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

It's more like complaining that there are also elbows on her shoulders, but also where her knees should be.
NOOOOO.jpg
 
I've spent quite a lot of time since EDO dropped quietly explaining to friends, players and non-players alike, that while the new dlc is buggy, it's not terminally so, as I've been able to play without too many issues. Yes, I get frame rate drops approaching anything busy - be that a planet (though only during the intial approach) or a well-lit surface settlement at night. But I'm using a GTX970, so I can't really complain... The new UI is awful, especially the Galmap but the cockpit station interface reminds me of Win8 - I'm sure it looks lovely to children, but is an insult to us in its inefficiency. Not fit for purpose.

But these things I can live with. Abandoning procgen planets in favour of inevitably repetitious tiling really worries me, and if reducing ED to yet another cut and paste universe is the direction of travel of the development team, I'm sad. I may not stop playing the game because of it, but I certainly won't have the same kind of commitment to the game that I have had since first release - and I mean 30-odd years. The whole point of this game has always been its unconventionality. Please, DB and FDev, don't lose that. If you do, it's the end of the magic that has always been Elite, and I will retire from the Pilots Federation in order to go melon farming on some remote rock. So that I don't have to be aware that my remote rock is indentical to every other rock in the galaxy. I rather think I'm not alone in that.
 
I've spent quite a lot of time since EDO dropped quietly explaining to friends, players and non-players alike, that while the new dlc is buggy, it's not terminally so, as I've been able to play without too many issues. Yes, I get frame rate drops approaching anything busy - be that a planet (though only during the intial approach) or a well-lit surface settlement at night. But I'm using a GTX970, so I can't really complain... The new UI is awful, especially the Galmap but the cockpit station interface reminds me of Win8 - I'm sure it looks lovely to children, but is an insult to us in its inefficiency. Not fit for purpose.

But these things I can live with. Abandoning procgen planets in favour of inevitably repetitious tiling really worries me, and if reducing ED to yet another cut and paste universe is the direction of travel of the development team, I'm sad. I may not stop playing the game because of it, but I certainly won't have the same kind of commitment to the game that I have had since first release - and I mean 30-odd years. The whole point of this game has always been its unconventionality. Please, DB and FDev, don't lose that. If you do, it's the end of the magic that has always been Elite, and I will retire from the Pilots Federation in order to go melon farming on some remote rock. So that I don't have to be aware that my remote rock is indentical to every other rock in the galaxy. I rather think I'm not alone in that.
There will be places (especially on atmospheric worlds) where procedural textures just aren’t going to look as good as hand-crafted ones. There are limits to the powers of random noise.

The issue isn’t that hand-crafted textures are bad, it’s that they’re bad if you notice them repeating. So that’s what they have to work on.
 
There are indeed limits to procgen... but on the other hand Horizons was.... well fine for most people (I personally still think it looks great). So clearly it's possible to deliver on this.

Honestly, IMO they broke something that didn't need to be fixed (and probably got out over their skis in the process)
 
There are indeed limits to procgen... but on the other hand Horizons was.... well fine for most people (I personally still think it looks great). So clearly it's possible to deliver on this.
Some of the Horizons planets were ok - the relatively flat planet surfaces punctuated with craters (which I assume were just procedurally placed crafted assets) looked great. Maybe a little dull, but that's just how those planets are.

I thought the more hilly/mountainous worlds though didn't look great at all. More interesting certainly, and better for things like canyon running, but they didn't look natural at all. More like some kind of 3D mathematical graph.

I think the terrain in Odyssey is generally better; the textures though are a big mix. For me at least, the detailed textures when on-foot are superb, and the planets look great from a distance (provided you don't see repeated patterns) but the mid-level distances are poor. Minecraft-like blocky textures, weird mixes of colours etc.
 
I don't understand why the new tech even has repeating textures, whereas Horizons didn't (or at least it was so subtle noone picked up on it)? Are they using tiles, whereas they didn't before? I've seen so much complex geometry in Horizons (like that SUPER craggy planet during DW2) yet have never seen anything like this -

Screenshot_0048_5.jpg


Is it just the tech not working properly, or is this going to be it?
 
whereas Horizons didn't
Long time explorer and first time poster here. Sorry everyone. I'm possibly going to ruin Horizons' procgen for you as well. It's one of those "once you see it you can't unsee it" things... ;)

So I just lifted this screenshot at 1:50 from the video about terrain quality in Horizons vs Odyssey that someone linked earlier in this thread and marked some of the pre-generated terrain assets used by the Horizons procgen algorithm. See the top two tiles for Horizons terrain and notice the similar patterns baked into the Horizons terrain? A few of them are obviously somewhat distorted (see Horizons night vision screenshot top right). Perhaps it's due to being rescaled/squished in the y axis by the Horizons procgen or maybe due to the fish-eye effect in the original screenshots, but they're clearly drawing from the same assets. There are more repeating patterns in the screenshot of course but I only marked the, at a glance, most egregious ones.

View attachment 230708

This is as far as I know the only way to get procedural generation to work with anything resembling reasonable performance on today's hardware. Having every little piece of the landscape entirely procedurally generated on the fly, down to every rock and bump, for an entire planet at 1:1 scale is simply unworkable given today's hardware restraints (i.e. local storage, memory and computing power). In particular if the procedural generation is being done in real time on the user's own CPU/GPU. Also, it's extremely resource intensive and complex (if even at all feasible) to simulate and procedurally generate more complex geological formations, such as those formed by wind, liquid erosion or tectonic stresses, using real-time mathematics and achieve anything resembling 60+ fps at the same time. Perhaps when we all are running quantum computers sometime in the future...? This is 100% why Frontier uses these large pre-generated ground assets and try to blend them together as best as they can when Odyssey is generating planet surfaces.

The trick is to have enough variety of pre-generated assets and arrange these assets in random and subtle enough patterns to make it less obvious to the human eye that they're actually based on the same meshes and textures. (Even that won't work all of the time as one can see in Star Citizen and No Man's Sky procgen, or in the screenshots above...)

IMO the issue with Odyssey is not so much that it uses pre-generated assets on planet surfaces. As you can see Horizons does that too and for performance reasons it needs to do that! The issue is that Odyssey's lighting, planetary colour variety at a distance along with a (quite likely) lower pool of larger, more detailed and comprehensive mesh assets compared to Horizons. All of this makes the baked in patterns in Odyssey stick out like a sore thumb compared to Horizons more subtle approach to surfaces.

Could Odyssey do better as far as planetary surfaces go for us explorers? Absolutely! I fully agree that it needs more work and a more subtle approach to asset re-use. Is it unfixable? Most likely not. Horizons uses the same approach Odyssey does well enough that most won't ever notice any repeating surface assets in Horizons, as this thread is evidence of.

The devs need to tweak the sharp Odyssey surface lighting (yes please!), increase the variety and subtleness of ground mesh/texture assets and improve surface colours (i.e. make them better blended and with more subtle colour transitions between different spots on the surface, in particular when looking at a distance) and if possible also try to limit the adjacent re-use of pre-generated assets enough in Odyssey to make its surface assets blend as subtly as Horizons procgen does it. If the devs can pull that off then Odyssey procgen will fool the human eye at least most of the time, just as Horizons procgen algorithms manage to do.

Cheers!

PS. Again I'm sorry if I've ruined the Horizons procgen for anyone. Once you see it you can't unsee it... ;)

Screenshot (231).jpg
 
Back
Top Bottom