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

For me it was already enough that his original reaction to that youtube video had to be removed from the thread. Also I can't help but notice that the screenshots are from a Horizons beta. So I would like to see them still being present. Either that, or the poster just admitted that EDO is a beta, too.
Correction - that was not Horizons "Beta", that was posted in 2.1 Beta "The Engineers" - months later the original Horizons planetary tech has been released. Also, I've posted here an example screenshot with pattern from Horizons release from 2017
 
Correction - that was not Horizons "Beta", that was posted in 2.1 Beta "The Engineers" - months later the original Horizons planetary tech has been released. Also, I've posted here an example screenshot with pattern from Horizons release from 2017
Then I stand corrected about the validity of the screenshot, though I still don't see how that makes it better if we still have it, and on a larger scale this time. I would think that makes it not an evolution of the technology, but the opposite.
 
But I agree, your argument is 100% correct.

Chaos engine 1. Best game.

Chaos engine 2. Trash pandas on fire in a pit of monkeys
Spot on! Ah those glorious days with a little Amiga controller and a buddy to tear up the levels with. 😁

Games were simpler things then. Sigh....
 
Then I stand corrected about the validity of the screenshot, though I still don't see how that makes it better if we still have it, and on a larger scale this time. I would think that makes it not an evolution of the technology, but the opposite.
Good point. The biggest issue here - I suppose - is that there is no realistic way to "evolve" present Horizons tech. It's a dead end as it is. So the only other way is to build another tech - on different principles. And I'm not as naïve as to suppose that any new tech will be flawless and as good as the old one after 5 years of corrections.
 
Good point. The biggest issue here - I suppose - is that there is no realistic way to "evolve" present Horizons tech. It's a dead end as it is. So the only other way is to build another tech - on different principles. And I'm not as naïve as to suppose that any new tech will be flawless and as good as the old one after 5 years of corrections.
Yes, the timeframe is I think one of the big bugbears. We know how long it took to terminate the beigening and fix up Horizons. I don't think I have that much patience again.
 
That "Ultraforcap" graphics mode, I have not found it in the game settings. Is it real or a myth? 🤔
Taken on Odyssey release :
20210521070748_1.jpg

Don't know if it's still there. Someone posted he doesn't have the option, while I had. Maybe you don't either.
 
Yes, the timeframe is I think one of the big bugbears. We know how long it took to terminate the beigening and fix up Horizons. I don't think I have that much patience again.
Yeah, I'm also neither too young and - must admit - became quite conservative. However I do still prefer potential and perspectives - yes, even them being somehow controversial/ambiguous to some extent at the moment - of the new Odyssey tech rather than stagnation in Horizons.
 
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.
Damn it, now it looks like this fear has been confirmed. The 1:1 galaxy is no longer a best-effort simulation, but a corner-cutting abstraction. The fidelity and unpredictability of the Stellar Forge is what kept my explorer account heading out into the unknown. Now I'm not sure I'll even bother.

Those who don't "get" the emotional connection will of course dismiss this, as they are perfectly entitled to do, or try to rationalise it away by drawing attention to a slack handful of screenshots from five years of gameplay that demonstrate extremely rare, possibly even unrelated issues in the Horizons renderer. But those who do "get" it... well, thankfully this thread shows I'm not alone.

But for me I think the damage is done. FD have taken the game's USP and filleted it. And the real kicker is that I don't even understand why. Is it for long-term console compatibility? To free up client and/or server resources for more pressing demands or future expansion? As many have cynically suggested, might it merely be to provide better graphics for on-foot gameplay?

Maybe, just maybe, FD can apply a partial rollback or introduce a box of mathematical sticking plasters to blend away some of these more obvious artefacts, but it's going to have to be really, really good to undo the damage it's done to my perception. To be honest, I expect there'd need to be so much digital plasterwork covering up the Artex it'd be less resource intensive to just go back to doing it all with raw maths.

I know I'm not always easy to please, and heaven knows FD have dropped many balls over the years that have left me everywhere from mildly irked to hugely disappointed, for durations lasting from a few hours to many months. But nothing like this. Nothing that's left me feeling as though the very core of what ED was, the one constant in the chaos, has been lost.
 
Damn it, now it looks like this fear has been confirmed. The 1:1 galaxy is no longer a best-effort simulation, but a corner-cutting abstraction. The fidelity and unpredictability of the Stellar Forge is what kept my explorer account heading out into the unknown. Now I'm not sure I'll even bother.

Those who don't "get" the emotional connection will of course dismiss this, as they are perfectly entitled to do, or try to rationalise it away by drawing attention to a slack handful of screenshots from five years of gameplay that demonstrate extremely rare, possibly even unrelated issues in the Horizons renderer. But those who do "get" it... well, thankfully this thread shows I'm not alone.

But for me I think the damage is done. FD have taken the game's USP and filleted it. And the real kicker is that I don't even understand why. Is it for long-term console compatibility? To free up client and/or server resources for more pressing demands or future expansion? As many have cynically suggested, might it merely be to provide better graphics for on-foot gameplay?

Maybe, just maybe, FD can apply a partial rollback or introduce a box of mathematical sticking plasters to blend away some of these more obvious artefacts, but it's going to have to be really, really good to undo the damage it's done to my perception. To be honest, I expect there'd need to be so much digital plasterwork covering up the Artex it'd be less resource intensive to just go back to doing it all with raw maths.

I know I'm not always easy to please, and heaven knows FD have dropped many balls over the years that have left me everywhere from mildly irked to hugely disappointed, for durations lasting from a few hours to many months. But nothing like this. Nothing that's left me feeling as though the very core of what ED was, the one constant in the chaos, has been lost.
This is not enough for you? cause it look just like horizons
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-great-big-odyssey-screenshots-thread.568114/post-9293646
Did you think that maybe it was impossible to update the planetary technology as it was to include everything that is coming in the future such as planets with water, caves, forests, etc?
 
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here, because I never claimed Odyssey wasn't capable of generating nice or interesting worlds. It certainly doesn't address the obvious asset reuse issue. Am I'm supposed to lie back, close my eyes and think about this screenshot every time I see repeated landscape tiles from orbit?

Did you think that maybe it was impossible to update the planetary technology as it was to include everything that is coming in the future such as planets with water, caves, forests, etc?
Like I said, I don't know. That's part of what makes it so frustrating. FD might have a very good reason for having simplified the planetary tech, but such speculation has two problems: Firstly, they haven't said anything to suggest what such a reason might be. And secondly, even if they did so their reason would have to be spectacularly good for me to accept the repeated degradation of the existing planet modelling. Believe me, I have been daydreaming about lakes, rivers and forests since Kickstarter so your wildly speculative suggestion would actually be right up my alley if proven correct. But if it meant the chance of stumbling upon the exact same rivers, lakes, forests etc. I'd sooner stick with the airless moons.

If we hadn't already had Horizons for five years I might be more open to the possibilities of what Odyssey does and how it does it. But for me, the sacrifices that have been made in switching from the former to the latter are not worth the benefits. Odyssey's on-foot stuff is quite entertaining, even the taxi rides, and I'm really enjoying the base restoration missions (at least when they don't crash, shut down the reactor I just started up, and resurrect a troop of dead scavengers right on top of my spawn point). But as with all other additions to the gameplay, they'll only keep me entertained for so long before I get the urge to switch accounts and head out into the galaxy just as I've done so many times before. Except it's not the same galaxy any more, which is the heart of the problem. It's not even made up of the same mathematical stuff.

That might not make any objective sense to you, but the problem I have with Odyssey is not objective.
 
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here, because I never claimed Odyssey wasn't capable of generating nice or interesting worlds. It certainly doesn't address the obvious asset reuse issue. Am I'm supposed to lie back, close my eyes and think about this screenshot every time I see repeated landscape tiles from orbit?


Like I said, I don't know. That's part of what makes it so frustrating. FD might have a very good reason for having simplified the planetary tech, but such speculation has two problems: Firstly, they haven't said anything to suggest what such a reason might be. And secondly, even if they did so their reason would have to be spectacularly good for me to accept the repeated degradation of the existing planet modelling. Believe me, I have been daydreaming about lakes, rivers and forests since Kickstarter so your wildly speculative suggestion would actually be right up my alley if proven correct. But if it meant the chance of stumbling upon the exact same rivers, lakes, forests etc. I'd sooner stick with the airless moons.

If we hadn't already had Horizons for five years I might be more open to the possibilities of what Odyssey does and how it does it. But for me, the sacrifices that have been made in switching from the former to the latter are not worth the benefits. Odyssey's on-foot stuff is quite entertaining, even the taxi rides, and I'm really enjoying the base restoration missions (at least when they don't crash, shut down the reactor I just started up, and resurrect a troop of dead scavengers right on top of my spawn point). But as with all other additions to the gameplay, they'll only keep me entertained for so long before I get the urge to switch accounts and head out into the galaxy just as I've done so many times before. Except it's not the same galaxy any more, which is the heart of the problem. It's not even made up of the same mathematical stuff.

That might not make any objective sense to you, but the problem I have with Odyssey is not objective.
He's not trying anything. He just likes dropping by every few pages, cry a bit and then goes away again. 🤷‍♀️
 
He's not trying anything. He just likes dropping by every few pages, cry a bit and then goes away again. 🤷‍♀️
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but if it feels as though the argument is from bad faith I'll stop engaging. And to be fair there have been times in my life, gaming and otherwise, when my own argument here would have made no sense to me either. It's an appeal to emotion rather than logic, which would in extremis boil down to "It's a game; if you still like it play it, and if you don't like it uninstall it."

But of course Elite is more than that to many of us. The difficulty is in accepting the point at which the emotions trump the practicality, because obviously that's subjectivity on top of subjectivity. It's why it's not as simple as using one screenshot to somehow "cancel out" the reaction to another, no matter how often it's tried.
 
I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but if it feels as though the argument is from bad faith I'll stop engaging. And to be fair there have been times in my life, gaming and otherwise, when my own argument here would have made no sense to me either. It's an appeal to emotion rather than logic, which would in extremis boil down to "It's a game; if you still like it play it, and if you don't like it uninstall it."

But of course Elite is more than that to many of us. The difficulty is in accepting the point at which the emotions trump the practicality, because obviously that's subjectivity on top of subjectivity. It's why it's not as simple as using one screenshot to somehow "cancel out" the reaction to another, no matter how often it's tried.
I think this guy is just trolling a bit to he honest :)
But most here are interested in a good discussion as long as it's civil.
 
I think this guy is just trolling a bit to he honest :)
But most here are interested in a good discussion as long as it's civil.
If this thread served one purpose, then it's that even most of the people who are positive about the new planetary tech (that's me!) really dislike the duplicate features and patterns (that's me too!), even with the occasional hate-flaming and over-protecting in between.
Mission accomplished I think.
 
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