Don't forget the bonus picture!
Well, hot damn (via
reddit)
Planets looking fantastic now. The added detail helps break up the "roundness" of some of the terrain, too.
Look.
Getting better and better.
NO CLIFFS, NO PEACE!
edit: that last shot in Anton's post...hoochie mama, my pants are tightening.
But is Burny satisfied? That's all that matters.
I think his biggest complaint is the lack of craggy hard edges. That is still something you don't see. Big step forward though. I expect more improvements over time.
Haha. ^^
What they've done amounts to a
bug fix / optimization as well as adding some desparately needed definition and variety to the textures and their coloring. Before, planets viewed from the orbit were often nearly texture less, with grating LOD switches and texture pop ins. That's of course all good and makes Horizons less broken. ;-)
Although I think the textures viewed from the orbit are often not as sharp as they could be. It's a bit hard to tell however - it could also just be that some of the craters are that smooth. Without being able to see considerably smaller micro-craters for reference, it may as well be reaslistic that they sometimes look so feature-less. Or it might as well be large scale vertical displacement that is missing, which would make some surface features sharp, even from that distance.
As for being satisfied, no,
of course I'm not. ^^ Rocky areas are still just textures painted on smooth, flowing surfaces when you get a bit closer - as the topmost two screenshots show very well (the improved texture definition is much appreciated though!). Textured height maps alone simply don't cut it. We get billions of planets, but none of them is convincing by todays visual standards, unless it's a completely smooth, rounded and dusty rock or ice ball.
It's not just the lack of vertical cliffs and overhangs. Imagine you have a very steep cliff now. Two neighbouring points for the surface genereation are kilometers apart - vertically. Currently, the game will draw a smooth curve through them. That's not how such cliffs would work however, probably not even when they're formed from of ice, which might be layered/grown and then cracked. If you add horizontal displacement to such a cliff, you suddenly don't merely have two points to generate detail from for a surface area of maybe
several square kilometers. You can then generate sub-detail within that cliff that's currently only imitated by the texture's normal map. Which is fine in order to simulate such
finer details from a distance (large scale details should still be horizontally displaced), but looks like an
early 2000s flight sim's landscape with added normal maps and higher texture resolution/greater view distance by today's standards. Where are the bedrock layers? Where are the ice layers? Since when is a kilometer high broken rock surface smooth as a baby's arse? With a normal map.
Honestly the planetscapes in Horizons look like some of the early renders I made using the first Terragen many years ago, it really needs horizontal displacement. Have to agree with Burny on the way the planets look.
+1
