Firs thing to try would be the detail settings:

Press 'ESC' and change the "Planet Detail Level" settings to something higher.

When you ok these changes the game will pause for a bit and then you just need to wait for the terrain to be generated which can take a while.

Another thing to remember is that if you saw the video via this forum it might also be work-in-progress stuff that s20dan is currently implementing and so isn't in the Alpha 12 which was released recently but will be in a future version.

Thanks Fluffy,

I have the detail on max and also tried other settings but nothing much changes,

I never realised that some people may be using work in progress stuff 😀

Thanks anyways m8

That doesn't sound right Mars uses one of the most detailed terrains in Pioneer, WIP versions or not.

This is the mars terrain:

[attachment=857:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-14 18-57-38-66.png]

[attachment=858:pioneer-msvc-9 2011-07-14 18-53-58-62.jpg]

Whats different in the vid is just a different Seed for mars and some increased patch levels. Basically it ramps up detail but it should still be much more interesting than you described.

Hmm. you do realise it takes some time to generate the details at Very Very high with your CPU? If your flying to a planet you won't really notice it but if you start on a planet it will seem to be generating for a while. If its a speed issue then you can try Very High or just High, the detail should still be there up-close.

EDIT// Oops I've done it again 🙂 Those pics aren't from the Master Pioneer copy, but it should look close to that. Same terrain, same colours just not quite the sharpness in terrain as in the pic more octaves are used.

If you could post a pic of how mars looks for you under Very-Very-High mode than it could help nip this in the bud.

That is interesting, I was also disappointed in the visuals in Alpha 12. I thought they looked extremely weird and primitive. This is with settings on High. Changing settings around did not change the basic style much. Shaders had no effect. HDR had no effect. The terrain also took ages to generate.

Here are some screenshots of Mars. The first three are with detail set to "High", coming in to LEO.

The last two are at the surface (daytime), close to the terrain, with detail set to "Very High".

Also, collision detection seemed very dodgy/non-existent, is this expected?

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/3241/m ... urface.jpg

http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/6696 ... horbit.jpg

My specs are:

Mac OS X 10.6.8

MacBook (2009, Unibody)

Core 2 Duo, 2.0 GHz

NVidia 9400M

2GB RAM

Cheers.

Looks like you've also attracted some "attention" in that last screenshot 😀

Actually robtoujours, your pics should look like that, and I believe I have stumbled upon the reason why:

Changelog Alpha 12: All terrains optimised (octave count reduced) (#211)

That should explain why it looks crap. Octaves were reduced across the board to increase speed. Its logistically impossible for Alpha 12's terrain to run slower than Previous Alphas, I made those changes well over a month ago which is why I had no clue what was wrong before.

From my tests I noticed an improvement of up to approx 30% in speed compared to some terrains between Alpha 11 and Alpha 12, mainly the canyon and crater type terrains, but also there was a significant drop in visual quality for some terrains as well.

I'm not adversed to increasing octaves back up, but it needs testing... Some fractals can get away with low numbers of octaves, others can't.

You guys can help fix this if you like... Here's how: Download the latest nightly build which will have extra information output to the file stdout.txt. Whenever you see one of these planets that look too 'primitive' as you say, make a note of its name, location and the data from inside stdout.txt about the planet.

You could even go one further if you fancy it and explore these crappy worlds just to see if there are in-fact any features that look as they should or if it is all low-detail. Any and all feedback you gather and report helps in fixing these visual issues 🙂

Cheers.

I'm not familiar with the terminology ("octaves" to me is a musical term) but is it not possible to code the terrain engine so that the number of octaves is increased along with the detail slider (or separately, using a different slider), so that people with Ye Olde Hardware can turn it down to suit their systems, and people with Deep Blue can turn it way up to suit their systems?

It basically equates to how much detail is generated for each fractal. You could think of the number of octaves as the number of levels of detail, the number of times the fractal splits on itself....

Thats totally possible, but the current problem is that most terrains differ quite a lot from one another, once they are all standardised to use similar values, then this would have more meaning/effect.

EG: Some fractals you only want to reduce slightly but others you want to reduce a lot...

A slider is certainly the best way to do this, and ideally next to the slider it would output current max detail level in meters.