It's like the inverse of the Halo Anniversary bug where bump mapping only shows up with the light turned on.Here we go again.
Now Im seeing blurry white textures where planet surfaces should be when I use my flashlight, which was a bug I saw people talking about weeks ago. Thought it was fixed. Saw this last night. I had not seen this in ED:O previously, and I've put some.... hours into it by now. Still cant use Frontline/CZs. Not sure what else is broken because my attention span is short and I am losing interest.
New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
Yeah, TBH the main thing this new planetary tech makes me think of after seeing a few planets is Mass Effect. the original Mass Effect, and its samey, repetitive planetary surfaces. The first couple, you'e thinking "oh, cool", but by the end you're just like "Seen that, seen that, seen that" as you drive the Mako over the same bland terrain with the same features you've seen a bunch of times.
Yeah, well, you've seen one desert sand dune, you've seen them all. Same with seas, forests... Dmn. Nature is so repetitive!
It's when you keep seeing THE EXACT SAME ONE over and over across multiple planets. It's like you're suddenly in a cartoon where the main characters are lost and keep walking back into the exact same frame.
Like, okay, sometimes it's entertaining to see Vasquez Rocks constantly show up as a location on many different alien planets. But captain Kirk never fought a Gorn at "Generic Odyssey Ridge Formation"
Whilst I suspect you're right to have your doubts about whether they exist at all (although it's certainly got its fair share of ridiculously spikey hills) if they're making half an effort at realism it shouldn't be that easy to drop in from orbit and just hit the right spot, and they generally won't be that visible. What would be good is if they (a) existed, (b) weren't scattered all over the place, although better still if there was the odd planet or moon that was completely chaotic all over (like Miranda), and (c) we could get maps of planets to actually pore over and look for interesting places to visit. What's the point of mapping planets and not getting a map?
Well, at least we now know why they weren't going to merge the new planetary tech with Horizons. It wasn't because they couldn't, more like they knew something was very wrong.
Disappointed that this was allowed to be released in it's current state. Sure, Horizons had it's graphical issues at launch, but at least the Tech, on the whole, was working as intended.
Will be interesting to see just how high up on the road map the planetary tech is this Friday.
Disappointed that this was allowed to be released in it's current state. Sure, Horizons had it's graphical issues at launch, but at least the Tech, on the whole, was working as intended.
Will be interesting to see just how high up on the road map the planetary tech is this Friday.
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You do have a point, friend, but still... I'm intrigued. How many exact replicas of forests or seas have you seen on Earth? Like, say, 7 Caspian Seas clone stamped all across the map?
I have a feeling there is more behind the scenes reasons why they switched to a different method of planetary tech that they don't tell us.
Why using these repeating structures method instead of simply improving the Horizons procedural generation and building on it?
Reusing the same elements hints to saving space. Server space? Did the old planetary tech hit it's limit?
I'm confused. We will probably never know.
Why using these repeating structures method instead of simply improving the Horizons procedural generation and building on it?
Reusing the same elements hints to saving space. Server space? Did the old planetary tech hit it's limit?
I'm confused. We will probably never know.
Well that was it: something was very wrong, but not where you may be implying. There was something very wrong with the Horizons planetary tech that simply could not scale down to on foot. It is not just that though. Vulcanism was essentially a pita when it was introduced. You had to eyeball it from 20k up, scouring the whole planet or spotting the particular sweet spot - the crossing of canyons, where the POI 'might' be. The whole POI business introduced with the DSS was pretty much a concession to the fact that no-one in their right mind would spend THAT much time searching for things that could not be seen or detected from orbit.
There was nothing remotely realistic with the flora and vulcanism tech in Horizons. Even the wild canyons were a side effect - hairball theory - they were never realistic. It was broken and the technology just simply would not hold up under close on foot inspection. It was designed for an SRV at the closest and they needed to go one step further with detail. Plus - if I read it right, the plans they have going forward meant that they needed to make the change to cater for those plans - meaning Horizons planetary tech was dead-ended. It had nowhere to go.
No matter what happened, there was no way it was going to please everyone when they released it.
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There's absolutely no disputing that, that's for sure!
My guess is overheads got too high when you tried to scale up the LOD it was generating, and they didn't want Odyssey tanking framerates even more than it already does which is why they went backwards to such a simplified, old-school system they knew was reliable.
Wow, I didn't even notice until now, but some of the examples in this thread are extreme. Unfortunately you cannot unsee things, so I'll automatically search for patterns now -_-
Going from fully procedural surface generation (which was a technical feat, mind ya!) to this is a downgrade that tells me a simple story: we couldn't make it work, thus accepted defeat and give you this uninspired, boring system instead
Let's hope it was due to the tight schedule to meet the fiscal May deadline and will be reverted to a fully procedural generation...
Going from fully procedural surface generation (which was a technical feat, mind ya!) to this is a downgrade that tells me a simple story: we couldn't make it work, thus accepted defeat and give you this uninspired, boring system instead
Let's hope it was due to the tight schedule to meet the fiscal May deadline and will be reverted to a fully procedural generation...
It has its moments no doubt and some stuff looks indeed awesome.
However, if 95% of the rest of the universe looks like crap and sameyish/patternish i honestly prefer the old Horizon planetary tech & lighting over theese new systems.
Regrettably unlikely, which also raises the issue that another problem with this new system is, any time they were to add a bunch more prefabs to it to try and increase the variety of combinations so that we get less repetition within environments, they'd need to regenerate every planet in the galaxy all over from scratch again, making future improvements to it over what it is now in the open beta less likely to happen
They don't need to sit down and generate all the planets, they'll be generated on the fly on the host's computer. Just need to upload the set of prefabs and chuck them in to the system.
I'd expected crater prefabs, or at least a crater-specific algorithm for them, but using the same mountain is rather disappointing, especially since it's a rather stand-out one (and I'd have thought a procedural algorithm to create something similar wouldn't have been too hard).
Maybe, but planets shouldn't look different every time you visit them, at least that's not how it was until now.
More likely I could see them regenerate everything again for console release when they eliminated the bugs and improved the tech.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
Thank god that does not seem to be the case
otherwise those videos and testimonies would most likely not even exist yet.
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Thank god that does not seem to be the case
You must be playing a different game then cause it is really hard to "not" see what's wrong with the current systems & tech.
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
I havent even noticed a single tile issue yet. Not denying they exist though, but I must have been one of the lucky members of your 5%.
Seriously though. Personally I think the principle of having to break some eggs to make an omelette applies here. The Stellar Forge is very vast. I am not a dev but I suspect it is near unavoidable that we will have glitches, bugs and issues like the ones showed in this thread etc for a long time to come. And we would have probably had them, in one shape or another, anyways even if FDEV had decided to delay the release. It happened with Horizons, not even on release but after release, so given this re build seems to be of a much more impactful magnitude I am not surprised at all. I still think it is a impressive feature. The important thing is that FDEV addresses the worst of them in a reasonable manner.
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