Planetary circumnavigation in Odyssey (conclusions, videos, tips, etc)

[Caelum Incola]

Here's a little hastily edited vid of @Alec Turner on one of his circumnavigation night-time legs. It shows a bit of his damn fine technique (and one or two rapid unplanned decelerations ) from an outside perspective, as well as how ridiculously dark it was without night vision and some of the terrain variations too.

Source: https://youtu.be/hDP07jfwnwQ

 

[Northpin]

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.

yeap, while EDO is indeed beautiful, i really miss the dramatic planetary features that were present in Horizons. And i dont necessarily mean the deep canyons... but even the most basic feature - a mountain range that is worthy of that name.

 

[Alec Turner]

yeap, while EDO is indeed beautiful, i really miss the dramatic planetary features that were present in Horizons. And i dont necessarily mean the deep canyons... but even the most basic feature - a mountain range that is worthy of that name.

I'm currently out at GEC POI 138, the 9.6km high, so called "Neverest II". While it's an awesome sight to be sure, located as it is deep in the heart of Barnard's Loop ..

.. with all due respect to its discoverer I'm not really sure it deserves the name "Neverest II". It's just another repetition of Odyssey's classic shark fin like, single peak ridge, with the same basic shape but scaled up maybe 50% above average. It doesn't have any more complexity than a 3km high version of the same ridge and certainly couldn't be called a mountain "range" in any real sense. If this does prove to be Odyssey's "Neverest" then that's just an indictment of Odyssey's mountains to be honest.

Good fun tho!

Source: https://youtu.be/PONHN8T-Yrs

 

[Northpin]

.. with all due respect to its discoverer I'm not really sure it deserves the name "Neverest II". It's just another repetition of Odyssey's classic shark fin like, single peak ridge, with the same basic shape but scaled up maybe 50% above average. It doesn't have any more complexity than a 3km high version of the same ridge and certainly couldn't be called a mountain "range" in any real sense. If this does prove to be Odyssey's "Neverest" then that's just an indictment of Odyssey's mountains to be honest.

Indeed, it looks like a bug in the height map and not a mountain range, unfortunately.
It's still better than nothing

 

[SushiCW]

Thanks for the write-up!

I agree that Odyssey has some really stunning vistas on occasion, but the mountains in particular are just so bad in comparison with Horizons. Scale aside, they just look horrible, unnatural, and stretched.

And you often get whole giant fields of like-sized, like-shaped ugly mountains.

 

[Walter2]

And you often get whole giant fields of like-sized, like-shaped ugly mountains.

With flat, almost featureless plains in between.

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

I assume you're referring to the thing where the terrain morphs into different shapes as you approach (I imagine gaining more polygons and precision which redefine its shape). I didn't actually see too much of that (maybe I was moving too fast?), just the rocks that literally beam in (they even have what seems like an animation for it, momentarily appearing almost as a wireframe hologram before fully rendering). Interestingly (and I don't think I imagined it), that got worse in the final 100 km after update 12 had droppped.

The rocks should have a timer where they are no-clip until a certain time after rendering. This would be less likely to break immersion, and in particular, your SRV.