Not another graphical change! (AKA What have you done to my Nebula?)

[Obsidian Ant]

UPDATE 08/11/2016: Someone brought this thread back from the past (it's originally from July 2015), so please keep that in mind when reading the post. Also Frontier have made a response to this issue, which can be seen in this thread. One other thing, as of today, the issue still seems to be present:

------------------------------
Original Post
-----------------

Note: I know they are not my nebula...

This is perhaps one of the most disappointing Optimizations^TM so far.

This is the Horsehead Nebula, one of my favourite areas in the game.

I appreciate that to a large extent our taste in graphics is subjective, but there is also a matter of quality. I personally miss all the little details that are present in the gamma nebula, even though it's clear that the gamma version wasn't quite finished and has a few obvious flaws. What we have now, is missing a huge amount of detail. The red nebula in the background (Barnard's Loop) also seems to have taken a reduction in texture quality.

I am thinking about touring the same route I did back in gamma, and having a look at what else has changed. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lovely area...but...well...


EDIT: It still has the original appearance on the galaxy map:

EDIT 2: When Galaxy map loads up (for the first time in a game session) the Horsehead Nebula loads in layers / stages. The in-game Horsehead Nebula matches one of the incomplete stages of nebula within the galaxy map.

[video=youtube;O6qzvryjgZY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6qzvryjgZY[/video]

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

Those screenshots are quite telling.

Have FD commented on the reasons behind these changes yet, and why things are no longer as detailed as they once where?

 

[Obsidian Ant]

Those screenshots are quite telling.

Have FD commented on the reasons behind these changes yet, and why things are no longer as detailed as they once where?

All they have said is this, which doesn't explain why the nebula has changed:

Hey guys,

Good thread. Greg Ryder (Frontier’s Head of Rendering) got in touch with me after reading and wanted to offer some clarity on the points raised.

His thoughts are below but I’d like to say that I think this is a really great example of the dev teams listening and truly caring about giving technical responses where possible. So big kudos to Greg and the rendering team as I know they’ll be reading. Sorry for the delay in replying.

I would also just make a gentle reminder that all bugs should be reported through the bug forum and through support channels just so we can make sure we are effectively recording and fixing those bugs.

“Please thank Granite for putting together a thread like this. The team is always striving to make things better, and we’ve found a number of things using the profiling tools on the Mac and Xbox One that have improved the PC build (thus the opposite to the fear they might lower the quality of the PC build). Elite: Dangerous is built to scale on PC (including 16k screenshot ability and hopefully one day 16k game when the monitors & graphics cards exist!). We are certainly not inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game. Exposing more tweakables for an enhanced Ultra is clearly something you guys are passionate about and we’ll see where it can fit in the current roadmap.

On the ships / galaxy map front, I’m not aware of any changes that went in for 1.3.

Dust / Fog: This was optimised due to a pathological case of overdraw (which looked very broken in a number of cases). There’s definitely no downgrade due to our Mac and Xbox One versions, but there have been some changes. Performance and visual consistency should be improved in the general case, however it does seem that some systems are not looking as good as they did. As ever there is no perfect solution. For a fair comparison, the exact same position and lighting conditions are needed (some viewing angles will always looks more awesome!), but we could have entire threads dedicated to discussions on how to light rings (and we’ve had many long discussions internally). I have a number of open issues in our system on the look of the rings, though currently no ETA for when we’ll be addressing them.”

Thanks!

Zac

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=162195&page=6&p=2482259&viewfull=1#post2482259

 

[Spanksh]

Wow, that's quite...shocking to be honest. I didn't know what they looked like before, but that's so much better. It's really disappointing seeing what this game has looked like/could look like. Really seems like every single update downgraded the graphics at some place.

 

[JesusOnEez]

One caveat before I post...I've not played anything other than the retail release from 1.2 onwards.

But...am I the only one that thinks the bottom screenshot looks better? It looks more 'nebulary' to me. The top image looks grainy somehow. Having looked at this sort of stuff through a decent telescope, the bottom one seems more real to me without going through major digital and optical manipulation (which looks more like the top one).

M2C

 

[ZeeWolf]

What if it transpires that Mr Ant's graphics card has been slowly melting this whole time ;-)

 

[Ralph Rodriguez]

One caveat before I post...I've not played anything other than the retail release from 1.2 onwards.

But...am I the only one that thinks the bottom screenshot looks better? It looks more 'nebulary' to me. The top image looks grainy somehow. Having looked at this sort of stuff through a decent telescope, the bottom one seems more real to me without going through major digital and optical manipulation (which looks more like the top one).

M2C

Personally the first one is jaw dropping and the second one looks bad.

 

[TruffleSnout]

But...am I the only one that thinks the bottom screenshot looks better? It looks more 'nebulary' to me. The top image looks grainy somehow. Having looked at this sort of stuff through a decent telescope, the bottom one seems more real to me without going through major digital and optical manipulation (which looks more like the top one).

I would think that's just the effects of the soft focus of most optical telescopes. Long exposure photography will expose more of the fine structures like in the top screenshot. Also note that through a telescope, nebulas are all (usually) uniformly grey. Pleiades being a notable exception. The reds and blues and greens we usually see in nebular photos is the result of color manipulation of different transmission frequencies. (I'm sure I don't have to explain any of that to you - that was more of a benefit to other readers).

All of that leads to this thought: Since we're already using one photo manipulation technique in the game (colors - which I'd like to leave in the game) I'd rather have the fine nebula structure as well.

 

[xyphic]

From a pure aesthetics point-of-view, I slightly prefer the latter to the former (which I think looks a little busy).

PS The assumption here is that nebulae have been optimised, whereas this *could* be a simple aesthetic change driven by the art director. It *may* still be an optimisation, but I feel it's unfair to jump to those sorts of conclusion.

 

[Obsidian Ant]

What if it transpires that Mr Ant's graphics card has been slowly melting this whole time ;-)

So long is it is just my graphics card, and not my brain...

- - - Updated - - -

One caveat before I post...I've not played anything other than the retail release from 1.2 onwards.

But...am I the only one that thinks the bottom screenshot looks better? It looks more 'nebulary' to me. The top image looks grainy somehow. Having looked at this sort of stuff through a decent telescope, the bottom one seems more real to me without going through major digital and optical manipulation (which looks more like the top one).

M2C

I think the first one could perhaps be unfinished, which is why it has problems at the edges...

From a pure aesthetics point-of-view, I slightly prefer the latter to the former (which I think looks a little busy).

PS The assumption here is that nebulae have been optimised, whereas this *could* be a simple aesthetic change driven by the art director. It *may* still be an optimisation, but I feel it's unfair to jump to those sorts of conclusion.

I agree that the second one certainly seems to be in keeping with the style of the rest of the nebula in the galaxy.

 

[Bran Tse Mallory]

Note: I know they are not my nebula...

This is perhaps one of the most disappointing Optimizations^TM so far.

This is the Horsehead Nebula, one of my favourite areas in the game.

I appreciate that to a large extent our taste in graphics is subjective, but there is also a matter of quality. I personally miss all the little details that are present in the gamma nebula, even though it's clear that the gamma version wasn't quite finished and has a few obvious flaws. What we have now, is missing a huge amount of detail. The red nebula in the background (Barnard's Loop) also seems to have taken a reduction in texture quality.

http://i.imgur.com/GR6FuRy.jpg



I am thinking about touring the same route I did back in gamma, and having a look at what else has changed. Don't get me wrong, it's still a lovely area...but...well...

I can see the difference but what troubles me is my inability to match this to the actual Horsehead nebula which in all honesty the game is not making a good job of. One of the reasons why i purchased the game was to explore the Milky Way and see the sights.

What I expected to see was more along the lines of this:


The games engine is more than able to render this. I'm also concerned that the largest stars are not included. VY Canis Majoris may well be there but the bigger stars are missing. UY Scuti was discovered over 100 years ago but somehow it has been overlooked.

Maybe that could be another paid expansion... The real Milky Way!

 

[fluffa]

Welcome too.......

Xbox optimization

 

[Mr_Blastman]

To me the internal structure in the second looks more what I'm accustomed to looking at it in photos taken from telescopes like hubble and the outside is far more detailed now.

 

[Ryder35]

You guys need to get an oculus rift, then you won't be able to tell the difference due to the low res!

 

[Obsidian Ant]

To me the internal structure in the second looks more what I'm accustomed to looking at it in photos taken from telescopes like hubble and the outside is far more detailed now.

I don't know, quite a lot of nebula photos have that extra 'detail'...

But one thing is for sure...the new nebula seems to be more consistent with the rest of the games nebula.

 

[Matt Dickinson]

Hi guy's are these taken from the same system? Are your graphics options unchanged? For every nebula in the game we have two versions a high and a low and we pick the high depending on your graphics options and which nebula is closest. I can promise nobody has touched the assets themselves as we haven't been working in that area for awhile so either your settings have changed, your in a slightly different system or we've a bug in deciding which nebula(s) should be high detail

 

[govny]

I think the second image is far better than the first.
clearly we don't have the same tastes.

 

[{SAS}Stalker]

By the time version 2 comes out.....

 

[Obsidian Ant]

Hi guy's are these taken from the same system? Are your graphics options unchanged? For every nebula in the game we have two versions a high and a low and we pick the high depending on your graphics options and which nebula is closest. I can promise nobody has touched the assets themselves as we haven't been working in that area for awhile so either your settings have changed, your in a slightly different system or we've a bug in deciding which nebula(s) should be high detail

Thanks a lot for checking out this thread!!

I have the exact same system in both screenshots, settings were set to max in both cases. I haven't even changed drivers in the past six months (bad of me I know). There does seem to be an issue with graphic settings not applying correctly, the following shows the differences between low and ultra settings:

In the following image, the fx on the asteroid changes, but shadows do not get applied.

Spoiler

A number of other people have reported this in the following bug report thread, but it hasn't got picked up yet:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=163773

 

[Arjin]

Hi guy's are these taken from the same system? Are your graphics options unchanged? For every nebula in the game we have two versions a high and a low and we pick the high depending on your graphics options and which nebula is closest. I can promise nobody has touched the assets themselves as we haven't been working in that area for awhile so either your settings have changed, your in a slightly different system or we've a bug in deciding which nebula(s) should be high detail

Thanks for the input Matt, I just passed through that area and to be honest it looked freakin fantastic. But I do not have pictures from beta to today for comparison.

Granite is it possible its just a lighting detail? unless you are in the exact same spot from beta I bet alot changes the view according to where you are sitting.