We want numbers, names, and source of this information. Jokes aside, blaming "the select few ones" is more akin to paranoia than common sense. Common sense points towards most players not being here is because time has passed, life goes on for many, and most people's time may be worth more than just whining on a game forum, torturing themselves imagining developers have secret dark schemes to frustrate players. Optimize what ? How can we expect any developer to optimize something if we do not show specifically what causes FPS drops ? These are just sweeping statements. When someone looks in a direction and sees a drop, then looks in another and no problem, then something in the "FPS drop" direction may help the devs pinpoint the issue. But just saying the whole planet is at cause can't be possibly true : just look up from the top of a mountain and it should already be different than looking around and down. Even prior to these changes we could make playfields so heavy as to cause significant FPS drops, just by abusing deco distribution. This doesn't need extensive testing nor detailed description of hardware used to understand the issue. I regularly advocate for more sparse distribution of deco and creatures on playfields, to avoid spoiling all content in the first systems and seeing repetition of same content all over afterwards. It kills the surprise and feel of discovery. But Eleon chose to cram lots of deco and POIs on some playfields and this not only causes the problem I just mentioned but it also impacts performance. Players are supposed to be stranded on some undiscovered planet, but after a few minutes players realise that even "desert" planets are full of junk, plants, animals and structures. But here it's just 3 new playfields where they crammed all new content mixed with old stuff to show us new models and biomes generation. Don't expect "optimisation" here because that never happened before, and playfields are getting more and more crammed with content as time passes. No point to optimize when some shaving could be done, especially if that could result in a more believable setup of playfields. When they add POIs and AI pathing, this kind of deco overload will be unplayable. But the game has been heavily criticized for its old looks in reviews, so something has to be done. Now it's showtime, later we can hope all this will be better calibrated...
No problem. I will just add it to my growing collection : White Knight, Devil's Advocate, Troll, Fanboy, Hypocrit, Delusional, Liar, Ignorant, Uneducated, No Lifer, Mentally ill, Sick, Singleplayer Crybaby, Agressor, Design Club Member, etc. Being one of the "select few ones" seems rather positive in that context.
Ah, so I'm not the only one thinking that way! Good to know. The deserts, the arctic wastes (and hell even the bare moons, and the space itself!) feels like a Christmas market with all those cramped stations, POI's, trees, resources, pentaxid crystals, and the grounds teeming with animals. Something definitely has to be done about that.
Well Eleon probably never looked as far into the future of the game as we are right now, if we are to believe what they told us when leaving Early Access. For most of the time spent in Early Access, we only had a handful of planets prior to the "Galaxy" system, so there were not many options to show all possible content. But now that we do have a galaxy with thousands of stars/ systems, it can be redesigned to spread content more, but this would also require reworking other aspects like early game building capacity and survival. Because a player can get bitten, shot at, can fall from great height, lack food, get too hot or too cold, etc, there has to be elements to cure these conditions found on the same playfield. If players are required to leave the playfield then there needs to be sufficient materials to make a ship capable of just that. So just with these 2 elements "health issues" and "space travel issues" there has to be lots of components already present on the very first playfield. Unless the experience is more story-driven for the first few hours : players could find a ship that only requires minimal repairs to leave the planet, and "health issues" could be minimal on the first playfield, and these could be spread out more in various steps following progression through many star systems/ playfields. This also makes any kind of tutorial much less "loaded" and dense, giving only a few bites to chew on each of the first planets/ playfields. With thousands of places available to visit, it is quite feasible to have, say, 1 hour of presence/ exploration/ gaming per playfield, on average, and keeping longer stays for homeworlds or faction bases, for example. So instead of having a drone base, various deserted POIs, civilian stuff, trading station, Talon settlements and whatnot, just have 1 abandoned base with some "local" critters in there, to give a small taste of combat and base fueling/ repair, then repair a ship and get off the otherwise desert planet. Just one of many possible scenarios. This in turn allows to skim the playfields from too many deco items/ poor performance, and also makes the game easier to learn for newbies. This also requires carefully designing the starter sector to prevent "open world sandbox" from the very beginning : players have no choice but to follow the path of the scenario while gaining at least the first 10 levels and unlocking all basic content, then they may get to the point where they encounter their 1st "temperate faction world" where they see oasis, ponds and a few wild beasts. This would require making most of the playfields templates rather simple, and focus on making more elaborate playfields scarce and story-related. If players have to spend 30 or 40 hours to visit 30 or 40 playfields before gaining access to free galactic travel, I think it's not a bad thing if each of these playfields bring something new each time.
Yes! So much yes to this one! Not only that, but it would also be more immersive, in my opinion. The desert/wasteland planets should have their barren aestetic. The habitable planets and especially jungles should feel more dense than the deserts. Space should be more.. spacy? I don't know, it should be pretty easy to achieve this technically. Would both improve performance, as you stated, and greatly deepen immersion, and the feeling of how big the world is. To be honest I never thought about this transition that much. The lack of content distribution makes more sense now. To be fair "health" is not really an issue to me -- as of now, it is relatively easy to survive (If you're not starting on a cold planet. Then yeah, I found it barely playable). This fact may be a separate issue on its own.
It's easy to survive because it has been designed that way : we kill a critter then we find the cure for its bite in his belly. But that content, just like crops, medicine, food, advanced weapons and crafting, etc, can also be spread on many playfields. For a starter world, have only scarce plants that can serve for biofuel, to be used when the player finds the broken ship, whatever it may be. Have just enough fuel to allow travel just a bit more than what is required for scenario, to allow some margin of error for the player. Have these plants grow back so if player messes things up he can wait and try again. Or better yet : use the motorbike, and only the motorbike, until scenario provides a better option. Have only 1 or 2 "free roaming" creature on the planet ( base and stronger variant), something the player has to use his survival tool or starter pistol to defend himself against. When player finally finds abandoned base/ silo/ whatever, put more of these critters in there to crank up difficulty one step. Have some cool scenario puzzles or interactions in that base, focus on quality instead of quantity. When player is searching for that base/ silo, only have temperature, hunger and eventual critter issues to worry about. If player starts with motorbike, then a very flat and desert playfield is perfect. Players are always thrown on temperate planets on the start, and they struggle with the motorbike in dense forests or fields with rocks/ ditches everywhere and get stuck. Not fun, comes back regularly. Have that playfield be fun to ride extensively on the motorbike. Maybe have 1 promethium deposit somewhere, but protected by something that requires the player to complete another step (get armor in silo/ base) to be able to survive mining the promethium deposit. Players also have to get accustomed to mass/ volume, "wi-fi" link to manage inventory, they have to learn constructor basics, even have to learn how to put an armor on. Instead of having the players read tons of information, make all these parts of one streak of actions on the starter world, and make them worthwhile. Motorbike is the best example I can give here of something that is very badly exploited, that could be done differently. When player realise it can be a life saver, costs no fuel, then they start to appreciate it. On a planet where they know they might be able to build an enclosed/ armored vessel, not so much... The current problem I see is that players already have very high expectations on what the game should give them from the start, and the way starter playfields are designed makes it very hard to think of another way to make the player progress in the various aspects and mechanics of the game. Almost all playfields have the basic resources + fuel, edible plants, medicinal stuff, and enough enemies to level up a few times. That's already too much, too fast, in my view.
But more on topic : will it be possible to obtain the thumbnails for all these new deco items so we can integrate them in the Playfield Designer's databases ?
I wandered around the temperate planet and snow moon last night. The increased variety of deco and the more dense ground clutter look great at least from ground level. I think the temperate changes especially would sell the game as a more modern title for new players. I would like to see how it plays with POIs though. I am worried about performance, but also how much more trouble it will create for navigating HV tanks around it, or for approaching POIs on foot. The fact that enemies and drones can shoot through some of the terrain deco makes increased density potentially an increased annoyance for the player. But clearly your artists have been busy. Keep it up! Can't wait to see how these improvements roll out galaxy-wide.
Well, what can I say... Bye-bye FPS, I guess?.. (Low grass density, Far distance) No matter the grass settings (which do seem to have effect), the FPS stays below 40 when in a field of grass. Another observation is that, while on Low density, grass is still pinned down by various influences, however, due to density, it is much much less noticeable. Maybe a setting "Grass quality" should be added, with functionality similar to the "Water quality"? When inside looking towards water, FPS drops even further. More water-related, I guess. (Water set to Low, btw). It's even more weird that sometimes, when looking at water, FPS first drops to something like 18, but, after some time, restores to 35, and it only happens after moving to a new location. Maybe wrong water quality is used first?.. Also, ARCTIC PALM TREE ARCTIC PALM TREE BOTTOM TEXT Turns out there's literal jungle on the pole!
A welcome change, if we aim to update visuals of the game. However, it seems that some LODs are born more equal than the others. Like here, trees A and B have highly detailed, good-looking LODs: In other cases, as demonstrated on a screenshot below: Tree C has it's LOD suffer from the lack of baked shadows, which, being sufficiently detailed as far as I can tell, looks nothing like its full counterpart. Tree D seems to have shadows baked, but, due to the sparsity of its branches, each branch is far too obviously low-poly, and this is made even more obvious by the height of the tree -- which makes the background for these branches to be bright sky and white fog! Tree E has mostly okay detailing, but due to its leaves being mostly the same color with branches and arranged in "plates", they blend together in the LOD texture, making them look like singular huge low-poly leaves. Some LODs are clearly mismatched: (the small ones also turn out to be snowed when close, lol) Some seem to be generated with too low polycount: Overall, nothing that couldn't be fixed, if the devs want to.
Not to sound offensive, but I could as well set it to 800*600. I could, but I really don't want to, 'cause it really hurts my eyes to see the pixels face to face. I personally don't see the point of all the fancy new shaders, deco or water, if I see all of it either pixelated or blurry.
Not to sound defensive...but I see nothing of what you talking about and I run my Game on 4k Monitor while the ingame Setting is on 1600x900... Btw., all improvements on DECO are a WIP and after adding it they can start to bring the Performance back up.
I really hope so. Otherwise, I will have to, to my highest dissatisfaction, resort to lowering the resolution, or, potentially, even leave the game for a while, until I upgrade my graphics card. That would be a long, long wait... But, luckily, this is my personal preference, which does not influence the looks or the amount of relative FPS drops in testing.
If someone has to lower all their graphics settings to not get a 20 FPS drop due to the new deco, when otherwise they ran the entire game fine, then the problem is the new deco. Either it needs optimization in the models, and/or needs better placement on the planet to not cause such a performance drop. These new deco are awesome, really amazing and I'm excited to see them added to planets and use them myself! But it's good to point out the issues with them so they can hopefully be improved.
Note these are just testing sites for the new deco and deco system.... Nothing else to say to that. Self Explaining.
Yes, and people are testing them and reporting issues that they encounter. That is exactly why they added them to test planets.
I think the fog at the poles is deliberately dense to hide the ground texture which is usually pretty bland on the poles. Nice to see they still have some deco there, it used to be completely flat before. Because of the way maps wrap around when reaching the edges and the poles appearing circular on the map, there is no way to "bend" the terrain (which is rectangular) to have "circular poles" when flying over them. Only solution would be to have much, much larger planets so it would be impossible to see all the polar circle in one glance from high above. I saw there were some new "presets" in the playfields yaml but they seem to be used mostly for grass. How are the trees and other deco placed now ? It looks very random, all varieties mixed up together. Models are very nice, I couldn't see them in high rez on my poor laptop but you went close enough in your video so we can see nice details.
