Planet feature generation

As for me, I liked some of the typical Horizons features, but overall I prefer Odyssey. Bodies in Ody looks less sugarcoated (if that's the right word) and more like actual astronomical objects.
I think for non-atmospheric worlds both are fine at generating realistic enough terrain and only the tech issues make odyssey worse here. For atmospheric worlds with less craters and more flat surfaces odyssey doesn't have enough to be interesting and justify itself and that just brings further attention to the shortcomings of the terrain on non-atmo planets too.

Mainly it's the lack of chaos (for example craters being more round than on the real pictures) and the illusion being ruined by the repeating tiles (which is mostly a DSS issue actually). This is more of a limitation of the techniques used probably.

The promise of the tiles - having interesting, highly realistic terrain (without too much GPU work) doesn't deliver - at least on this set of planets which limits it too much. There's some promise in planets with more bio signals that have more biomes and thus more varied terrain mixed with each other, but those are rare and seeing the same tiles repeated everywhere ruins them even on "good" planets eventually.

There's probably quite a few things Odyssey could do to make people appreciate the terrain that's currently there more, but they never tried and seemingly just gave up on it.
 
One of the point people bring up sometimes is Olympus Mons, being 24kms high, I think it was mentioned earlier in the thread, yes remarkable, but what is often not remarked is that it is also 550km wide, you wouldn't see the base from the peak due to the horizon and it's likely you wouldn't notice a huge gradient anywhere. Even with the thin atmosphere on Mars the actions of wind erosion will wear anything sharp down over thousands or even millions of years. Olympus Mons last erupted 25 million years ago from best estimates so that's plenty for temperature fracturing and wind erosion to do its job.

Now I won't deny it's likely there are extremes that could appear in planetary landscapes, but over the course of the existence of the planet they would be ephemeral at best. If you get huge ice cliffs on a small moon they were probably caused by moon quakes caused by gravitational stress, similar to the ones on some small moons of our gas giants, the same forces would knock them down fairly rapidly in geological terms. So I think there is a case for the odd extreme here and there, but they would be rarer than what we saw in the original planetary surface geology, and most planets with atmospheres would be fairly smooth with the odd impressive features like say the Grand Canyon and Mount Fuji, and now just think if you landed on Earth as an explorer, how lucky you would be to land somewhere close to the Grand Canyon or Mount Fuji, or other outstanding features, so even if the odd extreme feature existed, would we even be lucky enough to spot them on a full sized planet? You certainly wouldn't see them from orbit.

As I said earlier I have spotted a high mountain once at 6km, but that was only after I actually landed and saw how high it was, not from orbit and aiming at it. I personally think they have the landscape right in EDO, and there may be odd things scattered about we haven't found, but finding them is simply much harder these days.
 
There is a discrepancy between the demand for realism and fun.
It will never please everyone.
Well, another thing is wiping things which were discovered.
I'm not talking about possibilities, but I'm sure, that keeping old terrain on discovered planets (just with new textures), and new terrain on new planets could be good.
At least things discovered by all explorers in previous years still would exist in non-museum mode of legacy limbo.
 
so even if the odd extreme feature existed, would we even be lucky enough to spot them on a full sized planet? You certainly wouldn't see them from orbit.
You have to have the planet detail settings turned up pretty high and then fly in supercruise at the lowest altitude before entering glide and use the external camera to look around to have a chance of finding the interesting stuff.

The big qualifier here is IF - that's something frontier could skew, every planet MUST have at least one extreme/rare feature per 250 sq km of area (but not evenly spaced out), but then you, uh, end up with the same "rare" features being repeated on every planet. This is like horizons with it's deep canyons, but that seems something that was met with less opposition than the odyssey terrain despite it not being as realistic.

I'm afraid the solution here is more tiles, better terrain generation by mixing those tiles better in infinite combinations to create new, varied and still realistic terrain. That's not an easy fix, but making good stuff isn't easy.

But asking if there's planets with nothing interesting on them begs the question of what fraction of the planets are uninteresting - you can for example dismiss ice worlds easily in both horizons and odyssey (less so maybe), but in horizons any planet with a canyon has potential for you to drop in and fly around surrounded by deep canyon walls.

Maybe the lesson to learn from this is that it's better to err on the side of being unrealistic - would people complain as much if odyssey terrain was more exaggerated or would they be too busy having too much fun? Just don't make it too colorful to not draw NMS comparisions ;)
 
You have to have the planet detail settings turned up pretty high and then fly in supercruise at the lowest altitude before entering glide and use the external camera to look around to have a chance of finding the interesting stuff.;)

I've mapped entire planets doing that, small ones of course, that was back when the only way to find geo and bio was by doing, well, exactly that.
 
I prefer the planet generation in Odyssey overall, however Legacy does something better (as in "more realistic"): craters.
The old ones look much better and realistic, and include complex craters, which do not exist in Odyssey.

Edit: complex craters are those with the little mound at their centre.

I have actually seen several that have central mounds, evena couple with multiple mounds. I like the ones that have the craters inside the craters as well.
 
The planets from Horizons may look more interesting from space than in Odyssey, but they don't compare to how they look on the surface. I always paid attention to the scarcity of relief during the ride, the horizon line was very close, any mountain ranges were very few. Everyone remembers canyons because they were the only ones that gave some variety. In Odyssey the surface in my opinion is much better, the horizon line is far away and you see huge expanses in front of you and all the irregularities of relief give more effect of presence.
 
The planets from Horizons may look more interesting from space than in Odyssey, but they don't compare to how they look on the surface. I always paid attention to the scarcity of relief during the ride, the horizon line was very close, any mountain ranges were very few. Everyone remembers canyons because they were the only ones that gave some variety. In Odyssey the surface in my opinion is much better, the horizon line is far away and you see huge expanses in front of you and all the irregularities of relief give more effect of presence.
Ody's look great IF AA is enforced outside the game. Even on FSS scanner.
 
so even if the odd extreme feature existed, would we even be lucky enough to spot them on a full sized planet? You certainly wouldn't see them from orbit.

Earth's Grand Canyon is quite visible from low orbit. In a more general sense, river deltas and mountain ranges that would suggest the presence of dramatic features are easy to find from a fair distance. I'd almost certainly miss Colca Canyon on a quick pass over South America at a thousand km altitude, but I'd find the Andes at fifty times that; and a closer look would quickly reveal some dramatic features, even with just a visual survey. Proportionally more prominent features on smaller bodies with thinner atmospheres are even more visible.

Maybe the lesson to learn from this is that it's better to err on the side of being unrealistic - would people complain as much if odyssey terrain was more exaggerated or would they be too busy having too much fun? Just don't make it too colorful to not draw NMS comparisions ;)

I think realistic terrain and a searchable in-game database of features would be the the best option. Extreme features certainly exist and they don't need to be particularly prevalent to be enjoyed, people just need to be able to find them. Having them be suitably rare makes the discoveries that much more memorable. Having that data eventually wind up in a public database makes those features accessible.
 
I personally think it's better this way even though we can no longer plunge down the vertical wall of a 30km seep crater or drive off the planet on huge mountains.

Well, you still can in Odyssey- but it may be it hand placed.

 
Odyssey has become more boring planet generation. If you like some stuff to actually discover you need to play the legacy. Odyssey just got better looks on overall flattened terrain. A polygon upgrade if you so will. There was a lot of fuss about the new terrain gen - in the end it was a lot about pretty much nothing. Features tiled noticeably more often, elevations were smoothened. Maybe it's more realistic but that'd be a case study why realistic isn't equal to fun.
 
Well, you still can in Odyssey- but it may be it hand placed.

These are far and between but there is a core of players not giving up on finding the interesting spots.
 
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