Well, maybe you'll have to wait for Elite Terraforming expansion.
You know, creating your own custom settlement, earthworks etc.
I estimate it could happen around year 2077
New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)
- Thread starter BlackMaze
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You know, creating your own custom settlement, earthworks etc.
I estimate it could happen around year 2077
Wasn't there a supposed "Leak" back in 2019 that claimed this was going to be the focus of the expansion in development?Well, maybe you'll have to wait for Elite Terraforming expansion.
You know, creating your own custom settlement, earthworks etc.
I estimate it could happen around year 2077
I went to the place the bottom two pictures were taken and I got stuff that looked more like this (ULTRAFORCAPTURE by the way).
The stuff between the ice and the hills at the back isn't pretty. My shadows are on ULTRA but look like they're on LOW. I've got everything set to the highest possible setting for these images.
It looks mostly flat with some protrusions added to it. It's not ugly but there's nothing impressive here.
The transition between ice and rock is too uniform. Again the middle distance stuff looks bland and flat.
Considerably less dynamic visuals. I don't think we're all getting the same results so I believe you that it looks great to you.
And I know this is personal taste, but I think the patterns on the planet look quite unnatural too.
There's just something I can't quite put my finger on about it. It might be the contrast.
EDIT: images weren't initially attached as I hadn't realised PNG wasn't allowed. It was nice to visit a planet which isn't grey!
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Yeah. You either turned away from the star to avoid the dramatic lighting or landed in the shadow.
You also picked landing sites that were deserts. It's pretty important now where you land on a planet and how it looks like will differ a lot depending on where you set down. You know, like in reality.
Funny enough, it looks pretty good for shadowed ice desert shots.
So sure, I can make boring shots on every single planet in Horizons and Odyssey. That's totally possible.
I posted these before, but here I go again. this is the WORST I was able to get in Odyssey on a random rocky planet. Worst, flattest location in direct sunlight. No shadows no nothing:
Then I turned about 90° and there was a crack in the ground:
Then I flew to a volcanic region, still in total sunlight, and tried to line up a good shot. Still the same planet:
And then I turned around to capture the parent planet on this planet:
That's one really boring rock that happen to has volcanism and a lovely parent planet in direct sunlight from worst to best, while still not relying on shadows.
I am sure it's not too hard to find a planet that's still more boring to either make a point about Odyssey, but that would be nonsense, right?
EDIT:
Technically that's not even a planet, but a moon.
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Odyssey texturing, especially transitions between different ground types, reminds me of back in the day when an MMO I played updated all its textures to higher resolution ones. The problem ended up being that all the textures were laid out in a grid pattern. With the old textures, all designed to blend into one another, more blurry, and sharing more of a common colour palette, you never noticed these seams, as the transition was really natural. But with the high contrasts of the higher res textures, all having far more stark colour differences, and in sharp focus so you could differentiate their patterns way more, suddenly you could see every area where the textures blended from one to another had turned into a chess board and it looked really unnatural.
This is what worries me mostly. I do so much filming and all the terrain is popping between their different LODs.
Horizons did a great job "hiding" this and I hope that they will manage to get this back into the new system. It'll be one hell of a job to get right, I think.
It was probably some sort of expectation bias, because I knew there'd been a patch, but I took four "restore the settlement" missions this morning and the planets on three of them looked great from orbit. No evidence of blurring or pattern repetition. Two of the settlements were on the dark side, so I didn't get to see the close approach without NV, but the third was on the daylight side of an ice moon and everything looked great right down through the glide phase to touchdown. The structure was on an escarpment surrounded by sharp mountains and looked fantastic.
Alas the fourth planet undid all of the good work. A few repeated and scaled patterns aside, there's also an actual grid of light and shade across the entire surface here. It looks very much like a LOD issue; if these grids weren't visible until you were right on top of them and couldn't see the adjacent ones, it wouldn't be nearly as obvious.
What's puzzling is how variable the quality of these worlds is. With fundamental engine problems I'd expect to see gridded planets and tiling problems everywhere, but it seems to be a coin toss. When Odyssey gets it right it gets it really right, especially on planets with atmospheres. But when it breaks...
Alas the fourth planet undid all of the good work. A few repeated and scaled patterns aside, there's also an actual grid of light and shade across the entire surface here. It looks very much like a LOD issue; if these grids weren't visible until you were right on top of them and couldn't see the adjacent ones, it wouldn't be nearly as obvious.
What's puzzling is how variable the quality of these worlds is. With fundamental engine problems I'd expect to see gridded planets and tiling problems everywhere, but it seems to be a coin toss. When Odyssey gets it right it gets it really right, especially on planets with atmospheres. But when it breaks...
It seems in parts that they have reduced LOD distances even s bit further, which makes these "grids" pop up now sometimes.It was probably some sort of expectation bias, because I knew there'd been a patch, but I took four "restore the settlement" missions this morning and the planets on three of them looked great from orbit. No evidence of blurring or pattern repetition. Two of the settlements were on the dark side, so I didn't get to see the close approach without NV, but the third was on the daylight side of an ice moon and everything looked great right down through the glide phase to touchdown. The structure was on an escarpment surrounded by sharp mountains and looked fantastic.
Alas the fourth planet undid all of the good work. A few repeated and scaled patterns aside, there's also an actual grid of light and shade across the entire surface here. It looks very much like a LOD issue; if these grids weren't visible until you were right on top of them and couldn't see the adjacent ones, it wouldn't be nearly as obvious.
What's puzzling is how variable the quality of these worlds is. With fundamental engine problems I'd expect to see gridded planets and tiling problems everywhere, but it seems to be a coin toss. When Odyssey gets it right it gets it really right, especially on planets with atmospheres. But when it breaks...
Someone tell Duck, we found the planet where they source all the Elephant Butt Leather.Alas the fourth planet undid all of the good work. A few repeated and scaled patterns aside, there's also an actual grid of light and shade across the entire surface here. It looks very much like a LOD issue; if these grids weren't visible until you were right on top of them and couldn't see the adjacent ones, it wouldn't be nearly as obvious.
What's puzzling is how variable the quality of these worlds is. With fundamental engine problems I'd expect to see gridded planets and tiling problems everywhere, but it seems to be a coin toss. When Odyssey gets it right it gets it really right, especially on planets with atmospheres. But when it breaks...
I am planning to make some (private) database : comparison of how the same planet looks :
and sometimes it's quite the opposite:
a planet with "nothing special" on distant view has some interesting features/locations.
I hope it will help to better predict what planets are worth a "closer look".
- in system map
- from space (DSS view before scanning)
- on approach (glide entry altitude)
- on the ground
and sometimes it's quite the opposite:
a planet with "nothing special" on distant view has some interesting features/locations.
I hope it will help to better predict what planets are worth a "closer look".
Nice pics... or this:
My goal is to find out
how different can planets that
look (almost) identical in map/from space
turn out to be after seeing them up close.
I think that even with it's problems, EDO's planet tech is way better than Horizon's. The real problem is that it only looks good in ULTRAFORCAPTURE and that's very demanding on performance. So, what we have here it's an optimization problem. I'm not saying that all other problems are not real, just thinking that if everyone could run the game with ULTRAFORCAPTURE on, the global opinion about planet tech would be different.
![[VR] Merkir](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/141/141091.jpg?1553527154){kind=avatar}
Your definition of "better" is different to mine.
Yes, if they have to regenerate locations for settlements (which I'm sure they're VERY RELUCTANT to do now the BGS is up and running) it might be worth having a bit where it favours putting settlements on the bright side where the bright side is going to stay the same for a very long time. If it's already doing this, make it do it a bit more!
Have to say I don't care whether textures for landscape are hand-crafted or procedurally-generated as long as I can't tell. Yes, noise functions can be infinitely variable, but they all look like noise functions and the real world doesn't actually always look like noise functions.
I suspect a clever combination of both, and a LOT of hand-crafted textures will get better results. (And I think this is what they're doing, just not always totally successfully.)