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

My understanding is this tech was put to build upon, we couldn't get better worlds out of the horizons tech. If we want the game to go forward we're gonn have to suck this up.

And I really don't like it, but reading what's been said before by Dr Kay, they needed this upgrade to work this way so they could advance the tech and give them a base to work from.

I hate it, but if this is the reasoning, I'll take it on the chin. I want the game to move forward past rocky, empty worlds.
 
What I'm about to show you will be the final straw in cementing the new planetary tech system into a failure.

I remember Dr Kay Ross stating on stream that their procedural heightmap system made use of handmade terrain that would then be randomized across. I was worried when I heard this.

Check this out - I'll let the images speak for itself:

Gq7qNhg.png


6D2HQvV.jpg


Literally all terrain features both from high orbit to low orbit are repeating, hand crafted, and break every little bit hunger for exploration. There is absolutely no desire to go down and explore since all you're looking at is the "randomly" organized set of hand crafted height map bits the developers have made.

Horizons gives a REAL sense of wanting to go and explore. Find planets with unique features.

Planets in Odyssey are no longer unique. They are just reorganised sets of the same features.

These planets were designed with one goal: look acceptable from an on-foot perspective or when looking from a twilight perspective with a setting sun for the atmo effect.

dont forget the OLD techs very frequent perfectly aligned grid pattern of craters... i find that way worse, and it is also more obvious imo.. the examples above i prefer over that atleast
 
Corners cut all over the place with this DLC. Well we can only hope they are on overdrive fixing things and that it sorts out in a couple of months. But time and again we've seen, it's very difficult to overcome bad launches, most people will just never come back.
 
"Q: Will large worlds feature tall mountains or geological features?
This is an interesting question! There is a reason why the features are shallower on larger planets. With the increased gravitational strains you can't maintain as tall a natural feature with the strength the material is made out of. so you'll end up with shallower features. I'm afraid it's just how the maths drops out for those, there's a good range of planets but the tiny ones tend to be able to support the more extreme terrain because the large things aren't being destroyed by the gravity pulling it down."

Question now should be "Will worlds feature tall mountains or geological features"?
Answer: "No".
This is providing now speaking points for White knights to explain, why, even though the new planets look like #$_&, it's actually...the best thing that ever happened to this game.
 
I wish I haven't seen this thread... now I'm depressed and sad. Extremely disappointing and soul crushing. :(
I did not read any forums intially - I wasn't even on the forums, I came here after playing the game and just being honest with what I'm looking at.
 
What I'm about to show you will be the final straw in cementing the new planetary tech system into a failure.

I remember Dr Kay Ross stating on stream that their procedural heightmap system made use of handmade terrain that would then be randomized across. I was worried when I heard this.

Check this out - I'll let the images speak for itself:

Gq7qNhg.png


6D2HQvV.jpg


Literally all terrain features both from high orbit to low orbit are repeating, hand crafted, and break every little bit hunger for exploration. There is absolutely no desire to go down and explore since all you're looking at is the "randomly" organized set of hand crafted height map bits the developers have made.

Horizons gives a REAL sense of wanting to go and explore. Find planets with unique features.

Planets in Odyssey are no longer unique. They are just reorganised sets of the same features.

These planets were designed with one goal: look acceptable from an on-foot perspective or when looking from a twilight perspective with a setting sun for the atmo effect.
Any key rationale why they would have gone down this sad road?
 
Who was pushing for Odyssey to release this year?
As someone else pointed out, it was likely a financial obligation to shareholders. It sucks and I don't like that, but companies in this position don't really have a way out of it, best thing to do is to release and fix on the backend. Which would describe what's happening here pretty well unfortunately.

My view may differ from others as I believe that FDev are trying to make the best of 2020 compounding everything and I don't believe in the mantra of 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' attitude to the situation. Patience and understanding along with persistently working with FDev through the evident issues is likely to yield the best results, that is if we want to see the best Elite can be, as some say. Development these days is iterative, long gone are the days of trying to fit a game into 64k or 2Mb, as obvious as it seems to point out, I think some tend to forget that, and are too quick to attribute malice or incompetence.
 
It would be interesting to know in detail how this hand-made pattern is used to create variety across millions of planets. There is something I'm probably missing. If hand-made patterns are not heavily modified by some magic-math each time I don't really understand how variety would work across so many planets.
 
"For Odyssey... we're talking up 100km worth of terrain for example, which are now generated offline into terrain shapes that we know are formed."
This is where this tech fails. The universe is created and determined by chaos.

Procgen math is way closer (and much more unpredictable) to chaos than choosing among a set of patterns and laying them out randomly.

Patterns are a sign of order.
 
Back
Top Bottom