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Yup, that huge impact crater is really grating on me now. I've seen it so many times. To use that same asset over and over I can only call lazy on FDev's part.
New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
- Start date
Yup, that huge impact crater is really grating on me now. I've seen it so many times. To use that same asset over and over I can only call lazy on FDev's part.
Nope, wrong thread, no angry people here, pass along
Hmmm you know, it may be not that obvious, as I expected.I'm clearly not paying enough attention as ive not seen one repeated pattern yet even though they obviously exist
I have found a screenshot of a planet that I was SURE it had the same pattern.
I tried to rotate/flip them to make them identical, and to my surprise I failed.
It seems it MAY be the same TYPE of feature, not a copy.
I need to make it properly though: screenshots from the same angle etc.
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the same thing happens in edh the just have strange colors
basically, it is a problem with mapping procedural textures to cover large areas, they use algorithms to generate the bump maps, but they also use the procedural texture to create the bump map, which means you get tiling issues and repeated mountains because the algorithm has to use the procedural texture as a base. change a few parameters and it will produce very different results from the same basic texture... (there is also a huge UV image and lighting mapping issue, which is going to be harder to fix)
And this is the issue that has been ignored time and time again. What works sitting in an SRV doesn't mean it works for on foot. It's a whole level deeper and obviously did not work and, by all accounts, does not work for what they wanted to do.
And to be clear - Horizons was broken for it's chickenfeed biology and half baked geological features. The lighting on planetary surfaces was butchered at the request of the Beige Brigade. Working fine??? you could say the same about Odyssey but you'd get shouted down!
Horizons uses a very similar principle, just with less complexity, which makes it look better in some lights, I think something went very wrong and they have had to put out something that little resembles the planned texturing, but while there are so many other firefights going on that need immediate attention, the overall look of the released game is suffering
I've got to post this one... When you look at the following picture and you take into consideration that all of the terrain is made up of a cocktail of handmade planetary features... What does this one tell you?
It genuinly looks like one of the preset handmade canyon sets that was created ended up getting mixed in with the rest of the assets that are NOTHING like it.
You'd never find a planet looking this hand-made-bad in Horizons:
It genuinly looks like one of the preset handmade canyon sets that was created ended up getting mixed in with the rest of the assets that are NOTHING like it.
You'd never find a planet looking this hand-made-bad in Horizons:
Looks the same to me. You're going to get slight variations in how they look because they need to be stretched, pinched, mirrored, reversed or inverted to blend with the other assets.
Here's some more:
Source: https://flic.kr/p/2m1JWPD
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Yup, the reason I'm waiting for this mess the be fixed before going and explore. It's an accumulation of issues, from minor to more major that break the realism and immersion to me. Horizon was not perfect, eventually, it was less "pretty" (or at least less potential for it), but it concealed the flaws well enough to stay credible.I've got to post this one... When you look at the following picture and you take into consideration that all of the terrain is made up of a cocktail of handmade planetary features... What does this one tell you?
It genuinly looks like one of the preset handmade canyon sets that was created ended up getting mixed in with the rest of the assets that are NOTHING like it.
You'd never find a planet looking this hand-made-bad in Horizons:
I must admit that for me personally using money as an argument in discussion about ED and it's updates
triggers a
"WHAT?"
reaction.
Most of players that get "sucked in" play hundreds or thousands of hours.
I just checked: my main account has:
View attachment 234811
it's more then 90 days / 2.600 hours spent playing.
So, even if I had bought ED and addons from the beginning for full price
(which I didn't, but lets' assume worst case scenario)
it would be ca $120 max,
what makes between
3 and 4 CENTS per one hour of playing.
or
20 hours per dollar.
In my book it makes ED "cost" next to none,
playing ED at the moment costs me twice less then I have to pay for electricity per hour of playing on my PC
Of course this is just my case, no other product EVER gave me such "successful" enjoyment per $ rate
To be fair, Elite Dangerous playtime is very much (overly) inflated due to the built in grind required to be able to accomplish anything.
There’s not much you can do to play the game that does not involve investing more time than it does in other games. Supercruise time is a big one as that is a requirement for every single gameplay element. Much of the gameplay overall involves waiting for things.
Sure it’s still an amazing value for the $$ for anyone that enjoys the game but you probably need to divide that playtime by 10 to arrive at a number that is actual gameplay (defined as actual user interaction with the game).
I never grinded anything in 5 years of playing.
Grinding is a choice.
I... actually think it looks quite nice.I've got to post this one... When you look at the following picture and you take into consideration that all of the terrain is made up of a cocktail of handmade planetary features... What does this one tell you?
It genuinly looks like one of the preset handmade canyon sets that was created ended up getting mixed in with the rest of the assets that are NOTHING like it.
You'd never find a planet looking this hand-made-bad in Horizons:
Also because it's unexpected.
It looks like this is one of the planet's poles which explains the ice and those cracked glaciers.
Makes all sense to me.
I am very interested how exactly did you calculate this "10 times" factor.
Because it would mean you are not "interacting" with the game 90% of time.
Do you fly back and forth to the Hutton most of the time spent in game?
True, but whilst you can reasonably complain about that downgrading everything it's also true if it improves. You couldn't find someone less keen on "change for the sake of change" and "embrace change" than me (concepts that have caused no end of mess in the wider world as far as I'm concerned), but applied without restrictions it also stops you fixing anything - including past mistakes.
This is the nutshell for me. A straw broke my camel's back, and I fear it may never straighten no matter how many bales are removed.
The fidelity of the 1:1 galaxy has always been important to me. I can't claim it was ever the prime driver behind my decision to pledge at KS; that would be ridiculous given that in 2013 we had no idea how great or otherwise it would look. But it was definitely a significant factor, a curiosity given what David Braben had squeezed onto an 880KB floppy using similar techniques in 1993.
But once ED launched, and especially after the absolute triumph of Horizons and SRV operations (prior to the Great Beigening) it became the game's benchmark for me, the thing that I could always fall back on when everything else got shaky. Even in those times when nearly every other aspect of the game seemed broken, I knew I could always fire up my explorer account, climb into my Asp or Anaconda, select the second star to the right and plough on into a wholly believable galaxy full of absolutely unique worlds.
Sure, a great number of them looked very similar. With most of them I never got close enough to be able to tell either way. But in all my time with the base game and Horizons I rarely felt as though anything in the Stellar Forge was "giving the game away", forcing me to see under the board, peek behind the curtain. I'd watched the presentations and streams and read the interviews with key people so I always knew on an intellectual level that it was all a melange of mathematical genius and artistic talent. But that was actually part of the joy; knowing at least on a very basic level how the system worked, but still capable of being fooled by it. A bit like watching a really good magic show; you can know mechanically how many of the tricks must work, but good showmanship still lets you enjoy the performance.
So even in the absence of any other game features, it was always the galaxy simulation that made the both my KS pledge and the hours I invested in ED seem absolutely justified. Even as players with different attitudes towards gameplay mocked explorers for being happy with "screenshot copypasta generator 3000" it didn't matter to me. The simulated galaxy was ED's USP and it was beautiful, even at times when the things for which it served as background were broken.
But I honestly fear that has changed forever now. I look at some of these Odyssey planets from space and from orbit and in many cases I no longer see unique worlds emerging from raw mathematical crunching. Instead I see what amounts to human-crafted -- or at best human-tweaked -- templates pulled from probability tables. And while I know this is as likely an issue of scale as of a wholly new paradigm being introduced (Horizons' PG almost certainly has elements of hand tweaking buried deep down in the modelling) my intellectual viewpoint can't override my emotional response to what I've seen.
The exact same processes that gave me a sense of awe and wonder looking Horizons' galaxy now leave me with a sense of profound disappointment when looking at Odyssey's. It almost feels like the longest bait-and-switch in history; the game I've loved for seven years has been taken away and replaced by something not quite the same that I'm supposed to embrace anyway. As though I've been switched from Coca Cola to own-brand soda and been told it's just as good. And I can't, at least not with the game in its current state, rationalise that away.
All I can hope is that whatever combination of rollbacks, patches and asset library improvements FD go with -- assuming they bother at all -- will be enough to smooth over the cracks and prevent me from thinking too much about what's going on underneath. To wow me with visual showmanship so I forget how much I've seen of how the magic tricks are done. It's perhaps a vain hope, but it may be all I've got because right now I honestly think the damage is done. I can't imagine ever looking at the ED galaxy with the same sense of awe I once had, but maybe I can one day look at it with a sense of acceptance. Of compromise.
On an more positive note, right now I'm very much enjoying the game on a smaller scale by playing the "restore settlement for operation" missions which are atmospheric as hell. In fact so immersed was I this afternoon, skulking around a creepy malfunctioning outpost full of dead mercenaries and workers, that when my wife sent a wireless print job to the printer behind me I literally jumped from the chair when it went into its warm-up cycle.
These missions are providing two positives for me; firstly a distraction from the obvious problems with the Stellar Forge (many locations are on the dark side of planets, so I don't even look at the surface unless I put the NV on), but also a reminder that given the right conditions FD are still masters at crafting immersive environments. And perhaps there's hope that, if they can get it so right with some of the new stuff, one day soon they'll be able to restore some of what's been lost from the old.
Mileages, as ever, etc.
I've struggled to put into words my current feelings about Odyssey, you've done it for me ... thank you!
I think a temporary fix has been used while they sort out everything else. The rendering process and lighting(UV mapping) have all been shelved until the game actually plays correctly more than some of the time... There are still moments where it all gets stuck in Low Poly count because it just gets stuck trying to render the entire planet or location all at the same time
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I honestly would have prefered if they used Horizon planetary tech while they fixed the Odyssey one instead of that low poly 2010 thing. Especially with a warning "we had a last minute bug and the new planetary tech is not in the build, but we will deliver it once fixed".