Planetary Tech, the best part!

[AJH16]

Wow. I say wow, FDEV you have done well. A quick explanation and an image.

Minor planets have up till now been badly represented in Elite Dangerous, physics tells us that very small minor planets can't form spherical shapes, there would have to be very unusual circumstances, quite rare circumstances, for that to happen. Once you get much under around 500klms radius the gravitational field isn't strong enough to force rock into a sphere. You can see this clearly in the following picture, Ceres at just under 500klm radius, spherical, the others not so much.

So what's changed with the new planetary tech? Here's an example from Horizons, this is Sadr Region Sector GW-W c1-25 A 1 at 177klm radius, the system map, you can just see a slight distortion, it's not quite spherical but nearly so. This is I have always assumed is a problem with the old tech planetary tech mesh and curvature, it's limited in the curvature radius it supports, so planets around this size down to the smallest radius get more spherical, not less;

The new planetary tech has made an astounding difference to these small planets, here is the same planet in the system map in Odyssey;

The lighting isn't good in the system map so it's hard to see, here's a before and after comparison from 30klms up, first Horizons then Odyssey, this shows the difference far better, and yes the exact same position, the exact same angle so no trickery, just swapped directly between Horizons and Odyssey without moving the ship;

This is a stunning change, it does make them harder to land on I will add, but it no longer feels like you are just driving around a very large beach ball, well done! It's very white because it's right next to the star, was quite a chase to catch it and surface temp well over 1,000k so I couldn't walk around, I might try the night side.

Have fun all!

This is super refreshing to see a post from someone that actually appreciates the fact that the new system spits out better planets even if a lot of people find them less visually interesting. Personally, I think it's far more interesting because not every planet looks like it's copied from the same template anymore. Horizons had more sharp edges and strong curves and ground clutter, but the real world doesn't have nearly as much of that as horizon had and it ended up meaning that every planet just copied elements from the same toolkits with some simple variation.

The new engine is vastly superior to the old one, aside from perhaps some lighting quirks and level of detail loading quirks that need to be worked out, but that's trivial relative to the massive complexity of the generation engine that Frontier managed to make with this expansion.

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

This is super refreshing to see a post from someone that actually appreciates the fact that the new system spits out better planets even if a lot of people find them less visually interesting. Personally, I think it's far more interesting because not every planet looks like it's copied from the same template anymore. Horizons had more sharp edges and strong curves and ground clutter, but the real world doesn't have nearly as much of that as horizon had and it ended up meaning that every planet just copied elements from the same toolkits with some simple variation.

The new engine is vastly superior to the old one, aside from perhaps some lighting quirks and level of detail loading quirks that need to be worked out, but that's trivial relative to the massive complexity of the generation engine that Frontier managed to make with this expansion.

I agree with you, but sadly, you are now in for a pounding from those who do not see it that way. Batten down the hatches, my friend.

 

[AJH16]

@anthonycsheehy yeah, I'm sure I probably will, but I'm not posting for them. I'm posting to show appreciation to the hard working developers that put a ton of effort in to this system only to have people complain that it's different rather than take it in for what it is. Is it perfect, no, but neither was Horizon's tech, it's different.

Same goes for the UI people are complaining so much about. The new galaxy map is far from perfect, but people forget that the old one was even more awful, we were just used to it. We learned to deal with the bad and now we have a different bad we have to learn that is less bad than before. At the end of the day, there's a LOT that has to go on in the galaxy map and that's hard to present in a way that doesn't sacrifice accessibility for some functionality at the expense of others. I personally think they did a pretty solid job at trying to improve it as much as can be done, it's just a very busy interface, but trying to break it out in to multiple interfaces isn't practical as they all need to be able to do navigation plotting.

I moderate sites on the internet, I know how to ignore a beating, but I also know that the positive things inside the mess are super great to hear from when you're on a team that is dealing with something like this.

 

[Scubadog]

What angers me most is that virtually all of you who are so ridiculously happy with the visuals don't experience this garbage in VR. Horizons has infinitely better VR visuals. The planetary tech is disgusting. To make it worse, I came across a video of how all this SHOULD have looked:

 

[Deleted member 121570]

Wow. OP presents the Odyssey version as superior. I'm not so convinced.
I like the better deformation on the small body. That's great!
The surface though? Uh....no. I mean....look at it.
Here's the surface of Ceres from the Dawn spacecraft. Which screenshot do you think matches better?

 

[Mengy]

Wow. I say wow, FDEV you have done well. A quick explanation and an image.

Minor planets have up till now been badly represented in Elite Dangerous, physics tells us that very small minor planets can't form spherical shapes, there would have to be very unusual circumstances, quite rare circumstances, for that to happen. Once you get much under around 500klms radius the gravitational field isn't strong enough to force rock into a sphere. You can see this clearly in the following picture, Ceres at just under 500klm radius, spherical, the others not so much.

So what's changed with the new planetary tech? Here's an example from Horizons, this is Sadr Region Sector GW-W c1-25 A 1 at 177klm radius, the system map, you can just see a slight distortion, it's not quite spherical but nearly so. This is I have always assumed is a problem with the old tech planetary tech mesh and curvature, it's limited in the curvature radius it supports, so planets around this size down to the smallest radius get more spherical, not less;

The new planetary tech has made an astounding difference to these small planets, here is the same planet in the system map in Odyssey;

The lighting isn't good in the system map so it's hard to see, here's a before and after comparison from 30klms up, first Horizons then Odyssey, this shows the difference far better, and yes the exact same position, the exact same angle so no trickery, just swapped directly between Horizons and Odyssey without moving the ship;

This is a stunning change, it does make them harder to land on I will add, but it no longer feels like you are just driving around a very large beach ball, well done! It's very white because it's right next to the star, was quite a chase to catch it and surface temp well over 1,000k so I couldn't walk around, I might try the night side.

Have fun all!

In my opinion the surface detail on the Horizon shot looks leagues better than in the EDO shot. Yes it's nice to have small planets deform more, but the loss in surface detail is the true negative about the EDO planet tech. Horizons had much more variety and interesting features to explore.

 

[no namn]

so far i like new planet tech much more than i dislike it, but there is one thing i found and not often in the past...

invisible rocks! there are plenty of them now! and it seem on most planets too (sometimes u see a shadow, other times u just hit a invisble wall in the SRV)
-tiny bit OT perhaps but...

 

[AJH16]

What angers me most is that virtually all of you who are so ridiculously happy with the visuals don't experience this garbage in VR. Horizons has infinitely better VR visuals. The planetary tech is disgusting. To make it worse, I came across a video of how all this SHOULD have looked:

I am a VR player though I have not done VR with Odyssey yet outside of a brief trial in alpha. I'll try it out and see what my thoughts are on that.

That said, the thread with the copy/pasted tiles seems disconcerting.

 

[AJH16]

Wow. OP presents the Odyssey version as superior. I'm not so convinced.
I like the better deformation on the small body. That's great!
The surface though? Uh....no. I mean....look at it.
Here's the surface of Ceres from the Dawn spacecraft. Which screenshot do you think matches better?

Close up detail needs work, planetary geometry is improved. Close up detail should be an easier fix, though I'm now a bit worried that there may be cookie cutter issues that will become evident as people get more used to it based on some of the images uploaded today.

 

[AJH16]

so far i like new planet tech much more than i dislike it, but there is one thing i found and not often in the past...

invisible rocks! there are plenty of them now! and it seem on most planets too (sometimes u see a shadow, other times u just hit a invisble wall in the SRV)
-tiny bit OT perhaps but...

There are issues with things not rendering that should be so that might be part of it. I had a base the other day where culling logic went nuts and removed around half the base from rendering. Interior wall collision bounds were present but the wall was invisible. Hopefully that's glitches rather than not being implemented.

 

[Erei]

Glad you like it!

Is the fact that most bodies follow the same 4pattern with a different shade of beige/grey also intended ?
I took a screenshots of planet with a similar "oddities", a big crater as it was easier to see how similar they look. And how common they are.

Spoiler

So far there seem to be around 3-4 patterns, the crater one, the non crater moon, the canyon and craters, and perhaps another. They look drastically similar from space.

Is it intended or a bug ?

 

[varonica]

What? I've seen hundreds of potato planets like that.

Elite - Dangerous (CLIENT) 3_24_2021 10_17_34 PM by ruet66, on Flickr

They aren't the same because of the radius as I explained earlier. In Horizons as planets got smaller below around 500klm in radius they start to get smoother and rounder instead of less spherical. Bodies with a radius of 137klm are almost perfectly spherical in Horizons, in Horizons you only get potato planets from around 400-500klm radius up to around 1000klm radius. Look at my top example of a body with 177klm radius, almost perfectly round, they are all like that in Horizons.

 

[baron_V_S]

awesome photos, what a crazy planet!

nice to see the new planet tech is working in some cases. I'm sure the main issues can be ironed out.

 

[jammedhamed]

This is a great improvement. This game is going to be awesome when it's finished.

When it's finished. The new tech is extremely boring for me as an explorer.

 

[varonica]

Wow. OP presents the Odyssey version as superior. I'm not so convinced.
I like the better deformation on the small body. That's great!
The surface though? Uh....no. I mean....look at it.
Here's the surface of Ceres from the Dawn spacecraft. Which screenshot do you think matches better?

The surface detail could certainly do with improving across the board, however I blame a lot of that on players demanding smoother surfaces for SRV driving, in my opinion surfaces were much better in the Alpha before FDEV smoothed them due to player demand for the final release.

From the patch notes;

Large update to planetary tech, including reworked systems, terrain types, blending, craters and colouration - this also includes the reworking of some terrain materials to be flatter, for better SRV navigation

Of course this will have a far greater effect on the smallest planets and probably what caused a lot of the rounded off effects we tend to see on all the planets now, instead of mountains they are rounded of cones, that is most dissapointing, we at least had proper mountains with points in the Alpha.

 

[varonica]

I believe the planet tech is being dumbed down right now because of performance issues. I know they've removed the rocks. Shouldn't wonder if they've done more.

In the patch notes, it was adjusted due to some player demand for smooth racetracks. This was a major mistake and I hope they correct it, the up close terrains were far better in the Alpha.

Large update to planetary tech, including reworked systems, terrain types, blending, craters and colouration - this also includes the reworking of some terrain materials to be flatter, for better SRV navigation

 

[Deleted member 121570]

In the patch notes, it was adjusted due to some player demand for smooth racetracks. This was a major mistake and I hope they correct it, the up close terrains were far better in the Alpha.

I think that's a bit of a misrepresentation there btw. IIRC, the SRV guys were unhappy with the physics model changes to the SRV's handling as their primary concern, and I don't remember them calling for this wholesale destruction of surface features that we've now had.

Alpha was pretty poor too in terms of terrain generation - so much so that I recall statements made about how the mountain/canyon high/low model wouldn't be in until launch. Turns out it was apparently never there to start with imo. I personally flew around tons of planets in alpha and they were all boring and crap.

It's good that the smolbols got some deformation, which makes good sense. The surfaces are garbage level though, flattened, overly smooth and look like mouldy yoghurt.
It's a total shame.

 

[sgurr]

In the patch notes, it was adjusted due to some player demand for smooth racetracks. This was a major mistake and I hope they correct it, the up close terrains were far better in the Alpha.

Who was demanding flatter race tracks?

The terrain around bases in live hasn't changed from Alpha.
A round flat stamp in the terrain has been applied to all/most of the settlements and ports.

My personal opinion on this is that it has ruined racing in settlements as there is now no lumpy terrain to negotiate. For SRV racing specifically flat terrain makes for boring racing.

Edit: It's been suggested that with the dramatic increase in numbers of settlements that FD have imposed a terrain stamp to rule out having to manually alter anything. In Horizons you used to be able to log issues about specific places where the terrain and buildings didn't match up.

 

[Deleted member 121570]

Who was demanding flatter race tracks?

The terrain around bases in live hasn't changed from Alpha.
A round flat stamp in the terrain has been applied to all/most of the settlements and ports.

My personal opinion on this is that it has ruined racing in settlements as there is now no lumpy terrain to negotiate. For SRV racing specifically flat terrain makes for boring racing.

Edit: It's been suggested that with the dramatic increase in numbers of settlements that FD have imposed a terrain stamp to rule out having to manually alter anything. In Horizons you used to be able to log issues about specific places where the terrain and buildings didn't match up.

Lookin' at your signature there @sgurr and wondering what you make of the new 'handcrafted' Pom now?

 

[sgurr]

@varonica

Just realised what you quoted:
"Large update to planetary tech, including reworked systems, terrain types, blending, craters and colouration - this also includes the reworking of some terrain materials to be flatter, for better SRV navigation"

There were siginificant portions of terrain in Odyssey with a LOT of rock scatter and small scale lumps that could make driving the SRV extremely challenging for some. The SRV racing community were NOT the ones asking for it to be changed.

There were also problems with the collision meshes making impacts unpredictable.