I took a few days break from the disappointment of Odyssey, what's the general gist of things here, many planets still copy-paste? Or there's been some news they are going make them unique again some day? I've thought to myself this is all because of the first person shooter that no-one asked for, they had to standardise and generify everything so the bases wouldn't sink into the ground or something, maybe i'm wrong i don't know, i'm just depressed at this point.
New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
I have to agree. That is totally unacceptable. In fact now that it's been pointed out, I find it nothing short of shocking. ED's main claim to fame were unique procedurally generated planets. That's gone, replaced by procedurally placed tile planets.
Still shaking my head. Can't believe this. And btw, this is what Star Citizen does, and no doubt many other space games.
AcKtUaLlY...
Star citizen, is waaay more sophisticated than that. Never played it, but am very interested in the tech.
SC uses a combo of procedural generation combined with crafting hand, but the way I understand it works is..
Take blank planet.
Devs add temp and atmo stats
System generates first pass planet
Devs can then go in, and with a very large brush (or fine brush) paint different regions e.g. Super dense for rest, dense for rest, sparse forest, scrubland forest.
But HOW those regions are made is still procedural. So SC Devs are basically playing a super advanced version of sim city when they make the planets.
It seems fdev are doing the exact opposite. Dev created assets, procedurally placed
I would not call the SC way more sophisticated actually. For instance it would mean a lot of work to do that on the scale of Elite with 100s of billions of whole systems.
Their way is just more suited to their type of developing their game but it makes their playable area incredibly small at the moment.
The Frontier way was always, and still is with Odyssey, to generate the base parameters like sizes, gravity you name it via a proc gen built on rather realistic models of our Milky Way.
On top of that, for Odyssey, they now seem to opt to go a bit the SC way in taking bigger precrafted/precalculated patterns as tiles for the proc gen to use - edit: to increase th visual appeal and fidelity.
And just like in SC they seem to have much too small a number of this assets to accommodate a galaxy this size at the moment.
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Remember, camera aren't perfect, and it was worse in 1969. It was the first time humanity used cameras in space, we learned as we went. According to the astronauts who landed on the moon, there is an extremely thin atmosphere like thing when you are on the ground. I think it's suspended dust or something, and not actual atmo. The camera didn't pick it up. Just like they can't pick any stars because they are special camera to photography the moon.Yeah. We'll see about what happens.
The haze helps a ton with distance LOD, like in most open world games, which look just weird if you use tweaks to kill off the fog.
But on planets without atmosphere, fog and atmospheric haze is not a thing and without anything disturbing the ground, dust will just settle and done.
I mean, here comes reality:
No haze.
Also no duplicate patterns though.
I feel planet on Horizon feel more real than Odyssey. Sure, they're not perfect, but they look like Mars or something. Planet in Odyssey are bland, and downright cartoonish looking at times.
That's it for me, the NEW planetary tech literally runed the game into unplayable mess.
Horizon was perfect from the start, y do you broke it FD?
Pff... usual Odyssey flat, boring, monocolor surface.
No haze.
Also no duplicate patterns though.
So unrealistic.
I can bet this location looked better in Horizons.
You can bet your [redacted] it did!!!Pff... usual Odyssey flat, boring, monocolor surface.
So unrealistic.
I can bet this location looked better in Horizons.
All this happened before. All this will happen again... and get even better.Planetary tech Horizons 2015
"AdriánGuth, post: 9238268, member: 89099"]
People dont have memory.
Elite: Dangerous – Developer Frontier Responds to Downgrade Reports
Elite: Dangerous – Developer Frontier Responds to Downgrade Reportswccftech.com
"AdriánGuth, post: 9238309, member: 89099"]
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...erous-players-noticed-the-galaxy-turned-beige
Now do this for over 400 billion planets.
I think that's the major difference between these two games. Elite's galaxy is completely procedurally created with the exception of a few places.
So the planetary tech and its algorithm magic fed with astronomical fuel has to generate billions of planets that make sense and can't be too fantastic or empty.
That can't be easy. Couldn't have been with Horizons and with Odyssey it's even more details to consider.
Sad to say I'm in broad consensus. I've lost count of the number of times I've waxed lyrical on here about the sheer beauty, the almost spiritual joy of seeing unique vistas emerge from the seeds and algorithms of the Stellar Forge. The strange visceral feeling of knowing that every planet, every mountain range, every plain you looked upon was unique, never to be repeated anywhere. Even the rocks, themselves non-unique assets, were placed in a way that guaranteed mathematical uniqueness. I berated numerous posters for using the term "copypasta" to describe the ED galaxy, because the visual similarity between worlds was merely a subjective artefact, and we understood that under the hood everything was pure chaos mathematics. To some players it was an irrelevance, while to others it was everything. God, at least in this galaxy, did play dice with the universe. An almost infinite set of dice.
But that's not the case any more. Now every mountain range and plain is not unique, because it's quite possible there's another just like it a few tiles away. Or even hundreds just like it on another world light years distant, who knows? God isn't playing with infinite dice any more, so much as rolling two D6s and pulling from a column in a look-up table.
And yes, I know it's not as simple as that, and that this is very subjective, and that there are probably very good efficiency reasons why it makes more sense to pre-define archetypical landscape elements and construct the worlds from those. But for me the perception of having lost something special "underneath" is something from which it's going to be very difficult to recover. Even if the new planetary tech system is overhauled and tweaked, and the tiling system given a larger pool of smaller tiles to the point where the artifice is largely invisible, it still won't be quite the same. It's hard to describe, but to me it's akin to moving from the Matrix to the holodeck. The simulation will still be convincing when it works, but the method is much more transparent and the odds of seeing an immersion-shattering glitch much more pronounced.
The good news is that the numbers and algorithms are all still there. It's not like throwing out a mould. There's always the chance of a partial reversion, a hybridisation of the Horizons and Odyssey systems that will give the efficiencies needed while retaining enough of the old model to produce those spectacular canyon worlds and other edge cases that the community has fallen in love with. But my personal fear is that the underlying "magic" of it all may be gone, or at least tainted, forever. That we've glimpsed too much of the Matrix code and, even if the simulation matches or surpasses what we had before, some of us will always see some of that green katakana rain in our peripheral vision.
Quoting myself now. That's a new one. So, yeah, I think something's going on. The first body I decided to test on after posting the above...
Source: https://flic.kr/p/2m2A5fE
Mind you. This is just a planet picked at random and a landing spot that looked cool from above. There was no DSS scan and I didn't notice the plant life while landing. I didn't even need to leave the blue circle.
I think that's really just because if there's life, it's everywhere it could grow. No POIs with clustered plants, but regions populated with them.
Certain stuff just won't grow on rocky ground, or on sand or whatever, which is why the heatmap points you at the regions you'll find them.
There is no POIs for plants.
I don't know if I would call this really a bug, tbh.
If that planet hosts life at all (no matter of scanned beforehand or not) it should harbour life not only on a small spot but distributed wherever it could take root on the same planetoid.
That it's invisible while descending, yes, that I would put under the LOD problem.
Edit: @Valorin, darn ninja'd
That's confirmation's bias though. When I tried the scan plant thing, I didn't have much difficulties to find the plants, but a single landing is not representative of anything.
You need to slow down and be really low to have the LOD catch up, then it shows up.
I'm not talking about that. I'm saying I had no data about the surface that could, potentially, spoil the results.
But it's not just one. I do agree it's not definitive though. Just something to consider.
But what do you think isn't working correctly?
Also, note that bacterial stuff is very hard to see. Or at least was, I know they make it easier to spot, but didn't try since.
That you shouldn't land on life whenever you set down, or even one out of ten times, when you're not looking for it. And that the material and life distribution issues are interconnected to the planet tech issues.
Taken from one of your screenshots:
Whenever you see these patterns, you know you're playing Odyssey. Every planet has them. Here are some screenshots from Deciat 1:
Maybe they impress you the first time you see them. But since they are everywhere, they contribute to the sameness of Odyssey's planets. You'll get tired of them soon.