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

I dunno, maybe they had one of those endearing "I shouldn't be saying this" moments that people interpreted as a full fledged admission that the work on Update 12 is at full swing.
"... but I shouldn't be saying this."

"Oh, so there will be an Update 12?"

"No, that's why I shouldn't be saying this."

😜

Jokes aside, the fact that Frontier are still working on something for Elite didn't really come as a surprise to me. If they weren't, that'd be it for the game I'd say.
 
Hm. I don't quit on games since they are games and not a relationship. Makes no sense for me. I can always just play later.
Same here. I play ED much less frequently than I once did, but for now it's still there when I need it.

I expect much of the apprehension (or schadenfreude, depending on which side of the fence you stand) around whether or not an online game has entered "maintenance mode" is that it is inevitably followed at some point by "servers off", at which point none of us can play later*.

*I'm aware of what David Braben once said about open-sourcing the Stellar
Forge if the servers were shuttered, but I strongly doubt it will ever happen.

As far as games go, I really love Elite though. So, this is a disappointment because those patterns are more of an issue for me than anything else with Odyssey.
Subjectively, even accounting for less frequent play, I don't seem to be seeing as many examples of in-your-face tiling repetition as I did when they first changed the planetary tech. Whether this is down to FD's tweaking, or me becoming less bothered, or a combination of the two is unquantifiable but it does mean I'm no longer flying up to planets and actively wondering whether I'm going to have an attack of the copypasta. I still see it from time to time, especially with the DSS filters on, but it's not as jarring or frequent and tends to be more subtle than earlier examples.

If I'm being honest, I'm both disappointed at the decision but also sort of relieved that I no longer have to concern myself with whether the issue is going to be 100% fixed, or even if it was ever 100% fixable. From this point on, WYSIWYG. And while the occasional bit of obvious tiling might still stick out, it's become a small price to pay for the overall experience. Once on the surface, the repetition is invisible. And some of the landscapes, especially the new ice worlds with their reflective surfaces and eerie ice-cracking ambient sounds, are incredible.

Overall, Odyssey is definitely an upgrade for me, especially planetary landings. Its just a pity it's something of an underwhelming upgrade on the whole.
 
So, I don't know what to think. I don't even have an oppinion because I don't have enough information to form one. Elite sits somewhere on the side and if something pops up, something pops up. If not, well, no changes here. I once what enthusiastic about the game and I kinda hope I will be again, but at the moment, most things that excited me about it have been hit pretty hard, even planetary tech, which was my absolute highlight concerning Odyssey. Never needed space legs at all.
I'm in a similar boat. What frustrates me is that I see what Odyssey could have been, and that Odyssey would have been amazing for me personally. For example, I enjoy the rock and plant scanning as its implemented in No Man's Sky, as simplistic as it is. It's a relaxing exercise that gives me a feeling of accomplishment and reward (in a video game setting, of course), that really adds to my sense of exploration. If Odyssey had copied and adapted this, instead of making their own janky "You want me to do what now?" version of scanning the same dozen plant assets, I would be much more interested in this DLC.

That's just one example in a whole bucket of features that at first glance interest me, but as soon as I stick a fork in it, I see the inside is still raw and uncooked and not at all what I hoped for. I think what makes me the most sad about Odyssey is that I see the hard work that went into this DLC, and I see the vision that Frontier had for it (especially in those pre-alpha videos), but the execution falls way short of that vision. Whatever hope I had that Frontier could bring their vision to fruition given enough time has dried up during almost a year of 11+ updates and multiple admissions of "Sorry, we can't do that." And if Frontier can't make Odyssey work as originally intended, there's no way they'll be able to pull off true atmospheric planets with weather, liquids, modeled erosion, or any of the other things many of us hoped for based on the original vision-casting of David Braben.

So these days I just hope for simple things like the next Bounty Hunting Community Goal (in Horizons, of course), and even that's not happening anymore 🤦‍♂️
 
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I'm in a similar boat. What frustrates me is that I see what Odyssey could have been, and that Odyssey would have amazing for me personally. For example, I enjoy the rock and plant scanning as its implemented in No Man's Sky, as simplistic as it is. It's a relaxing exercise that gives me a feeling of accomplishment and reward (in a video game setting, of course), that really adds to my sense of exploration. If Odyssey had copied and adapted this, instead of making their own janky "You want me to do what now?" version of scanning the same dozen plant assets, I would be much more interested in this DLC.
I'm reminded of Hbomberguy's Deus Ex vid, and how well he explains why the original Deus Ex has better hacking than 3.
 
That depends on why it will never happen, maybe there will never be a reason?
Possibly. I have been wrong, sometimes very wrong, with ED predictions before.

In this case I've always been a bit sceptical because of the slightly weasel-y choice of wording: "If [Frontier ever ... shuts down the servers] we would be able to release an archived version of the game, including the servers, but of course this would not evolve any further."(link) It's all a bit vague, conditional and noncommittal, and to be fair that's probably understandable given that the dropping of offline support meant he was forced into a defensive position when the game hadn't even launched.

But what's perhaps more damning is that the statement was made in November 2014 when the only stakeholders involved were FD themselves, the KS backers and those players who'd directly funded the game via beta / gamma early access. Now there are other partners and companies involved at various levels, I'm not sure it would even be Braben's call to make any more.

The one guarantee is that we will find out, eventually. Let's all hope it's later rather than sooner.
 
Personally, I always found the promise of an open source version rather dubious, to say the least. I can hardly imagine how the game would ever run without amazon servers. So if a private person starts such a personal server, they will still have to pay for the amazon servers. Looks to me like a job for a lot of well organised and passionate players who are willing to put some money on the table for it.

That's why I prefer to go for the optimistic option. 🙏

I think they were just saying whatever they needed to say to get people to drink the kool-aid.
 
Since this is also my impression, I would say that they have indeed improved, if not completely eliminated, the repetitive patterns.
Improved yes, mostly thanks to added details (which "drown" the pattern). But it's still very much there. The biggest culprit is some issue with mountains formations, where the game just take one stamp and put it everywhere.

With my last expeditions, I had those one :
2craters side by side thing
20220316162158_1.jpg

And it's hard to miss in scan mode :
20220314004100_1.jpg
I don't screenshot them anymore, what's the point ? But yes, it's rather frequent.


Honestly, while annoying, it's not the worst issue I have with odyssey. It's just the accumulation of issues that gets me. I can deal with 1-2 bugs. But there are a lot. Repetition are hard to spot from the ground/low altitude (unless it's the same bloody rocks that spawned 5times around you).
But stuff like this, it's much worse.
20220310211609_1.jpg
That one is impossible to miss, no matter your altitude. It's right "in your face". And I don't think I need a red circle for even the most blind of forumers. There are plenty of little or big bugs like this, and it's annoying.

The recent cancellation make me afraid that what we have is all we'll get.
 
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I see these things too (of course I do and I suppose everyone does). I just don't understand why you get so hung up on the view from orbit. That is something I would never expect to see anything beautiful or particularly interesting in Odyssey or Horizons, instead I would choose SE if I were looking for such views from those heights. Quite possibly we both play in very different ways. I don't recall ever parking somewhere in orbit and admiring the great view. For me, orbit is nothing more than a medium of passage to the surface, similar to a lift, which doesn't necessarily need to be covered with Persian carpets for my sake, because I have no ambitions whatsoever to settle down there. Do you play at all or do you just dissect the game?

I cannot stress this enough: It's the surface at ground level where Odyssey really shines, even if there are ugly things there too, but the much improved variety (compared to Horizons) more than makes up for these flaws.
Odyssey suffer from a lot of LoD issue and overall lower quality orbital appearance. More often than not, planets from orbit or the approach before glide are blurry and/or pixelated. Thing is, it was not like that in Horizon, and even in odyssey, when it doesn't bug, it look nice. So, it's not intended.
On the ground, usually it's OK, but the landscape also suffer.
I climbed that super high mountain expecting/hoping for a pretty view, and instead I had some low res LoD thing, includign a melted ice cream mountain.
20210809225440_1.jpg

On the other side, this was the view :
20210809224302_1.jpg

On one side, Odyssey look nice. On the other side, it's a vanilla melted ice cream. Guess which side I'm on^^
(also 15fps loss for having a plant in the frame lol)
It's not about being pretty, it's about bugs and low resolution being used when a proper high resolution is available. Which mean it's not "moon ugly", which is OK, but it's "computer generated ugly", which isn't.


And then we had other issue, like missing atmospheric effect, and bugged fog at guardian/thargoid sites, or in general.
And then we have the fact the vast majority of planets we have belongs to one pattern amongst a handful. It's not good for repetition, obviously, but also for the sense of discovery.

As I said, it's the accumulation.
As for your last picture, though, I'm at a loss. At what height and speed did that happen and is it reproducible? I haven't seen anything like that in my sessions (or I simply forgot or overlooked it because I was speeding through). But the crucial question is: how often do you actually see something like in the last picture? I only ask because I think if your answer is "quite often", it strongly suggests that there is something wrong with your PC or the settings. The pictures you provide also look suspiciously familiar. How many times have you already posted them and when is it from? If your answer is "rarely", why does it matter at all?
I think it's a specific set of texture which is buggy. It doesn't swap off the LoD texture unless you are literally feet on the ground. It ahppened I think twice ? In my week of exploration, for that specific bug. And yes I posted it already. I don't keep a library of similar bugs so I can vary the pictures :D I usually take one screenshot for it, and will not for the next one.
 
It seems they keep shooting themselves in the foot all the time, I'm surprised they didn't have to amputate it yet! :D

Still no matter how much one might want to complain, one would have to give them having published an epic space game for the last 8 years.. Maybe not always as we want it, and with quite a lot of bugs and unfinished stuff. Many have played for many years, I'm only in 3+ years but in that time I've seen EDH get very good and getting more features. I'm really hoping the same happens with EDO..!
 
New Posts feature, which throws up an incredible mishmash of all Frontier games without any way to filter.
Set New Posts to only show watched forums, then watch the entire Elite Dangerous set of forums. That's what I did, so New Posts gives me (mostly) only ED related threads. Still a mish-mash, but lesser.

Screenshot 2022-04-16 190028.jpg
 
I'm in a similar boat. What frustrates me is that I see what Odyssey could have been, and that Odyssey would have been amazing for me personally. For example, I enjoy the rock and plant scanning as its implemented in No Man's Sky, as simplistic as it is. It's a relaxing exercise that gives me a feeling of accomplishment and reward (in a video game setting, of course), that really adds to my sense of exploration. If Odyssey had copied and adapted this, instead of making their own janky "You want me to do what now?" version of scanning the same dozen plant assets, I would be much more interested in this DLC.

That's just one example in a whole bucket of features that at first glance interest me, but as soon as I stick a fork in it, I see the inside is still raw and uncooked and not at all what I hoped for. I think what makes me the most sad about Odyssey is that I see the hard work that went into this DLC, and I see the vision that Frontier had for it (especially in those pre-alpha videos), but the execution falls way short of that vision. Whatever hope I had that Frontier could bring their vision to fruition given enough time has dried up during almost a year of 11+ updates and multiple admissions of "Sorry, we can't do that." And if Frontier can't make Odyssey work as originally intended, there's no way they'll be able to pull off true atmospheric planets with weather, liquids, modeled erosion, or any of the other things many of us hoped for based on the original vision-casting of David Braben.

So these days I just hope for simple things like the next Bounty Hunting Community Goal (in Horizons, of course), and even that's not happening anymore 🤦‍♂️
Yeah. My Odyssey would have been only very basic FPS features and tons and tons of scientific exploration content. getting readings, samples and the like from surfaces, implementation of more realistic stellar stuff, like black holes with acretion discs and so on. You know, the kind of stuff that we know is out there, interactable and with corresponding services for analysis and selling data. There's a lot of gameplay here if you really build up a system for scientific exploration and not just add data to collect and sell. And, of course, planetary tech. Moar.
But these things come down to development choices and not implementation. I knew from the start that Odyssey will only be partially for me.
 
Same here. I play ED much less frequently than I once did, but for now it's still there when I need it.

I expect much of the apprehension (or schadenfreude, depending on which side of the fence you stand) around whether or not an online game has entered "maintenance mode" is that it is inevitably followed at some point by "servers off", at which point none of us can play later*.

*I'm aware of what David Braben once said about open-sourcing the Stellar
Forge if the servers were shuttered, but I strongly doubt it will ever happen.


Subjectively, even accounting for less frequent play, I don't seem to be seeing as many examples of in-your-face tiling repetition as I did when they first changed the planetary tech. Whether this is down to FD's tweaking, or me becoming less bothered, or a combination of the two is unquantifiable but it does mean I'm no longer flying up to planets and actively wondering whether I'm going to have an attack of the copypasta. I still see it from time to time, especially with the DSS filters on, but it's not as jarring or frequent and tends to be more subtle than earlier examples.

If I'm being honest, I'm both disappointed at the decision but also sort of relieved that I no longer have to concern myself with whether the issue is going to be 100% fixed, or even if it was ever 100% fixable. From this point on, WYSIWYG. And while the occasional bit of obvious tiling might still stick out, it's become a small price to pay for the overall experience. Once on the surface, the repetition is invisible. And some of the landscapes, especially the new ice worlds with their reflective surfaces and eerie ice-cracking ambient sounds, are incredible.

Overall, Odyssey is definitely an upgrade for me, especially planetary landings. Its just a pity it's something of an underwhelming upgrade on the whole.
I see it as an upgrade as well. There's a lot of great stuff. Overall I like the new planets a lot better than Horizont's. They look more realistical, there's more variety, scatter rocks, surfaces look a lot better, especially on ice planets.
It's easy to underestimate the work that has been put into planetary tech, also because negative things always get more attention.
But really, for me the new planets are still the highlight and I wouldn't want the Horizon ones back.
 
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