Having already completed 4 previous planetary circumnavigations in the SRV in Horizons I've been curious for a while about what it would be like to do one in Odyssey.
I've had some strong reservations about Odyssey's planet tech so, although it's taken me a while to psych myself up to do it, I also felt duty bound to give it a proper go.
Two days ago (8th June 3308) I completed my much publicised circumnavigation of Col 359 Sector BE-Q c6-0 7 b so it's time to share my thoughts.
First off a little about the criteria I used to select which planet to do this on.
I wanted it to be smallish (under 400 km radius), have low gravity (under 0.05g), have an atmosphere, be relatively close to the bubble, and be scenic with as much terrain variation as possible. For this the fabulous Spansh Body Search proved to be an absolutely invaluable resource. I forget the exact criteria I fed in but it was along these lines ..
.. and produced a list of just 12 candidate worlds. I flew to each (using the excellent Cmdrs Toolbox Multi Waypoint Planner to plot my route) and spent time flying (and driving) around each to pick one I really liked. From the outset the variation between its areas of green "hillside" and flat white icy tundra (not to mention the bonus of a gas giant in the sky and its beautiful sky colouration) made "Col 359 Sector BE-Q c6-0 7 b" a standout candidate.
Having picked the planet all I then needed to do was pick a place to start (and finish) and a heading to follow. As a rule I like to head 90° East (since that means you're driving towards the sunrises and have less chance of staying in the dark for extended periods of time) and to simply follow the equator (latitude 0°) as closely as possible so I just tracked that course in my ship until I spotted a feature (a crater in the middle of an ice flat) that would serve as a recognisable finish line. With hindsight a crater is not a great finish line since you can't easily see it from the ground. In Horizons I always liked to use those mounds that you would find in the middle of certain craters but alas those are gone in Odyssey so perhaps a mountain top would have been better?
I guess also a quick word on navigation. As I said, I generally just stuck to a heading of 90° and latitude 0°, adjusting my direction of travel as the latter started to go either positive (in which case veer right a bit) or negative (veer left). But I also used @Crank Larson's terrific SRVTracker utility which lets you both set waypoints and track them (via an on-screen overlay). I set my start point as the first waypoint so I could use that as an accurate guide to my exact finish point (both heading and distance) but I also set waypoints at the end of each day for further tracking of my progress (and also as a handy backup ... if you die in the SRV in Odyssey then, unlike Horizons, you end up back in the ship but alas NOT directly above the place where you died).
The journey itself is probably best conveyed via the videos I recorded along the way.
Source: https://youtu.be/1e3lYE2RoR8
Source: https://youtu.be/zzCgAKC2Bw0
Source: https://youtu.be/PcnEvLOFKTs
Source: https://youtu.be/KK_LmTrfHpU
Source: https://youtu.be/Hu6hXi7c0EI
Overall it was an absolutely stunning journey but ... I also still have deep misgvigings about Odyssey planet tech compared to Horizons.
First the good stuff. Obviously from those videos you can see that it is VERY beautiful. The colouration of the sky adds a great deal of ambience and, as you travel, you also experience astonishing changes, from sunrises that start with a vague hint of colour in the sky, then build to a classic early dawn ..
.. before changing (surprisingly quickly) to the bright blue of another glorious day ..
.. to sunsets where the low dusk light levels seems to linger a lot longer than the quite rapid changes of dawn ..
(although maybe that's just a consequence of having my back to it)
The surface detail is also quite astonishing. Variation in textures, levels of surface cracking, size and quantity of scatter rocks, etc is significantly better than Horizons. That said, it's not particularly kind on the SRV (and I think this is one area where perhaps SRV racers struggled a bit ... you can no longer easily swoosh along the surface like you're playing Tiny Wings) ..
Instead it's a constant battle to build up speed (although build up speed you must .. travelling fast along the ground in a Scarab in Odyssey is a nightmare, instead you really need to get above 40m/s and take to the air ASAP if you're to have any hope of heading in the same direction at speed for a prolonged period of time). Other problems include the dreaded late spawning rocks, and several times I was brought to a juddering, hull crushing stop when a boulder the size of a cow would materialise out of nowhere, less than a second before I hit it head on. Those aside, for me personally the rougher terrain is not a criticism of Odyssey. As racers were were spoiled for fun in Horizons. Odyssey has become a more realistic place in this regard and (given I'm still able to do what I just did) I'm OK with that.
So the plus points are obviously there and I'd be foolish to claim that Odyssey isn't astonishing when it's good. The valley in the "Sound of Music" video above, the way the green hills finished and the ice started and I was able to cross from a hill on one side and then look back from a hill on the other ... it really reminded me of the Austrian countryside and damn near brought a tear to my eye it was so magnificent.
But - there are definitely issues.
For one I really dislike the shape and scale of the "mountains". It's exactly like the algorithm has just pinched bits of the ground and pulled them up to varying heights. They're small and thin and simplistic and no comparison whatsoever with the vast mountain ranges we have in Horizons which you can spend hours climbing and in whose terrain you can get completely lost. And that's true of canyons too.
In fact, generally scale is the main issue. And I don't just mean height of mountains. It's more like the general scale of all terrain variability. So in Odyssey I was passing from rolling green fields to rocky mountains to flat plains of ice several times a session. It's beautiful but each is indistinguishable from the last and it does become repetitive. In Horizons you might travel for extended periods across dull flat areas, but what made that exciting was that you'd see a feature on the Horizon (perhaps a mountain, perhaps the dark hint of a ravine complex) and take another half hour or so to get there. There was a sense of anticipation, of getting gradually closer, and the feature itself would be epic. So epic that once you'd finally managed to traverse it you were glad of another period of dull terrain for the rest and relaxation it provided. I claim that's kinda gone in Odyssey. There's still great terrain, but its small and just repeats again and again all the way around the planet. And here's the real test of that. When we staged the First Great Planetary Expedition in Horizons back in 3305 we mapped our chosen planet, picking (and naming) numerous features along our chosen route to act as waypoints for the expedition. Tangled flat-top expanses of ravine with names like "The Lithops Mesa" or the torturous "Northern Route" (a ravine that took days to map), towering mountain ranges to be crossed like "Sulphur Peak" and "The Cliffs of Insanity", and even subtle but no less distinguishable ground features like the gentle discoloured indentation of "Coluber's Folly". You can see all of these and more (and still visit them in Horizons) on the interactive map we built over here (click on the gif).
I would really REALLY love to stage a similar expedition in Odyssey. But unless there are planets that we can map to the same degree, I just don't think it's going to be very interesting.
There's more to say (like how ugly nightvision in Odyssey is - it's just so garish and only seems to illuminate the edges of rocks, but not the ground itself) so perhaps I'll return to this thread and continue this later (I did want to give a bunch more advice for anyone considering their own circumnavigation), but for now lunchtime calls and I've already written over 1400 words!
[to be continued]
I've had some strong reservations about Odyssey's planet tech so, although it's taken me a while to psych myself up to do it, I also felt duty bound to give it a proper go.
Two days ago (8th June 3308) I completed my much publicised circumnavigation of Col 359 Sector BE-Q c6-0 7 b so it's time to share my thoughts.
First off a little about the criteria I used to select which planet to do this on.
I wanted it to be smallish (under 400 km radius), have low gravity (under 0.05g), have an atmosphere, be relatively close to the bubble, and be scenic with as much terrain variation as possible. For this the fabulous Spansh Body Search proved to be an absolutely invaluable resource. I forget the exact criteria I fed in but it was along these lines ..
.. and produced a list of just 12 candidate worlds. I flew to each (using the excellent Cmdrs Toolbox Multi Waypoint Planner to plot my route) and spent time flying (and driving) around each to pick one I really liked. From the outset the variation between its areas of green "hillside" and flat white icy tundra (not to mention the bonus of a gas giant in the sky and its beautiful sky colouration) made "Col 359 Sector BE-Q c6-0 7 b" a standout candidate.
Having picked the planet all I then needed to do was pick a place to start (and finish) and a heading to follow. As a rule I like to head 90° East (since that means you're driving towards the sunrises and have less chance of staying in the dark for extended periods of time) and to simply follow the equator (latitude 0°) as closely as possible so I just tracked that course in my ship until I spotted a feature (a crater in the middle of an ice flat) that would serve as a recognisable finish line. With hindsight a crater is not a great finish line since you can't easily see it from the ground. In Horizons I always liked to use those mounds that you would find in the middle of certain craters but alas those are gone in Odyssey so perhaps a mountain top would have been better?
I guess also a quick word on navigation. As I said, I generally just stuck to a heading of 90° and latitude 0°, adjusting my direction of travel as the latter started to go either positive (in which case veer right a bit) or negative (veer left). But I also used @Crank Larson's terrific SRVTracker utility which lets you both set waypoints and track them (via an on-screen overlay). I set my start point as the first waypoint so I could use that as an accurate guide to my exact finish point (both heading and distance) but I also set waypoints at the end of each day for further tracking of my progress (and also as a handy backup ... if you die in the SRV in Odyssey then, unlike Horizons, you end up back in the ship but alas NOT directly above the place where you died).
The journey itself is probably best conveyed via the videos I recorded along the way.
Overall it was an absolutely stunning journey but ... I also still have deep misgvigings about Odyssey planet tech compared to Horizons.
First the good stuff. Obviously from those videos you can see that it is VERY beautiful. The colouration of the sky adds a great deal of ambience and, as you travel, you also experience astonishing changes, from sunrises that start with a vague hint of colour in the sky, then build to a classic early dawn ..
.. before changing (surprisingly quickly) to the bright blue of another glorious day ..
.. to sunsets where the low dusk light levels seems to linger a lot longer than the quite rapid changes of dawn ..
(although maybe that's just a consequence of having my back to it)
The surface detail is also quite astonishing. Variation in textures, levels of surface cracking, size and quantity of scatter rocks, etc is significantly better than Horizons. That said, it's not particularly kind on the SRV (and I think this is one area where perhaps SRV racers struggled a bit ... you can no longer easily swoosh along the surface like you're playing Tiny Wings) ..
Instead it's a constant battle to build up speed (although build up speed you must .. travelling fast along the ground in a Scarab in Odyssey is a nightmare, instead you really need to get above 40m/s and take to the air ASAP if you're to have any hope of heading in the same direction at speed for a prolonged period of time). Other problems include the dreaded late spawning rocks, and several times I was brought to a juddering, hull crushing stop when a boulder the size of a cow would materialise out of nowhere, less than a second before I hit it head on. Those aside, for me personally the rougher terrain is not a criticism of Odyssey. As racers were were spoiled for fun in Horizons. Odyssey has become a more realistic place in this regard and (given I'm still able to do what I just did) I'm OK with that.
So the plus points are obviously there and I'd be foolish to claim that Odyssey isn't astonishing when it's good. The valley in the "Sound of Music" video above, the way the green hills finished and the ice started and I was able to cross from a hill on one side and then look back from a hill on the other ... it really reminded me of the Austrian countryside and damn near brought a tear to my eye it was so magnificent.
But - there are definitely issues.
For one I really dislike the shape and scale of the "mountains". It's exactly like the algorithm has just pinched bits of the ground and pulled them up to varying heights. They're small and thin and simplistic and no comparison whatsoever with the vast mountain ranges we have in Horizons which you can spend hours climbing and in whose terrain you can get completely lost. And that's true of canyons too.
In fact, generally scale is the main issue. And I don't just mean height of mountains. It's more like the general scale of all terrain variability. So in Odyssey I was passing from rolling green fields to rocky mountains to flat plains of ice several times a session. It's beautiful but each is indistinguishable from the last and it does become repetitive. In Horizons you might travel for extended periods across dull flat areas, but what made that exciting was that you'd see a feature on the Horizon (perhaps a mountain, perhaps the dark hint of a ravine complex) and take another half hour or so to get there. There was a sense of anticipation, of getting gradually closer, and the feature itself would be epic. So epic that once you'd finally managed to traverse it you were glad of another period of dull terrain for the rest and relaxation it provided. I claim that's kinda gone in Odyssey. There's still great terrain, but its small and just repeats again and again all the way around the planet. And here's the real test of that. When we staged the First Great Planetary Expedition in Horizons back in 3305 we mapped our chosen planet, picking (and naming) numerous features along our chosen route to act as waypoints for the expedition. Tangled flat-top expanses of ravine with names like "The Lithops Mesa" or the torturous "Northern Route" (a ravine that took days to map), towering mountain ranges to be crossed like "Sulphur Peak" and "The Cliffs of Insanity", and even subtle but no less distinguishable ground features like the gentle discoloured indentation of "Coluber's Folly". You can see all of these and more (and still visit them in Horizons) on the interactive map we built over here (click on the gif).
I would really REALLY love to stage a similar expedition in Odyssey. But unless there are planets that we can map to the same degree, I just don't think it's going to be very interesting.
There's more to say (like how ugly nightvision in Odyssey is - it's just so garish and only seems to illuminate the edges of rocks, but not the ground itself) so perhaps I'll return to this thread and continue this later (I did want to give a bunch more advice for anyone considering their own circumnavigation), but for now lunchtime calls and I've already written over 1400 words!
[to be continued]
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