Hmmmm..... icy planets also look like this right now:
https://i.imgur.com/UXVFKug.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/KBrEFir.jpg
https://imgur.com/gallery/UQhqO
I shot those about a week ago on the PS4.
I was goofing about on an ice world looking for minerals a couple of weeks ago and I can vouch that it looked like those screenshots,
I never said anything to the contrary... Apart from the beige plague that haunted this game for a year I was always quite pleased, in general, with how the planets looked like, especially when it comes to large scale / orbit view , and i have praised the devs for it on numerous occasions. Despite their overall low resolution, blurriness, general old school heithmap`y appearance, and lack of variety (we have a canyon creating algorithm, rounded mountains creating algorithm, an algorithm that creates those nice flat cut-off areas in canyons, and craters, and that`s it) they always felt pretty convincing to me.
That should not detract us from the fact that even after recent improvements (2 years post initial release, mind you), the screen shots you have kindly provided are still a far cry from the concept art mentioned in my post or the one from post #11.
There are no sharp edges, no layered materials, no rocky formations sticking out from beneath the ice cover as visible on the slopes on the concept arts, no sharp vertical and horizontal cracks, no signs of ice braking off and falling down creating those razor sharp cliffs, no soft deformable objects (soft snow / ice dust).
Add to that the huge differences in texture definition (resolution difference, variety difference, colour palette difference, lack of 3d deformations like bump-maps/parallax mapping/tessellation and so on), some anisotropic filtering problems, poor lighting on the small scattered rocks (that one i actually expect to be improved by a lot in Q4) and you can see how far, in reality, we currently are from those concepts. Sure the subsurface scattering looks nice... but that's just one detail needed to make it look like the concept art
The devil is in the detail, and those details that are missing, unfortunately require a whole plethora of various fundamentally different technologies that are both: performance heavy and very tricky to implement in a procedural way on the scale that we need for elite.
Now, looking back at FD`s past performance I can say that very rarely, if ever, do they provide more than they have specifically told us. Usually it`s to the contrary, stuff gets cut out and target gets lowered, because development is hard and they lack resources etc. case in point: engineers, settlements, station variety, multi-crew, SRVs, off-line mode, comets and other phenomena, orrery, the whole DDF, and so on).
I assume that you have listened to the presentation during which the concept art discussed was first provided and that you have heard that they never actually said anything about improving surface generation technology other that they are going to "improve their scatter rock system". That was it and that is all I expect them to do. This unfortunately will not suffice to make our planets look like those concept artworks.
Even if i take into consideration that its more than 3 years past the initial launch and 2 years after Horizons, and that it`s high time for them to be working seriously on atmospheric planets, which will simply have to include erosion based deformations, material layering etc. so stuff from the concept arts, I am immediately reminded of Sandro`s words on how development got very hard, and how they are thin on resources, and the overall back-pedalling vibe I`m getting from Frontier since the launch of horizons, and this assures me in my views.
So again, I`m happy that some of you still believe that the quality seen on those concept artworks will come to our game in 2018, but at the same time I myself don`t, and I advice others, especially the newcomers, to keep their expectations low, and expect an improved scatter rock system and not much more.
. Despite some people's complaints, I felt that 3.0 made some fantastic improvements to the game. I find Engineers much more intuitive & fun to work with than pre-3.0, but still feel that more improvements can be made. I love the overall direction of C&P.....but just now want them to toughen things up even more, by having repeated criminal acts racking up much bigger bounties, by making Notoriety last longer (& have more game-play functions) & by making Interstellar Bounties be non-cleanable, except by being brought to book.
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