics and FPS issues on my hardware (and possibly due to using wine/linux), I really do enjoy odyssey..

I do enjoy ED, in its both incarnations.
But i cant stop getting a bit worried seeing all the budgetary cuts that seem to affect the game in the last 4 months

 

[nanite2000]

That's it right there. I don't need a number to tell me if it's OK for me to be enjoying something or not. Game play does.



You mean games that are remotely like ED? So Star Citizen? There is no other game that has all the features that ED provides that could even come close to claiming significantly better graphics than ED. It runs better than ED does it?



And what matters the most to a game? You said it. Game play.


P.S. I just realised there is a major flaw in ground CZ game play. The drop-ship rides to and from the battle give you way to much time to play forum warrior

Suit yourself - I'm not going to waste my time trying to convince a random internet stranger.

If you're happy with the game, then I'm happy for you. Sincerely.

Just as long as you bear in mind that what's "good enough" for you isn't necessarily good enough for everyone else, and that's being reflected in the game reviews.

 

[Northpin]

Just as long as you bear in mind that what's "good enough" for you isn't necessarily good enough for everyone else, and that's being reflected in the game reviews.

That post you linked was from someone that actually likes the game

Steam reviews?
Most of them are from the first months after launch (when EDO was in a really bad shape) and a lot other reviews are left in spite.

Even i left a negative review in the beginning, but in the mean time i changed my review to a positive one since EDO improved a lot since launch.
Edit: Recent reviews are Mixed on Steam (52% positive)

 

[Ian Skippy]

It's never not amusing to see people in this forum argue day after day that others are, in fact, not having fun and the things they enjoy are bad and not an improvement.

Dont like a a game? Okay. Want to tell random strangers that literally every day for months or even years? Odd, but okay. Want to argue people who are having fun are wrong? Lol.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Want to argue people who are having fun are wrong?

It is rather odd behaviour, indeed.