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

If you look at the four circled areas in the top left corner, they are actually different.

The top right are for sure the same, but it's low level. Look at my picture taken from orbit. Giant big country sized chunks of areas repeated. Find me that in Horizons.
Theyre same textures, look again.
 
You need to watch this with Dr Kay Ross. starts around 12 min in

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2AJS_-bTg0
I know, Ive seen that. And tech in Odyssey is much more complex, theres no handcrafted lanscape, cept one that near engineers bases maybe (like in Horizons) and some unique POIs.

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. It takes the view of starting big and refining small. A planet has all sorts of Stellar Forge data associated with it. Things like the gravitational stress its crust goes under, the proportion of its depth which is crust or magma or core, the stresses its under, how cratered it would be, if it's tidally locked, and more. From those, and the general knowledge of what the planet is made up of, we decide its top layer information. That is describing general shapes and regions of interest across the entire surface and the general types of formations which will be there. Things might make the terrain more chaotic, make more flat plains or basins and things like that. From stochastically sampling that information, the next layer of information goes down - we're talking up 100km worth of terrain for example, which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed.

We have resources that represent the shapes and the types of features that we'd want to generate in the first place. Then we've got some stochastic sampling and blending to put those together, not only in the right places across a planet, but now also rotated correctly so they flow into each other in the right direction - which makes quite a difference in the visual quality of a vista.
 
I know, Ive seen that. And tech in Odyssey is much more complex, theres no handcrafted lanscape, cept one that near engineers bases maybe (like in Horizons) and some unique POIs.

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. It takes the view of starting big and refining small. A planet has all sorts of Stellar Forge data associated with it. Things like the gravitational stress its crust goes under, the proportion of its depth which is crust or magma or core, the stresses its under, how cratered it would be, if it's tidally locked, and more. From those, and the general knowledge of what the planet is made up of, we decide its top layer information. That is describing general shapes and regions of interest across the entire surface and the general types of formations which will be there. Things might make the terrain more chaotic, make more flat plains or basins and things like that. From stochastically sampling that information, the next layer of information goes down - we're talking up 100km worth of terrain for example, which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed.

We have resources that represent the shapes and the types of features that we'd want to generate in the first place. Then we've got some stochastic sampling and blending to put those together, not only in the right places across a planet, but now also rotated correctly so they flow into each other in the right direction - which makes quite a difference in the visual quality of a vista.
The tech in Odyssey starting at 21 min in discusses how Odyssey is different from Horizons.
 
Again - Horizons was fine. They wasted all of this development time and cost for nothing. Instead of this they should have been adding actual gameplay (things TO DO while exploring) and fixing bugs.

There's clearly a huge vacuum of direction and leadership
 
Again - Horizons was fine. They wasted all of this development time and cost for nothing. Instead of this they should have been adding actual gameplay (things TO DO while exploring) and fixing bugs.

There's clearly a huge vacuum of direction and leadership
Were you around when Horizons came out? There were issues with that tech as well until they squished the bugs although not as many issues.

It will be the same for Odyssey. they have a ton of bugs they need to address to show off the tech as intended.
 
Were you around when Horizons came out? There were issues with that tech as well until they squished the bugs although not as many issues.

It will be the same for Odyssey. they have a ton of bugs they need to address to show off the tech as intended.
Actually the bigger problem is that it's nowhere close to finished. The graphics engine for Odyssey is in shambles.... alpha quality software at best.
 
Horizons was fine
If ps2 graphics is ok for you. For me its superugly uninteresting simple landscape. Glad they improved it a lot.
EliteDangerous64_2021_01_14_19_34_48_042.jpg
 
I agree with you. It clearly needed 6 more months in the oven but I think when they are done fixing the issues it is going to be glorious.

I've seen good planets, I've seen bad planets. It needs far more variation in texturing and coloration, though. These are ridiculous and they aren't even the worst examples I've seen.
 

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Do you guys think the 400 billion planets are all hand crafted in Horizons?

wow, ok

No, we do not, but you almost hit the nail on the head there.

In EDO - If Fdev handcrafted, let's say, 500 assets (textures, mountains, canyons, etc), and now these 500 assets are being randomized across 400 billion planets ... I think you are starting to understand what I'm saying here.

In Horizon they had a mathematical algorithm to create the heightmaps which makes a reoccurring pattern very rare if not impossible.
 
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