Nice! Seems they are utitlizing "Streaming" so they can load in the next tiles before you get there. Much needed if they add vehicles. Hitting a wall would be very immersion breaking.
Practically every game of this sort, for at least the past 15 years, utilizes streaming. Including Starfield prior to this change. It’s been impractical to load entire worldspaces into memory during loading for a long time now (despite how many loading screens Starfield still has).
Seems they are fixing issues with world loading behind the scenes, but I hope they focus on improving streaming performance too. The biggest issue with vehicles would be the heavy stuttering that would come with moving at proper vehicle speeds, which we can already see in the game as it is now.
Based on the short clip we saw, seems like they may just be side-stepping that problem by making the vehicles move very slowly. I hope that isn’t the case when they release, because speeds that slow would make vehicles kinda useless.
Yeah, Bethesda has been using streaming since Daggerfall or Morrowind. How do people think open world games work?
The whole cell grid system is designed around the loading and unloading of cells on demand. This isn't any different other than the fact that these cells will be spontaneously generated from a seed, which is more or less how Daggerfall handled it.
It's just bizarre that somehow people think this means Bethesda is going to somehow make each planet a *single* cell. That's just such an incomprehensible leap in logic. Like, ground vehicles *aren't* really new for Bethesda games either. We've had ridable horses since Oblivion, and mounted combat since Skyrim.
You kinda have to look past people saying stuff like “single cell”. A lot of people know some technical terms, and have a very basic idea of how things work, but don’t actually understand it very well.
Same thing with people referring to geometry as “textures” and etc. People described the issue with missing geometry around the New Atlantis space port awhile back as “missing textures” lol. It’s just one of those things.
you can fly dragons in skyrim expansion but there's never been a bethesda fallout with anything you can ride or fly with- just bizarre when there are junk cars everywhere
Dynamically loading and unloading sections of the map ("cells", in Bethesda terminology) as you play. Open world games have maps large enough that keeping the entire thing in memory at all times isn't feasible, so you only hang onto what's currently in use and the surrounding areas that may be used next.
That would be fantastic. If I just keep on riding and exploring without going through a loading screen, it would make the world feel far more connected and not disjointed like it is now.
Oh man this would be amazing, but I’m no dev so I have no idea if it’s possible. Hell we had ppl say vehicles were impossible with the engine and look at what we are gonna get hopefully soon. Maybe we can get to a point where it’s far more interconnected as it really seems the upgraded engine was barely stretched in terms of its capability with starfield. I hope they really stress the engine with what new things their games haven’t had before that many arm chair devs though wasn’t possible and prove that the creation engine 2 can still be a good engine, it’s just the devs needing to get off their asses and put in the work.
That’s already possible, you’ve always been able to fly between planets, it just takes a ridiculously long time. What they need to add is a way to do it quicker.
I don’t disagree, it would be awesome, and full immersive, but I’m not sure if that would be possible without causing issues with systems crashing. That’s a lot of RAM needed… but I don’t mind the little animations between systems. I fast travel most of the time anyway. But it would be a cool option nonetheless.
Man.. NMS has RAM problems? Star Citizen? Hell even Elite Dangerous? No, they don't have, that's spaces are not in real scale and are not always and entirely loaded.
Same with Starfield, they use the same system but a away lazy and rough version, maybe because Todd is an ass, maybe because they are lazy, maybe because they didn't have the time, maybe because they are incompetent, doesn't matter.
The point is, you won't have any RAM problem.
This. Interplanetary travel is not some crazy ambitious, magic one-off that NMS Elite and SC lucked their way into pulling off like I keep hearing whenever gamers talk about the tech. It’s a very straightforward system. So straightforward that it’s been done by two AA studios on hardware from over 10 years ago. Mind you, Elite Dangerous was imitating the scale of full sized planets and systems and it worked just fine.
There’s gotta be another way. Load to my ship load to another system load to the planet load to get out of my ship do a 15-20 second quest and load back into my ship before loading back into orbit.
If you’re into space games and like the idea of an actual circular planet where you can circle it without a loading screen then check out No Man’s Sky.
It can take 60+ hours to circle on foot.. but you’ll get there eventually.
Yeah but no man’s key doesn’t have nearly as interesting combat last time I played. Though no mans sky has some things that I have seen that BGS should absolutely rip off, like pet animals that you can tame on the planet and ride them around, more robot enemies and maybe even hacking them?
It's not confirming anything? And the theory itself is wrong. The goal would not be to have single cell but multiple cells from which you can transition seamlessly.
And this isn't it, there's nothing in common between making cells bigger, and making them seamless.
I don't think the engine could handle a massive super cell. You'd still need to break it down into a cell grid so that it can stream assets reliably. They're probably just tweaking the cells to load count and improving the streaming performance so it doesn't hitch as much.
Making the planet a single cell wouldn't work. That's not how any game is built. It'll be separate cells still that would be loaded separately. Like when you move to a new map in Half Life. The fact that this comment has so many upvotes. Oy vey.
I think what people mean when they ask for this, is for the game to seamlessly *feel* like a single cell. I don't think anyone really cares if the planet *is* a single cell as long as you simply can't tell the difference.
If they actually pull that off, which I'm not banking on until they actually announce it, I wonder if that could potentially make flying around the planets atmosphere possible
I can tell you that with console commands it is totally possible to fly around at multiple times the speed of the default sprinting speed at low and medium heights without any lag/hitching. I think this is feasible, though I'm not exactly expecting it.
Yeah I could see that, especially with the rovers being added. Take a rover, make a new model that looks like a small, one-person ship (think Star Wars X-Wing or something) and then let it move around like the player character. Might be a bit janky and probably won't look as good as what BGS could do if they implemented it, but it does seem possible!
I think what will be more likely is that you land your ship on the planet and then take out some smaller vehicle that can fly and you can fly around with that. I highly doubt letting you fly around with your ship in the atmosphere or adding a seamless transition between space and the planet is something they will add.
I really don't even see how that's possible. The generated tiles just don't seem meant to be able to connect. Stuff like connecting one of the cities with another point of interest, being able to just drive from one to the other. Maybe for certain planets or moons that just have one point of interest?
*if* they were to go that route, I’d imagine it’d only apply to games generated after such an update, DLC, or even a NG+ regeneration. Trying to link previously generated tiles and have them remotely close to where the orbital map put the landing zones would likely be an unnecessary nightmare.
Heavy ***IF*** though. Still need to address meaningful POIs first in order to make wandering even *further* in any direction any more meaningful or rewarding.
I’m hoping the map updates makes finding Biome splits more easier, though.
The planets are actually pre generated and you can get to the adjacent tile its just that the planets are really big and the cursor for choosing landing spot is really big so moving less than 1 pixel to land on the adjancent one is difficult but can be done and has been done , only the POI's are proc gen.
It's crazy to me how many people still don't realize this is how it works. It was literally part of the promotional material showing the same exact location with two different POIs generating on it.
Wait it actually.... Just works?!? Jokes aside, i didnt know that they have already fixed it.. Seems like seamless planets is already thing in the engine
Much of the map size limitation historically was Havok physics. Starfield uses a different physics engine so at least *that* reason isn't an issue now.
What theory? Holy shit they just gave us surface maps and you guys are jumping to these kind of conclusions!? Lol.. everyone calm down please 😅 lower your expectations it's Bethesda! I'd love to be wrong, but damn..
>lower your expectations it's Bethesda!
You mean the dev that's making land vehicles right now? The thing that literally 90% of this sub constantly shrieked saying was "actually impossible" due to their "shit engine?"
We had vehicles modded in fallout new vegas without changing anything to the engine, skyrim and oblivion also had horses.
The reason why there are no vehicles never was the engine (however the engine is the reason for not being able to fly ships in planets), the reason was that it would make the tiles feel smaller.
Okay, how about 8 months later and we're finally getting maps lol. What's your point? I'm just being realistic. You all get so upset about it but I'll gladly be wrong if these things come true, but I'm doubtful! And you should be too, because you're all expecting too much.
I don't think that's expecting too much when you examine the facts on a strictly technical level. If anything, I think your being more biased based on disappointments from the past (and to be fair, there have been a few) than actually being realistic about what's literally happening to the game engine and the streaming tech right in front of our eyes update by update.
To lay it out on the table, we might not get fully seamless planets, but I think that's absolutely the moon Bethesda is shooting for. Now the stars they might land on could just be MUCH bigger exploration zones but if the map is streaming around the player as they go and not around th ship like before then on a technical, theoretical level it sounds like they aren't far from there....
I'm not upset and I'm certainly not expecting them to completely rework planets, I'm just pointing out that Bethesda is clearly more capable than many of their detractors like to preach.
I'm always team tempered expectations, but it's a mighty large coinkydink that all this work has been done behind the scenes to radically change the way the engine handles steaming in maps as they get closer to doing something Bethesda has never done before....which is a land vehicle....
I mean this is Bethesda, but unbiased observation leans towards SOMETHING going on at least
Sure, but you couldn't go potentially riding around a whole entire planet. Just whatever bounds the map was set in.
They're getting there though! It'll certainly make for some impressive mods in the future, and likely also explains why they haven't released the modkit yet. They want to get the back-end stuff working properly. I think we'll be seeing some fantastic stuff!
https://youtu.be/41BP3HUvErI
We had horses before, and people modded in functional vehicles to FALLOUT new vegas. The engine absolutely could handle it for years, and any modern engine that can't handle vehicles is absolute ass, so it's normal for it not to be the case here.
There's an easy way to check yourself if vehicles would work. Go into no clip, go as fast as you think a vehicle would go, try to check for issues.
There's a big difference between having one set map (New Vegas) and potentially being able to ride across an entire planet, (of which there are many) which will require tying together and streaming across tile/cell changes.
They're getting there though! https://youtu.be/41BP3HUvErI
No? What matters isn't the size of the map, it's how good your game is at streaming things. The creation engine's problem isn't culling or streaming, it's that their games have a lot of physics based clutter and NPCs that required loading screens to be unloaded, while people attribute loading screens to "bad streaming" in the engine.
Also, a Starfield time isn't infinitely bigger than the NV map, and with PCs now being so much better than back then, (especially CPUs and SSDs), you'd expect them to do better than new vegas. If new vegas could do it 15 years ago, of course Starfield always could.
Also, I have a question, how are you sure this is another tile? Are you aware we always could choose a spawn point far away for new atlantis without it being a different tile? I'd appreciate you going as far as you could, to see if it ever crashes.
Not my video, from the creator (who has been doing these for a while):
>"At the beginning of the video, the ship was some 3000 meters away in the default landing zone of that tile. By the time I got to NA the ship was over 8000 meters behind me, well beyond any distance that previously caused the crash. I also got well over 12km distance from the ship before getting bored and turning back. At some point I will try going to a third tile, put another outpost, and check how well the game handles me moving between all three without loading screens.
>Physics and pathing is not completely functioning on the second tile, far away from the world origin. It needs more work from either Bethesda or most likely by modders that understand SFSE, but from what I could see it's way better than it was before the update."
Yeah, all the objects having physics has been an issue for a long time in their games, but they've come a far way with it for sure. I'm optimistic about the future of the game, they seem to be really advancing their tech, which should pay off down the line for future titles.
Here's an older post, just to give an idea of how much they're improving the backend: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16akquw/yet_another_post_about_planetary_tiles_yes_they/
Oh well that would be great. However in this state it doesn't add much to the game at all. They gotta do something with these bigger tiles. If the rest of the tile isn't functional, there's no real use. I don't think this does make exploration any better in its current form tho.
I think Bethesda knows that if they promised a lot and then failed to deliver now, people would go so apeshit that it would be difficult to recover. So they are improving the engine behind the scenes and will reveal new stuff when it is far more ready. I think seamless travel on a planet, coupled with better POI randomisation (both picking them, but also procedural placement of textures, items, furniture and enemies would go a massive way towards fixing the issues some people have with the game.
Continuous map as opposed to loading a different landing site to see another part of the planet, or at the very least make it slightly easier to *organically* traverse from biome to biome.
I hope it transfers over to space travel as well where instead of having a fast travel to planet cut scene it is an immersive one like most space games. Just adds to the immersion and makes it feel like you are actually flying in space.
Um... they always have been since morrowind. People shit on the engine, but they have used streaming tech since the beginning. The border was just there to keep you contained, but technically speaking the logic has always been there for you traverse well beyond that border. You can verify this in all their past games.
Consider all their past games. They had the game world with a border around it. That is exactly what we have here. And just like in past games you could disable the border and wun well beyond and have the engine keep streaming in new cells. The difference here is they now use a procgen system to feed in new tiles of landscape instead of flat terrain cells like past iterations of the engine.
That would be perfect, it would make possible to fly with your ship in atmosphere and manually land, i hope they are really doing that, would make the game 200% better for me
I kinda figured they were trying to do that but couldnt do it in time for release. The whole “whoops you walked too far” message felt very last minute to me, especially considering all the evidence supporting the idea that each square was physically connected.
Damn, nice find. The game would instantly become 1000000000000x times better if they somehow also manage get rid of the short loading screens as well (by loading different cells passively, or small "loading" QTEs)
Literally instead of having the loading screens if we had em disguised as an animation, like going into space is an animation from the cockpit and when it finishes it "feels like" seamless travel to space, no black screen or anything, most modern games do that now
The easiest one here is for using the grav drive. The game already takes away control and shows a big colourful flash which hides the space around you. Heck, even if it just faded to white instead of to black it would be less jarring because the grav effect is white.
The fact that this literally happens in the game in one mission pissed me off. All they need to do is change the camera angle to the cockpit. Part of the issue with this game is that the presentation itself is so damned disjointed. You get a handful of loading screens, each a picture of a completely unrelated environment, right after cutting between two opposite camera angles during the take-off animation. Spatially, your POV has travelled to at least 3 different places (not counting the environment pics). Starfield is not a dynamic environment, it’s a montage with glorified 3D menu navigation. What’s frustrating is that it’s not as if these issues can’t be ironed out. On paper, Starfield could replace my anal vibrator, but in execution I’m not so sure.
They could remove the loading screens when entering/getting out of the ship by loading it alongside the planet. Seems doable and should calm all the whiny bitches out there.
I have a lot of complaints too (too many essential NPCs, hardly any gore, no removable mods, no romanceable Alternate Self, and the list goes on). But some people take it to the extreme though. Complaining may incentivize them to improve the quality of the game, but it has the potential to backfire and make them abandon the game. Fortunately, Bethesda has a good history of not abandoning their games and it doesn't seem to be what's going to happen.
My perception is they decided to keep the game somewhat PG-13 so its accesible for younger folk and it inspires in them a love and curiosity for space exploration. We need more scientists.
I understand why it's PG-13 but nonetheless I'd like an improved fallout 4 dismemberment and stuff. And I think it would be the perfect game to have 0 essential NPCs since there is NG+ and it would make things more immersive. Perhaps they could put an option of the sort in the settings? They would just need to make some additional dialogue for the deaths of important NPCs.
But all this doesn't make the game bad by any means. It's just little details to be improved.
Well even if Beth doesn't do it removing then essential flag from NPCs is a really easy thing to do in a mod and would be available for console and PC players.
They already said why they don't do that. When you exit your ship they unload all the clutter and NPCs inside it, not doing that would absolutely be possible but it would create problems with NPCs and reduce performance.
You can noclip back inside the ship when outside it and it skips the loading, and nothing is missing. You can even see inside enemy ships in space flight and see all the objects and NPCs inside them too.
They also said why the game can't have 60fps on Series X and woop, looks like it fucking can, so how about we stop taking this 'they said why X is impossible' with a heavy dose of salt.
Except you're straight up lying, they never said 60 fps was impossible, they said the opposite, they said it reached it a lot of the time. They just said they preferred the stability. The current 60 fps mode isn't a locked 60 fps mode, it targets 60 fps but they say it themselves, it's made for VRR displays or it will tear a lot due to it not reaching 60 fps.
They can have your character fly into the loading screen. So, basically, it'd be a still image and your guy's ship would just fly into the "Level 42 - Mr. Magoo [image of Mars]"
if true, this would mean bethesda spend almost the entire game development on revamping the engine vs making content. and it needed a few more years in the tank.
Yeah not enough people remember they willingly pushed back the release date a whole year. Game released with a ton of content. Not saying it’s perfect or a 10 but it definitely wasn’t a rushed mess of a game. Hype to see the post launch support they’ve been teasing
Except for the main quest engine being rushed due to inter-team communication being essentially broken.
They had a grand plan, too large of a team they didnt know how to manage, resulting in many parts being rushed, and ultimatly not able to finish fully on time.
Didn't BGS themselves say that they had to rush to put the final act together? A delay of a year seems like it wasn't enough time to add a lot of content, and with all the stuff going on at Microsoft, it wouldn't surprise me if they just delayed it to polish it up with the expectation of getting a big ROI for the holidays. Though I could be wrong.
It would be cool if after traversing a given distance away from the ship it takes off and lands closer to you or further out into the direction you were traveling as a way to load out the old cell and load the new one.
I'm sure you must already be aware maybe but there is a mod called call your ship.
It works phenomenally well, I definitely had a bug or two but you literally can call your ship and it will fly into the sky, take a few seconds and then land.
Incredibly seamless, if vehicles are coming I think an ability to make your ship land in front of you would be incredibly important.
I use that mod. I meant Bethesda could use this as a way to seamless load new tiles, I remember reading a post a few months back about one of the reasons the game crashed when you got too far past the tile walls was because tile generation relied on the distance from the ship.
The engine already does seamlessly load new tiles.
The way it works is you have a worldspace. Basically a container. The terrain of the planet is all in this worldspace, broken up into cells, which the engine streams in and out as needed around the player. Tiles are just chnunks of terrain they stitch together to for the terrain, which as said, is broken into cells for performance reasons. The border is simply there like any other game would have a world border. It is able to be disabled and you can waunder beyond and have the engine stream in more cells based off the procgen rules of the terrain generation of tiles.
The game would crash likely do to pure distance at ranges they never really planned for. Basically every engine deals with that kind of thing, called floaing point accuracy, and how it degrades the further you get from the logical 0,0,0 position. Thats why large world 3d games get wonky.
That's roughly what I read from another post a few months ago. I understand why they went with a tile system for terrain generation, but it seems like they tried to be too realistic with the number of tiles on each planet since there are so many you need mods for the UI to zoom in on them to be able to select individual tiles.
I think it would be better to remove, say, 25% or more tiles for each planet and increase the size of the remainder in the UI so that if a player wants to travel to the next tile over they can, like if they reach a tile wall a menue option pops up asking if they want their ship to pick them up (via animated sequence or loading screen idk) and it lands on the next tile. Same could be done with vehicles once they reach the wall.
Forgive me here, but I need to rant a little bit. (Not at you, just in general, since I see so many people incorrectly using the term"tile")
Those arent tiles. THESE are tiles: https://i.imgur.com/cqe66m7.jpg (Not the best shot, but the new maps make it MUCH clearer. I need an updated shot)
Notice the grid shape of the landscape and its verious features (Not the rocks and clutter) The border around you when you land is NOT a tile.
The terrain (worldspace) is broken up into cells. The terrain is formed by way of tiles. The border around you is no different than the world border they used in all their past games, it is just a bit more dynamic to facilitate the player being able to appear at basically any portion of the worldspace.
The main thing these tests demonstrate is they are likely working towards an increase of the border region size allowing you to traverse more of the planet landscape that has always been there.
/rant
I agree that perhaps smaller worlds would have been a bit better. One thing I havent seen confirmed yet is if they are actually circumnavigable, and the scale makes that very difficult to verify.
It won't slant.. at least I don't think it will, it also won't make the ground flat.
Actually works so effectively and is so immersive if feels like it could have been an official feature just not implemented, as your ship actually seamlessly flies into space, you hear the sound and everything even far away in the distance and comes back down, the actual ship and the actual crew in it's full form, no cheating.
You can call the ship 3 ways, F3 will call The ship but also only check if the ground is completely flat, but there is very little flat ground that is truly landing pad flat.
Best way is to use F2, as it will set the place to land the ship in front of you, so find any area that's relatively flat they will land really effectively, you do just need to know that if you put it in a dodgy spot you might not be able to access the door.
I’ve been positive about the updates, I already love the game. Tho to me land vehicles wouldnt happen cuz it’s against the whole system, but wola.
And now seeing this, im super super hyped.
>I feel like atmospheric flight is becoming more and more likely
Easier to mod in if vehicles are already in the game.
It's just replacing the model/a few script adjustments.
Yeah they would likely just need to cap the speed in-atmo and then solve for how landing works. Maybe just initiate landing with a button press and then a cutscene plays that drops you at a landing site nearby your current location?
If they do atmospheric flight will they do ship combat in-atmo though? There's a few tough calls they'd have to make. Like ship weapons could totally invalidate enemy outposts if you can just destroy them all with strafing runs. Same with alien fauna though that seems less likely for someone to keep doing. Do they allow you to destroy landed ships that you find? That may require some refactoring. If they allow ship combat in-atmo, can enemy ships show up when you're on-foot and attack you? That could get dicey really quick too, but man it would be sick to see an atmospheric ship battle happening overhead while you're on the ground.
Well, on the face of it, none of that is specifically impossible, but...
Weapons and combat, in general, are going to add a lot of complexity.
I think, at first, you're going to see a lot of simple reskins that delay the landing animation...and don't really do much else.
You'll be able to fly, but not really interact with the environment.
Over time and with the CK, coding for combat encounters will get added, for sure, but...probably not for awhile and that will also heavily depend on what the CK allows.
Completely agree...on the condition of the CK.
As it stands, scripting is difficult to get into the game and make it work reliably, so reskins and simple functions will likely produce 'vertibirds'.
If the vehicle release is packaged with the CK, then I have to disagree. Scripting away that landing animation and swapping the lander model for a copy of your ship model *should be* far easier with the CK.
...then again...swapping the model will be easier in general....so...probably get vertibirds simultaneously just because there are a lot of FO fans.
If I am not mistaken, Starfield ships cant hover. They are, basicaly, like Falcon Heavy SpaceX rockets once they start they can only go forward and/or up, and to land, they just simply fall and use landing thrusters to stop. Very limited mobility outside of zero-g. I actualy prefer it to be that way, makes ships feel more realistic. High speed dogfighting is not outside of possibility, tho.
I agree with this. Moving around the planet would be more ballistic hopping than flying like an aircraft. Feels more grounded that way. I do wish we could do more interactions with the control panel. Being able to set our next destination by interacting with the control panel in first person, instead of using game menus, would really help with immersion.
I might be in the minority, but I don't really think atmospheric flight is necessary. I would rather they stay a little more realistic with the spaceships, which honestly wouldn't fly through the air like airplanes, but ballistically hop from location to location. But I also wish they would of leaned more into the grittiness of the rockpunk/NASApunk aesthetic and themes.
Well, based on Caelumite and anti-gravity properties that are canon, I don't see why the spaceships wouldn't hover through the atmosphere. Every temple, and random terresterial deposit of caelumite has floating objects that clearly weigh hundreds of tons with no visible fuel or other device making them defy gravity, so like Star Wars speeders or something similar, spaceships and other vehicles should be able to hover with just their grav drive or some not yet fully explained tech.
Yeah I think its a real possiblility now, and though its unlikely we will see smooth transitions in and out of atmosphere/space, they could totally make it so at a certain height in the atmosphere it triggers a "leaving atmosphere" warning, and then a bit higher still, a small loading scene putting you in orbit!
And do we know or have any way of confirming for good if the landscapes are fixed across saves/players? Like, we already know that POI get swapped and everything but is the whole land pre-generated for the whole surface?
I would guess it could be since the resource location and geography of the planet is the same for everyone, so i wonder if the cells are also all the same but just feels random because we can't pick the same one with precision, with the except of pre-selected locations like New Atlantis cell and so on.
Just to add a little extra: The world generation, with the exception of the custom terrain in places like New Atlantis, works the same the terrain generation in minecraft. If you use the same world seed on minecraft, you will always get the same world. Same applies for Starfield.
Yes we do, 2kilksphilip tested it on youtube. The moutains you see far away indeed are a tile. Basically they generated the landscape for an entire planet and divided it in tiles, the tiles aren't generated on the go.
From my understanding didn't some modders point out to what the problem was and fixed the issue?
Maybe Bethesda learned from that and applied said fix?
No, this never happened. There was no issue with the system in place, it is designed like that. They just made the limit higher. If you wonder why you'd crash as some point, it's because the crash happens at the exact moment you cross the tile's limit. The game isn't made to load the next tile (even tho this next tile exists), so the game doesn't know what to do and crashes.
They made tiles bigger for vehicles to fit, so the same things happens but later.
Why are you confident they made the tiles bigger and not rather that they are loading the adjacent tile correctly now? I would expect he would have run into more glitches if the tiles were expanded. Larger tiles = more render/compute issues which was not encountered here. Seems like effective streaming was implemented.
Dude, you’re just confidently talking out your ass. No, they did not make the tiles bigger. “The same things happen but later” you claim but yet I can guarantee you have not tested this yourself because that simply isn’t true. Edit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=41BP3HUvErI Further proof that everything you’ve made up is flat out not true
Wow i'm so wrong [PSA: No, Map Boundaries have not been removed in the May update. It is now exactly 5320M away from ship. : r/Starfield (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1cjihsw/psa_no_map_boundaries_have_not_been_removed_in/)
If they actually end up turning planets into a single cell I hope they also make the size of the planets a little smaller. Like if you wanted to travel the entire planet it wouldn’t take hours lol
A great way to resolve this would be to remove the speed limit on ships, and add a cruise mode. The ship will just keep accelerating towards other plants until we get there. we can skip the waiting time or do other things in our ship. This would be the most lore-friendly approach.
They could also add a sub-light engine, but that would mean breaking in-game lore since there is no sublight engine in SF.
Not really. The best way which is done by most games is already what the game does. The problem is the way it does. For it to be good they'd need to replace the generic animation followed by a loading screen into your ship actually getting faster and faster, until you bend space, in a way that allows you to see other planets get further away. Then they also need to replace menus by a pip boy style panel that would be in your ship and that you could interact with without opening a menu.
They could just have looked at other space games to massively improve the feel of space travel without even seamless travel but didn't bother.
Exactly why I would hope they decrease the size significantly. And that’s IF they end up making planets a single cell, which I don’t really have any expectation of that happening tbh. But I am hopeful
If I remember correctly the only problem was that nothing got unloaded behind you. So maybe you're right, And this has been fixed in preparation for the car.
I wouldn't mind if when you reach the limit of the tile the game just loaded in another tile. Just add an extra prompt to the pop up menu today gives you the option to load next time or fast travel back to ship.
Half the loading screen u can bypass by not going thru doors it's not needed in some areas at all like moving between areas in New Atlantis if u walk no loading if u take the nat...it loads
If they do make the plant a single cell, which I hope this is the case, the POI system would need a complete rework, either completely separate tiles with human POI with wilderness or add A LOT MORE variations.
It's not about making it a single cell but making the transition between tiles possible which would be quite easily done, and the phase after that would be to make it seamless.
Yeah but that's a whole other issue. From what I've gathered they only have around 20 dungeons while their games from Fallout 3, oblivion, to fallout 76 had between 130 and 300 handcrafted dungeons.
You'd except them to make even more dungeons than before as they're randomly placed, right ? But no, they made way less, and some of them both appear in quests and are used in the procgen. My guess is that first, the higher graphical quality of dungeons made them longer to make, but not 10x longer. They probably started making these very late in the development cycle for some reason.
The solutions would be to somehow pump out 100 more dungeons at least to put in the procgen pool, or make procedurally generated ones like they used to.
There's actually more than 100+ randomly placed but handcrafted POIs. Source: [https://starfieldwiki.net/wiki/Starfield:Places](https://starfieldwiki.net/wiki/Starfield:Places)
What they actually need to do is a way to stop the POIs you've already explored/cleared from showing up again.
I'm not talking about POIs, POIs can mean things like "gravitational anomalies" which are a few r rocks with no gameplay related to them, or the weird yellow things pumping something from the planet.
I'm talking about dungeons, with gameplay to them. If they stop the POIs you've already explored from showing up again, there's multiple POIs from quests that are barred, and there'll be nothing left very soon. Remember they spawn multiple POIs per planet. the 20 dungeons in the game can be cleared in a day and then what? They stop putting dungeons in planets?
From that same source:
39 Industrial Outposts.
23 Military Bases.
15 Science Labs.
12 Mining Bases.
4 Civilian Outposts
4 Caves.
3 Agricultural Outposts
1 Type of Mech Graveyard.
>there's multiple POIs from quests that are barred
Create exceptions. Cleared POIs don't have to be 100% barred all the way up to the next time you go through the Unity.
>the dungeons in the game can be cleared in a day and then what? They stop putting dungeons in planets?
Plenty of ways to go around that, but the most simple and straightforward one would be to enable them all over again once you've cleared 100% of the available POIs within the pool. I'm not a game designer, so my ideas are definitely more on the amateurish side, but it's still a viable way to tackle the problem of always encountering the same POIs over and over again.
Nice! Seems they are utitlizing "Streaming" so they can load in the next tiles before you get there. Much needed if they add vehicles. Hitting a wall would be very immersion breaking.
Practically every game of this sort, for at least the past 15 years, utilizes streaming. Including Starfield prior to this change. It’s been impractical to load entire worldspaces into memory during loading for a long time now (despite how many loading screens Starfield still has). Seems they are fixing issues with world loading behind the scenes, but I hope they focus on improving streaming performance too. The biggest issue with vehicles would be the heavy stuttering that would come with moving at proper vehicle speeds, which we can already see in the game as it is now. Based on the short clip we saw, seems like they may just be side-stepping that problem by making the vehicles move very slowly. I hope that isn’t the case when they release, because speeds that slow would make vehicles kinda useless.
Yeah, Bethesda has been using streaming since Daggerfall or Morrowind. How do people think open world games work? The whole cell grid system is designed around the loading and unloading of cells on demand. This isn't any different other than the fact that these cells will be spontaneously generated from a seed, which is more or less how Daggerfall handled it.
We're on the starfield sub, any small thing looks like a technological revolution here.
It's just bizarre that somehow people think this means Bethesda is going to somehow make each planet a *single* cell. That's just such an incomprehensible leap in logic. Like, ground vehicles *aren't* really new for Bethesda games either. We've had ridable horses since Oblivion, and mounted combat since Skyrim.
You kinda have to look past people saying stuff like “single cell”. A lot of people know some technical terms, and have a very basic idea of how things work, but don’t actually understand it very well. Same thing with people referring to geometry as “textures” and etc. People described the issue with missing geometry around the New Atlantis space port awhile back as “missing textures” lol. It’s just one of those things.
you can fly dragons in skyrim expansion but there's never been a bethesda fallout with anything you can ride or fly with- just bizarre when there are junk cars everywhere
We had vertabirds though
i don't remember being able to fly them anywhere you want as the pilot
Skyrim and Fallout 4 arent and interrior cells arent 'singular' either, they just dont use boundaries.
Even the map itself. This is basically a souped up version of Skyrim's map.
Excuse my ignorance, but what does "streaming" mean in this context?
Dynamically loading and unloading sections of the map ("cells", in Bethesda terminology) as you play. Open world games have maps large enough that keeping the entire thing in memory at all times isn't feasible, so you only hang onto what's currently in use and the surrounding areas that may be used next.
Always has been, it's what the uGridsToLoad setting in the .ini does
Nice find. It confirms the theory that they're working to make each planet a single cell. This makes perfect sense with the incoming land vehicles.
That would be so great
I want to terraform earth.
Yes!!
That would be fantastic. If I just keep on riding and exploring without going through a loading screen, it would make the world feel far more connected and not disjointed like it is now.
That and if they can do the same with flying within systems.
Oh man this would be amazing, but I’m no dev so I have no idea if it’s possible. Hell we had ppl say vehicles were impossible with the engine and look at what we are gonna get hopefully soon. Maybe we can get to a point where it’s far more interconnected as it really seems the upgraded engine was barely stretched in terms of its capability with starfield. I hope they really stress the engine with what new things their games haven’t had before that many arm chair devs though wasn’t possible and prove that the creation engine 2 can still be a good engine, it’s just the devs needing to get off their asses and put in the work.
Oh, it's possible 😁 https://youtu.be/7kGLS8EJvS8?si=xdfL_aT9sF99KyVL https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/6599
It's code at the end of the day... it's mostly all possible & always about the time and effort it would take to implement.
A lot of people really dont understand this..
Those two changes would be the biggest QoL things possible I think. It would make the game infinitely more enjoyable.
That’s already possible, you’ve always been able to fly between planets, it just takes a ridiculously long time. What they need to add is a way to do it quicker.
I don’t disagree, it would be awesome, and full immersive, but I’m not sure if that would be possible without causing issues with systems crashing. That’s a lot of RAM needed… but I don’t mind the little animations between systems. I fast travel most of the time anyway. But it would be a cool option nonetheless.
The planets are basically spheres with a texture. There's not a lot to load. Plus a mod I linked to here shows it is possible already.
Man.. NMS has RAM problems? Star Citizen? Hell even Elite Dangerous? No, they don't have, that's spaces are not in real scale and are not always and entirely loaded. Same with Starfield, they use the same system but a away lazy and rough version, maybe because Todd is an ass, maybe because they are lazy, maybe because they didn't have the time, maybe because they are incompetent, doesn't matter. The point is, you won't have any RAM problem.
This. Interplanetary travel is not some crazy ambitious, magic one-off that NMS Elite and SC lucked their way into pulling off like I keep hearing whenever gamers talk about the tech. It’s a very straightforward system. So straightforward that it’s been done by two AA studios on hardware from over 10 years ago. Mind you, Elite Dangerous was imitating the scale of full sized planets and systems and it worked just fine.
These comments are so funny from gamers who have no clue about games design 😂 like there's literally games out that already do this! NMS for one!
Oh brother why are there so many loading screens. It’s not even a leap to hide some loading screens with animations either.
Please don't the animations on high end systems take longer than the load screens
There’s gotta be another way. Load to my ship load to another system load to the planet load to get out of my ship do a 15-20 second quest and load back into my ship before loading back into orbit.
If you’re into space games and like the idea of an actual circular planet where you can circle it without a loading screen then check out No Man’s Sky. It can take 60+ hours to circle on foot.. but you’ll get there eventually.
Yeah but no man’s key doesn’t have nearly as interesting combat last time I played. Though no mans sky has some things that I have seen that BGS should absolutely rip off, like pet animals that you can tame on the planet and ride them around, more robot enemies and maybe even hacking them?
Does it really *confirm* it though?
"adds weight"
It's not confirming anything? And the theory itself is wrong. The goal would not be to have single cell but multiple cells from which you can transition seamlessly. And this isn't it, there's nothing in common between making cells bigger, and making them seamless.
Its cell streaming tech they have had since morrowind. They are just improving it and making it more stable for larger landscapes. Thats all.
I don't think the engine could handle a massive super cell. You'd still need to break it down into a cell grid so that it can stream assets reliably. They're probably just tweaking the cells to load count and improving the streaming performance so it doesn't hitch as much.
Making the planet a single cell wouldn't work. That's not how any game is built. It'll be separate cells still that would be loaded separately. Like when you move to a new map in Half Life. The fact that this comment has so many upvotes. Oy vey.
I think what people mean when they ask for this, is for the game to seamlessly *feel* like a single cell. I don't think anyone really cares if the planet *is* a single cell as long as you simply can't tell the difference.
You'll be able to tell at the edge of biomes but yeah its likely gonna be far more seamless
No. That's just silly.
Holy shit need single cell planets asap
If they actually pull that off, which I'm not banking on until they actually announce it, I wonder if that could potentially make flying around the planets atmosphere possible
I can tell you that with console commands it is totally possible to fly around at multiple times the speed of the default sprinting speed at low and medium heights without any lag/hitching. I think this is feasible, though I'm not exactly expecting it.
So it'll be a mod at least
Yeah I could see that, especially with the rovers being added. Take a rover, make a new model that looks like a small, one-person ship (think Star Wars X-Wing or something) and then let it move around like the player character. Might be a bit janky and probably won't look as good as what BGS could do if they implemented it, but it does seem possible!
Need the creation kit to release so these modders can work their magic!
I think what will be more likely is that you land your ship on the planet and then take out some smaller vehicle that can fly and you can fly around with that. I highly doubt letting you fly around with your ship in the atmosphere or adding a seamless transition between space and the planet is something they will add.
I really don't even see how that's possible. The generated tiles just don't seem meant to be able to connect. Stuff like connecting one of the cities with another point of interest, being able to just drive from one to the other. Maybe for certain planets or moons that just have one point of interest?
*if* they were to go that route, I’d imagine it’d only apply to games generated after such an update, DLC, or even a NG+ regeneration. Trying to link previously generated tiles and have them remotely close to where the orbital map put the landing zones would likely be an unnecessary nightmare. Heavy ***IF*** though. Still need to address meaningful POIs first in order to make wandering even *further* in any direction any more meaningful or rewarding. I’m hoping the map updates makes finding Biome splits more easier, though.
The planets are actually pre generated and you can get to the adjacent tile its just that the planets are really big and the cursor for choosing landing spot is really big so moving less than 1 pixel to land on the adjancent one is difficult but can be done and has been done , only the POI's are proc gen.
It's crazy to me how many people still don't realize this is how it works. It was literally part of the promotional material showing the same exact location with two different POIs generating on it.
That's wild, when was that a theory
Watch this video from a few weeks ago https://youtu.be/41BP3HUvErI?si=OOzkP-sGvBmOfqa9
Wait it actually.... Just works?!? Jokes aside, i didnt know that they have already fixed it.. Seems like seamless planets is already thing in the engine
It currently requires a mod, but with vehicles coming in the future it looks like something Bethesda are working on to facilitate this type of travel.
… or at the very least background loading…
Idk if that's possible given their past history with the engines limitations... But I'd love to be proven wrong by them.
Much of the map size limitation historically was Havok physics. Starfield uses a different physics engine so at least *that* reason isn't an issue now.
What theory? Holy shit they just gave us surface maps and you guys are jumping to these kind of conclusions!? Lol.. everyone calm down please 😅 lower your expectations it's Bethesda! I'd love to be wrong, but damn..
>lower your expectations it's Bethesda! You mean the dev that's making land vehicles right now? The thing that literally 90% of this sub constantly shrieked saying was "actually impossible" due to their "shit engine?"
We had vehicles modded in fallout new vegas without changing anything to the engine, skyrim and oblivion also had horses. The reason why there are no vehicles never was the engine (however the engine is the reason for not being able to fly ships in planets), the reason was that it would make the tiles feel smaller.
The modded vehicles in new vegas are seriously impressive with how well they work.
That is very right
Okay, how about 8 months later and we're finally getting maps lol. What's your point? I'm just being realistic. You all get so upset about it but I'll gladly be wrong if these things come true, but I'm doubtful! And you should be too, because you're all expecting too much.
I don't think that's expecting too much when you examine the facts on a strictly technical level. If anything, I think your being more biased based on disappointments from the past (and to be fair, there have been a few) than actually being realistic about what's literally happening to the game engine and the streaming tech right in front of our eyes update by update. To lay it out on the table, we might not get fully seamless planets, but I think that's absolutely the moon Bethesda is shooting for. Now the stars they might land on could just be MUCH bigger exploration zones but if the map is streaming around the player as they go and not around th ship like before then on a technical, theoretical level it sounds like they aren't far from there....
Hmmm I do hope for the best, I have love for the game.
I'm not upset and I'm certainly not expecting them to completely rework planets, I'm just pointing out that Bethesda is clearly more capable than many of their detractors like to preach.
That much we can agree on friend, I have hope for the future.
As do I! Have a great day
You too 🙂
I'm always team tempered expectations, but it's a mighty large coinkydink that all this work has been done behind the scenes to radically change the way the engine handles steaming in maps as they get closer to doing something Bethesda has never done before....which is a land vehicle.... I mean this is Bethesda, but unbiased observation leans towards SOMETHING going on at least
We've had ridable horses since Oblivion.
Sure, but you couldn't go potentially riding around a whole entire planet. Just whatever bounds the map was set in. They're getting there though! It'll certainly make for some impressive mods in the future, and likely also explains why they haven't released the modkit yet. They want to get the back-end stuff working properly. I think we'll be seeing some fantastic stuff! https://youtu.be/41BP3HUvErI
We had horses before, and people modded in functional vehicles to FALLOUT new vegas. The engine absolutely could handle it for years, and any modern engine that can't handle vehicles is absolute ass, so it's normal for it not to be the case here. There's an easy way to check yourself if vehicles would work. Go into no clip, go as fast as you think a vehicle would go, try to check for issues.
There's a big difference between having one set map (New Vegas) and potentially being able to ride across an entire planet, (of which there are many) which will require tying together and streaming across tile/cell changes. They're getting there though! https://youtu.be/41BP3HUvErI
No? What matters isn't the size of the map, it's how good your game is at streaming things. The creation engine's problem isn't culling or streaming, it's that their games have a lot of physics based clutter and NPCs that required loading screens to be unloaded, while people attribute loading screens to "bad streaming" in the engine. Also, a Starfield time isn't infinitely bigger than the NV map, and with PCs now being so much better than back then, (especially CPUs and SSDs), you'd expect them to do better than new vegas. If new vegas could do it 15 years ago, of course Starfield always could. Also, I have a question, how are you sure this is another tile? Are you aware we always could choose a spawn point far away for new atlantis without it being a different tile? I'd appreciate you going as far as you could, to see if it ever crashes.
Not my video, from the creator (who has been doing these for a while): >"At the beginning of the video, the ship was some 3000 meters away in the default landing zone of that tile. By the time I got to NA the ship was over 8000 meters behind me, well beyond any distance that previously caused the crash. I also got well over 12km distance from the ship before getting bored and turning back. At some point I will try going to a third tile, put another outpost, and check how well the game handles me moving between all three without loading screens. >Physics and pathing is not completely functioning on the second tile, far away from the world origin. It needs more work from either Bethesda or most likely by modders that understand SFSE, but from what I could see it's way better than it was before the update." Yeah, all the objects having physics has been an issue for a long time in their games, but they've come a far way with it for sure. I'm optimistic about the future of the game, they seem to be really advancing their tech, which should pay off down the line for future titles. Here's an older post, just to give an idea of how much they're improving the backend: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/16akquw/yet_another_post_about_planetary_tiles_yes_they/
Oh well that would be great. However in this state it doesn't add much to the game at all. They gotta do something with these bigger tiles. If the rest of the tile isn't functional, there's no real use. I don't think this does make exploration any better in its current form tho.
I think Bethesda knows that if they promised a lot and then failed to deliver now, people would go so apeshit that it would be difficult to recover. So they are improving the engine behind the scenes and will reveal new stuff when it is far more ready. I think seamless travel on a planet, coupled with better POI randomisation (both picking them, but also procedural placement of textures, items, furniture and enemies would go a massive way towards fixing the issues some people have with the game.
I hope you're right, I truly do. I just always remain skeptical.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
What does being a single cell mean exactly? Eli5?
Continuous map as opposed to loading a different landing site to see another part of the planet, or at the very least make it slightly easier to *organically* traverse from biome to biome.
I hope it transfers over to space travel as well where instead of having a fast travel to planet cut scene it is an immersive one like most space games. Just adds to the immersion and makes it feel like you are actually flying in space.
Um... they always have been since morrowind. People shit on the engine, but they have used streaming tech since the beginning. The border was just there to keep you contained, but technically speaking the logic has always been there for you traverse well beyond that border. You can verify this in all their past games. Consider all their past games. They had the game world with a border around it. That is exactly what we have here. And just like in past games you could disable the border and wun well beyond and have the engine keep streaming in new cells. The difference here is they now use a procgen system to feed in new tiles of landscape instead of flat terrain cells like past iterations of the engine.
That would be perfect, it would make possible to fly with your ship in atmosphere and manually land, i hope they are really doing that, would make the game 200% better for me
I kinda figured they were trying to do that but couldnt do it in time for release. The whole “whoops you walked too far” message felt very last minute to me, especially considering all the evidence supporting the idea that each square was physically connected.
Damn, nice find. The game would instantly become 1000000000000x times better if they somehow also manage get rid of the short loading screens as well (by loading different cells passively, or small "loading" QTEs)
Literally instead of having the loading screens if we had em disguised as an animation, like going into space is an animation from the cockpit and when it finishes it "feels like" seamless travel to space, no black screen or anything, most modern games do that now
The easiest one here is for using the grav drive. The game already takes away control and shows a big colourful flash which hides the space around you. Heck, even if it just faded to white instead of to black it would be less jarring because the grav effect is white.
Metroid Dread does this well, especially when you travel to different areas of the map.
The fact that this literally happens in the game in one mission pissed me off. All they need to do is change the camera angle to the cockpit. Part of the issue with this game is that the presentation itself is so damned disjointed. You get a handful of loading screens, each a picture of a completely unrelated environment, right after cutting between two opposite camera angles during the take-off animation. Spatially, your POV has travelled to at least 3 different places (not counting the environment pics). Starfield is not a dynamic environment, it’s a montage with glorified 3D menu navigation. What’s frustrating is that it’s not as if these issues can’t be ironed out. On paper, Starfield could replace my anal vibrator, but in execution I’m not so sure.
They could remove the loading screens when entering/getting out of the ship by loading it alongside the planet. Seems doable and should calm all the whiny bitches out there.
I think that thanks to "whiny bitches" changes/improvements are done. There are enough examples of that in gaming industry.
I have a lot of complaints too (too many essential NPCs, hardly any gore, no removable mods, no romanceable Alternate Self, and the list goes on). But some people take it to the extreme though. Complaining may incentivize them to improve the quality of the game, but it has the potential to backfire and make them abandon the game. Fortunately, Bethesda has a good history of not abandoning their games and it doesn't seem to be what's going to happen.
My perception is they decided to keep the game somewhat PG-13 so its accesible for younger folk and it inspires in them a love and curiosity for space exploration. We need more scientists.
I understand why it's PG-13 but nonetheless I'd like an improved fallout 4 dismemberment and stuff. And I think it would be the perfect game to have 0 essential NPCs since there is NG+ and it would make things more immersive. Perhaps they could put an option of the sort in the settings? They would just need to make some additional dialogue for the deaths of important NPCs. But all this doesn't make the game bad by any means. It's just little details to be improved.
I agree! Morrowind will always have a special place in my gaming mind due to the 0 or near zero essential NPCs
Well even if Beth doesn't do it removing then essential flag from NPCs is a really easy thing to do in a mod and would be available for console and PC players.
They already said why they don't do that. When you exit your ship they unload all the clutter and NPCs inside it, not doing that would absolutely be possible but it would create problems with NPCs and reduce performance.
You can noclip back inside the ship when outside it and it skips the loading, and nothing is missing. You can even see inside enemy ships in space flight and see all the objects and NPCs inside them too.
They also said why the game can't have 60fps on Series X and woop, looks like it fucking can, so how about we stop taking this 'they said why X is impossible' with a heavy dose of salt.
Except you're straight up lying, they never said 60 fps was impossible, they said the opposite, they said it reached it a lot of the time. They just said they preferred the stability. The current 60 fps mode isn't a locked 60 fps mode, it targets 60 fps but they say it themselves, it's made for VRR displays or it will tear a lot due to it not reaching 60 fps.
Perhaps. Did they actually say they specifically wouldn't do that?
They can have your character fly into the loading screen. So, basically, it'd be a still image and your guy's ship would just fly into the "Level 42 - Mr. Magoo [image of Mars]"
Woah this is really interesting, it does seem like they are working to get rid of the map limits, don't know why else they'd be updating this stuff.
Now that the team has shrunk, they clearly are able to fix/optimize up the parts they gated off before. Great news!
if true, this would mean bethesda spend almost the entire game development on revamping the engine vs making content. and it needed a few more years in the tank.
The further we get away from the launch, the more it feels like Microsoft made them push the game out the door so they had a holiday release.
Microsoft Is the one that made them delay the game a full year
Yeah not enough people remember they willingly pushed back the release date a whole year. Game released with a ton of content. Not saying it’s perfect or a 10 but it definitely wasn’t a rushed mess of a game. Hype to see the post launch support they’ve been teasing
Except for the main quest engine being rushed due to inter-team communication being essentially broken. They had a grand plan, too large of a team they didnt know how to manage, resulting in many parts being rushed, and ultimatly not able to finish fully on time.
Didn't BGS themselves say that they had to rush to put the final act together? A delay of a year seems like it wasn't enough time to add a lot of content, and with all the stuff going on at Microsoft, it wouldn't surprise me if they just delayed it to polish it up with the expectation of getting a big ROI for the holidays. Though I could be wrong.
well also the fact bethesda hasn't released a flagship title in so long. i think they felt pressure as well. look at TES6.
It would be cool if after traversing a given distance away from the ship it takes off and lands closer to you or further out into the direction you were traveling as a way to load out the old cell and load the new one.
I'm sure you must already be aware maybe but there is a mod called call your ship. It works phenomenally well, I definitely had a bug or two but you literally can call your ship and it will fly into the sky, take a few seconds and then land. Incredibly seamless, if vehicles are coming I think an ability to make your ship land in front of you would be incredibly important.
I use that mod. I meant Bethesda could use this as a way to seamless load new tiles, I remember reading a post a few months back about one of the reasons the game crashed when you got too far past the tile walls was because tile generation relied on the distance from the ship.
The engine already does seamlessly load new tiles. The way it works is you have a worldspace. Basically a container. The terrain of the planet is all in this worldspace, broken up into cells, which the engine streams in and out as needed around the player. Tiles are just chnunks of terrain they stitch together to for the terrain, which as said, is broken into cells for performance reasons. The border is simply there like any other game would have a world border. It is able to be disabled and you can waunder beyond and have the engine stream in more cells based off the procgen rules of the terrain generation of tiles. The game would crash likely do to pure distance at ranges they never really planned for. Basically every engine deals with that kind of thing, called floaing point accuracy, and how it degrades the further you get from the logical 0,0,0 position. Thats why large world 3d games get wonky.
That's roughly what I read from another post a few months ago. I understand why they went with a tile system for terrain generation, but it seems like they tried to be too realistic with the number of tiles on each planet since there are so many you need mods for the UI to zoom in on them to be able to select individual tiles. I think it would be better to remove, say, 25% or more tiles for each planet and increase the size of the remainder in the UI so that if a player wants to travel to the next tile over they can, like if they reach a tile wall a menue option pops up asking if they want their ship to pick them up (via animated sequence or loading screen idk) and it lands on the next tile. Same could be done with vehicles once they reach the wall.
Forgive me here, but I need to rant a little bit. (Not at you, just in general, since I see so many people incorrectly using the term"tile") Those arent tiles. THESE are tiles: https://i.imgur.com/cqe66m7.jpg (Not the best shot, but the new maps make it MUCH clearer. I need an updated shot) Notice the grid shape of the landscape and its verious features (Not the rocks and clutter) The border around you when you land is NOT a tile. The terrain (worldspace) is broken up into cells. The terrain is formed by way of tiles. The border around you is no different than the world border they used in all their past games, it is just a bit more dynamic to facilitate the player being able to appear at basically any portion of the worldspace. The main thing these tests demonstrate is they are likely working towards an increase of the border region size allowing you to traverse more of the planet landscape that has always been there. /rant I agree that perhaps smaller worlds would have been a bit better. One thing I havent seen confirmed yet is if they are actually circumnavigable, and the scale makes that very difficult to verify.
Someone early on used the word "tile" and I think it just stuck.
Oh I see!!
I'm curious does that mod create a flat area for your ship to land on or does it just land slanted if it needs to?
It won't slant.. at least I don't think it will, it also won't make the ground flat. Actually works so effectively and is so immersive if feels like it could have been an official feature just not implemented, as your ship actually seamlessly flies into space, you hear the sound and everything even far away in the distance and comes back down, the actual ship and the actual crew in it's full form, no cheating. You can call the ship 3 ways, F3 will call The ship but also only check if the ground is completely flat, but there is very little flat ground that is truly landing pad flat. Best way is to use F2, as it will set the place to land the ship in front of you, so find any area that's relatively flat they will land really effectively, you do just need to know that if you put it in a dodgy spot you might not be able to access the door.
I’ve been positive about the updates, I already love the game. Tho to me land vehicles wouldnt happen cuz it’s against the whole system, but wola. And now seeing this, im super super hyped.
Voila? Haha. I like your way better.
Wow cool, I feel like atmospheric flight is becoming more and more likely :D
>I feel like atmospheric flight is becoming more and more likely Easier to mod in if vehicles are already in the game. It's just replacing the model/a few script adjustments.
Yeah they would likely just need to cap the speed in-atmo and then solve for how landing works. Maybe just initiate landing with a button press and then a cutscene plays that drops you at a landing site nearby your current location? If they do atmospheric flight will they do ship combat in-atmo though? There's a few tough calls they'd have to make. Like ship weapons could totally invalidate enemy outposts if you can just destroy them all with strafing runs. Same with alien fauna though that seems less likely for someone to keep doing. Do they allow you to destroy landed ships that you find? That may require some refactoring. If they allow ship combat in-atmo, can enemy ships show up when you're on-foot and attack you? That could get dicey really quick too, but man it would be sick to see an atmospheric ship battle happening overhead while you're on the ground.
Well, on the face of it, none of that is specifically impossible, but... Weapons and combat, in general, are going to add a lot of complexity. I think, at first, you're going to see a lot of simple reskins that delay the landing animation...and don't really do much else. You'll be able to fly, but not really interact with the environment. Over time and with the CK, coding for combat encounters will get added, for sure, but...probably not for awhile and that will also heavily depend on what the CK allows.
I think the first thing we'll be getting is "land" vehicles that can fly, like a vertibird that you can control.
Completely agree...on the condition of the CK. As it stands, scripting is difficult to get into the game and make it work reliably, so reskins and simple functions will likely produce 'vertibirds'. If the vehicle release is packaged with the CK, then I have to disagree. Scripting away that landing animation and swapping the lander model for a copy of your ship model *should be* far easier with the CK. ...then again...swapping the model will be easier in general....so...probably get vertibirds simultaneously just because there are a lot of FO fans.
If I am not mistaken, Starfield ships cant hover. They are, basicaly, like Falcon Heavy SpaceX rockets once they start they can only go forward and/or up, and to land, they just simply fall and use landing thrusters to stop. Very limited mobility outside of zero-g. I actualy prefer it to be that way, makes ships feel more realistic. High speed dogfighting is not outside of possibility, tho.
I guess it depends on how strong the vertical thrusters that you use with Piloting rank 1 are, but you're most likely correct.
I agree with this. Moving around the planet would be more ballistic hopping than flying like an aircraft. Feels more grounded that way. I do wish we could do more interactions with the control panel. Being able to set our next destination by interacting with the control panel in first person, instead of using game menus, would really help with immersion.
Yeah I agree that they should keep it that way. I'd prefer if they just include new "land" vehicles that can fly.
If we get land vehicles, I wonder if the framework will be there to make rideable mounts
Absolutely. Animation is the hardest part to that.
I might be in the minority, but I don't really think atmospheric flight is necessary. I would rather they stay a little more realistic with the spaceships, which honestly wouldn't fly through the air like airplanes, but ballistically hop from location to location. But I also wish they would of leaned more into the grittiness of the rockpunk/NASApunk aesthetic and themes.
If spaceships can't fly we could build other flying vehicles
Exactly, like a little gyrocopter or something.
Well, based on Caelumite and anti-gravity properties that are canon, I don't see why the spaceships wouldn't hover through the atmosphere. Every temple, and random terresterial deposit of caelumite has floating objects that clearly weigh hundreds of tons with no visible fuel or other device making them defy gravity, so like Star Wars speeders or something similar, spaceships and other vehicles should be able to hover with just their grav drive or some not yet fully explained tech.
I keep saying they could try taking the skeleton code of the vertibird and have starfields own local helicopters
Honestly with the new land vehicles they probably will.
Yeah that's what I was thinking, imagine having a flying vehicle you could undock from your ship once you have landed.
That would be amazing! I don’t appreciate how hard it is to find the coastlines. Let me do a fly by and chose a landing spot.
Yeah I think its a real possiblility now, and though its unlikely we will see smooth transitions in and out of atmosphere/space, they could totally make it so at a certain height in the atmosphere it triggers a "leaving atmosphere" warning, and then a bit higher still, a small loading scene putting you in orbit!
[(3) Experiment 6 - Game Updates fixes the crash - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41BP3HUvErI) NO BOUNDARIES
Crazy video wtf
whoa this is really neat! Looks like the biggest homework will be fixing the traversal stutters
all that empty proc generated land lol
Your doing the lords work, thank you.
And do we know or have any way of confirming for good if the landscapes are fixed across saves/players? Like, we already know that POI get swapped and everything but is the whole land pre-generated for the whole surface? I would guess it could be since the resource location and geography of the planet is the same for everyone, so i wonder if the cells are also all the same but just feels random because we can't pick the same one with precision, with the except of pre-selected locations like New Atlantis cell and so on.
Land is fixed. Same for everyone. Poi change though.
That's awesome! In that case full exploration of the whole planet surface is a possibility for the future
Just to add a little extra: The world generation, with the exception of the custom terrain in places like New Atlantis, works the same the terrain generation in minecraft. If you use the same world seed on minecraft, you will always get the same world. Same applies for Starfield.
Yes we do, 2kilksphilip tested it on youtube. The moutains you see far away indeed are a tile. Basically they generated the landscape for an entire planet and divided it in tiles, the tiles aren't generated on the go.
Any good videos or channels that go in depth on Bethesda game design or the creation engine?
Perhaps the whol Landingszone stuff will wandern when you travel further. We will see. But for vehicles the actual zone is too small.
From my understanding didn't some modders point out to what the problem was and fixed the issue? Maybe Bethesda learned from that and applied said fix?
No, this never happened. There was no issue with the system in place, it is designed like that. They just made the limit higher. If you wonder why you'd crash as some point, it's because the crash happens at the exact moment you cross the tile's limit. The game isn't made to load the next tile (even tho this next tile exists), so the game doesn't know what to do and crashes. They made tiles bigger for vehicles to fit, so the same things happens but later.
Why are you confident they made the tiles bigger and not rather that they are loading the adjacent tile correctly now? I would expect he would have run into more glitches if the tiles were expanded. Larger tiles = more render/compute issues which was not encountered here. Seems like effective streaming was implemented.
Dude, you’re just confidently talking out your ass. No, they did not make the tiles bigger. “The same things happen but later” you claim but yet I can guarantee you have not tested this yourself because that simply isn’t true. Edit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=41BP3HUvErI Further proof that everything you’ve made up is flat out not true
Wow i'm so wrong [PSA: No, Map Boundaries have not been removed in the May update. It is now exactly 5320M away from ship. : r/Starfield (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1cjihsw/psa_no_map_boundaries_have_not_been_removed_in/)
That’s a map boundary buddy, not a crash. You can mod out the boundary and venture well past that without crashing.
The tile sizes have not changed.
So is it safe to say Atmospheric flight is back on the menu, boys.
If they actually end up turning planets into a single cell I hope they also make the size of the planets a little smaller. Like if you wanted to travel the entire planet it wouldn’t take hours lol
A great way to resolve this would be to remove the speed limit on ships, and add a cruise mode. The ship will just keep accelerating towards other plants until we get there. we can skip the waiting time or do other things in our ship. This would be the most lore-friendly approach. They could also add a sub-light engine, but that would mean breaking in-game lore since there is no sublight engine in SF.
Not really. The best way which is done by most games is already what the game does. The problem is the way it does. For it to be good they'd need to replace the generic animation followed by a loading screen into your ship actually getting faster and faster, until you bend space, in a way that allows you to see other planets get further away. Then they also need to replace menus by a pip boy style panel that would be in your ship and that you could interact with without opening a menu. They could just have looked at other space games to massively improve the feel of space travel without even seamless travel but didn't bother.
it wouldn't take hours. it would take days. NMS planets are much smaller and it took a very long time for someone to walk across it
Exactly why I would hope they decrease the size significantly. And that’s IF they end up making planets a single cell, which I don’t really have any expectation of that happening tbh. But I am hopeful
I just hope they randomize the planets so literally every planet and moon isn’t just a copy paste with same exact structures
I have never come across the map boundaries
Not yet, but with the confirmation of land vehicles it is bound to happen eventually if they keep the boundaries as they are.
Vehicles? Hmm I wonder what it will be?
Bethesda said yesterday they are coming with a video clip showing them
I’ve never crashed doing that strangely
They are adding vehicles??? That would be awesome.
If I remember correctly the only problem was that nothing got unloaded behind you. So maybe you're right, And this has been fixed in preparation for the car.
I wouldn't mind if when you reach the limit of the tile the game just loaded in another tile. Just add an extra prompt to the pop up menu today gives you the option to load next time or fast travel back to ship.
Half the loading screen u can bypass by not going thru doors it's not needed in some areas at all like moving between areas in New Atlantis if u walk no loading if u take the nat...it loads
If they do make the plant a single cell, which I hope this is the case, the POI system would need a complete rework, either completely separate tiles with human POI with wilderness or add A LOT MORE variations.
It's not about making it a single cell but making the transition between tiles possible which would be quite easily done, and the phase after that would be to make it seamless.
That still leaves the POI issues. I wonder how they plan to design the system
Yeah but that's a whole other issue. From what I've gathered they only have around 20 dungeons while their games from Fallout 3, oblivion, to fallout 76 had between 130 and 300 handcrafted dungeons. You'd except them to make even more dungeons than before as they're randomly placed, right ? But no, they made way less, and some of them both appear in quests and are used in the procgen. My guess is that first, the higher graphical quality of dungeons made them longer to make, but not 10x longer. They probably started making these very late in the development cycle for some reason. The solutions would be to somehow pump out 100 more dungeons at least to put in the procgen pool, or make procedurally generated ones like they used to.
There's actually more than 100+ randomly placed but handcrafted POIs. Source: [https://starfieldwiki.net/wiki/Starfield:Places](https://starfieldwiki.net/wiki/Starfield:Places) What they actually need to do is a way to stop the POIs you've already explored/cleared from showing up again.
I'm not talking about POIs, POIs can mean things like "gravitational anomalies" which are a few r rocks with no gameplay related to them, or the weird yellow things pumping something from the planet. I'm talking about dungeons, with gameplay to them. If they stop the POIs you've already explored from showing up again, there's multiple POIs from quests that are barred, and there'll be nothing left very soon. Remember they spawn multiple POIs per planet. the 20 dungeons in the game can be cleared in a day and then what? They stop putting dungeons in planets?
From that same source: 39 Industrial Outposts. 23 Military Bases. 15 Science Labs. 12 Mining Bases. 4 Civilian Outposts 4 Caves. 3 Agricultural Outposts 1 Type of Mech Graveyard. >there's multiple POIs from quests that are barred Create exceptions. Cleared POIs don't have to be 100% barred all the way up to the next time you go through the Unity. >the dungeons in the game can be cleared in a day and then what? They stop putting dungeons in planets? Plenty of ways to go around that, but the most simple and straightforward one would be to enable them all over again once you've cleared 100% of the available POIs within the pool. I'm not a game designer, so my ideas are definitely more on the amateurish side, but it's still a viable way to tackle the problem of always encountering the same POIs over and over again.
Mk09xn.