Why is the Sun chasing me in Outer Wilds?

Proxy Planets or: How Mobius Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Far Clipping Plane
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This bug was fixed in Outer Wilds 1.12, although the proxy sun atmosphere is still off. There's a mod to fix it though: outerwildsmods.com/mods/vanil...
I tried downpatching to version 1.10 to check for the proxies being implemented yet but they were still there. That's the oldest version available on the Steam betas section so I couldn't test any pre-DLC versions. I vaguely recall proxy planets being added around the time Echoes of the Eye came out though, but not entirely sure.
I didn't explicitly say it in the video but the way I fixed the far clipping issues in the new planet mods was to just implement the same proxy planet fix from the base game.
If you read the description of the video please comment the entire script to Bee Movie

[@gandalfthegray7454]

ok

[@jamesdick5847]

In this universe of black holes, planet-killing plants and spaceship-hungry anglerfish, I can't think of anything more terrifying than the Sun suddenly leaping out of the System and chasing after me as if I owed it twenty quid. O.o

[@xen-42]

I completely agree, theres a sort of eldritch horror to bugs in this game

[@Lance_Drake]

Imagine pairing the Majora's Mask Moon mod with this bug.

[@xen-42]

Fear

[@chylex]

that bug looks so funny on video, but if I saw this in the game I'd start shitting myself

[@paprus5972]

"Oh. That's what the Sun Station does."

[@ziiyan2370]

That must be horrifying for someone who is floating away from the solar system, opens their map, and just sees the sun chasing after you.

[@xen-42]

Yeah definitely gave me the creeps first time I saw it

[@marekcarlisle6937]

imagine the horror of having THE SUN chase after you on your escape into deep space

[@moblinvariable246]

I had noticed the proxy planets playing the game myself, but it’s so cool hearing you explain how they actually work! Outer wilds is such a fascinating game on a technical level.

[@xen-42]

It really is, there's a lot to learn from it really pushing the boundaries of what Unity can do

[@Zack_Wester]

I think if you lower the Graphic setting it pulls the Proxy planet earlier aka at like 25K distance meaning its easier to see ingame.

[@Vicegale]

Neat! I did the Isolation ending today for the first time before watching this and I noticed that when I shot a probe while I was +200km away from the sun, the probe actually passed the solar system when it was 30-50km from me. Figured it was a bug, but it's explained by Proxy Planets

[@xen-42]

That's pretty neat actually, clearly Mobius just needs to implement a new "proxy probe" feature

[@Throckmorpheus]

I definitely saw the planets disappear into the clipping plane when getting really far away from the solar system back during my first playthrough you're not going crazy there

[@xen-42]

Good to know, it must have been around the time the DLC released then

[@Mr.JosephElliot]

yeah i agree! i swear i have encountered this before also, i think around when i bought the game on PC to play the Echoes of the Eye DLC

[@juliettegeo5002]

cheeky mobius typo

[@xen-42]

Strings are my favourite data type

[@DaveLH]

3:20 -- I can confirm that "disappearing sun" bug in the early days of OW was not just you -- It happened to me when I first played the game, and it caused Twitch streamer HelloItsKolo quite a bit of anguish on her maiden playthrough, because it was after she removed the warp core, and as she flew too far from the sun and it slipped past that far clipping plane and vanished, she thought she was observing the sun's pre-supernova collapse, even though she still had plenty of time to get to the Vessel. So in her despair that poor woman went into "deer in the headlights" mode and got the "Now beyond the supernova, you drift though space until you starve" ending. So that's why I'm really, really glad they finally fixed that bug. (Fortunately, Kolo soon realized her mistake, and ultimately finished the game.)

[@xen-42]

Really makes me you wonder how many people get one of the alternative endings and just stop playing

[@jimtwothesecond]

"Esteemed" "game" "developer" Mobius Digital blunders yet again by shipping a clearly unfinished title and left it for the modders to fix. Erm, hire fans...lol

[@xen-42]

if they dont take the modder fix for the proxy sun atmosphere we will riot!

[@Laezar1]

you're talking like it's a massive company or a game breaking glitch, it's really not that surprising that a niche problem like that went untested. Don't talk about it like it's a bethesda game lol

[@jimtwothesecond]

I'm only messing around :p@@Laezar1

[@Laezar1]

@@jimtwothesecond oh that wasn't clear ok ok =p

[@hearth1an]

uh it's just a fireball casted by universe that want player to die!

[@xen-42]

damn u right, this is what the hearthians get for making their ships out of wood

[@RecentFuture]

Enjoyed this series so far, but also obviously learned in the process that you made New Horizons and did so much else for the OW modding community. Extremely grateful on all fronts-the gaming community is way too lucky to have people like you!

[@xen-42]

Glad you like the video, and thanks for the kind words! I'm happy to have contributed to the modding scene for sure!

[@Dan0RG]

Huh, could've sworn the sun disappearing from the player's view when flying far away was fixed in 1.12 as well. From what I can remember, though, the planets always stayed and only the sun ever disappeared. Maybe the logic was somehow reversed before 1.12? As in, the proxies were always in the game, but the sun's proxy would ONLY appear on the map view instead of the player's view?

[@xen-42]

The code controlling planet proxies and sun proxies is a bit different (which is why the typo I talk about here only affected the sun and not the planets) so it wouldn't surprise me to hear that there were other issues that affected them differently. I only tried stuff out on versions 1.12 and 1.10. What you're saying about the sun vanishing and everything else staying sounds really familiar though, might be from being in the map view as you cross the far clip plane distance, so when you switch out of the map its meant to show the proxy sun instead of the real sun but then it misses that because of the typo and then forgets to actually update the state of the sun. Just theorizing there, haven't specifically double checked that case

[@crazyjaybe]

Wow dude good job with these videos!

[@grandstarstudiosFORMER-YT]

no, the sun is headed toward you because it's mad

[@xen-42]

Oh god oh fuck what have I done

[@FloweringMajo]

Did proxy planets end up being implemented into Outer Wilds Galaxy?

[@xen-42]

Yeah we ended up making them, they aren't as good as the base game ones so sometimes you can notice some pretty weird behaviour with the proxies clearly intersecting into each other but its better than seeing nothing

[@ShineVendor]

Was outer wilds made with godot, and is the game's code open source? Love your videos! They're ridiculously entertaining Edit - it's unity, shoulda watched the whole video first 😅

[@xen-42]

I'm glad you like the videos! It's not open source but with free tools like dnspy can you decompile the game and look at the source code that way, super useful for modding