FFXI client tweaks. FFXI updates that might realisticly happen.

[Atomic_Skull]

Ok I think it's pretty obvious that a graphics update to FFXI isn't going to happen. However there are things they could do to improve the existing client on modern PCs that wouldn't be too hard to implement and which would not affect PS2 support at all.

First of all, change how the resolution select works in the config. We already know that FFXI supports any resolution your graphics card is capable of so restricting the "background" setting to a maximum of 1024x1024 in the config utility doesn't make sense.

Furthermore, the whole "background/overlay" system they use is confusing to new players. They should change the "background" to be a fraction of the overlay and change the name to "Rendering resolution" with a help text that explains what it actually is. So you can select the resolution you want and then choose 1/4 1/2 2/3 and "full resolution" for rendering (this is the way FFXIV does it).

Update FFXI to DirexctX 9 already, DirectX 8 is dying and Nvidia and ATI hardly care about it. This would solve 95% of the problems FFXI has on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

60fps support. FFXI's graphics engine *does* support 60fps, there is a cutscene in COP that runs at 60 fps (the one with the demons) and the FFXI benchmark also runs at 60fps in places. So we know this is possible without having to change any of the animations for the models.

MSAA support, or rather, MSAA support that isn't really slow. At least on ATI cards if you match the overlay and background resolutions (e.g. 1280x720 for both) then forced MSAA actually works with FFXI. The problem though is that it is very slow with shadows enabled. MSAA already works with FFXI, so it's just a matter of fixing FFXI to work better with it.

Adjustable menu size. Add an option to draw the menus larger so that everything doesn't become unreadable at very high resolutions. Even if it's just "draw all menus at 2x size"

An option to restrict the width of the UI. So say if you were running the game at 1920x1080 you could restrict the width at which the UI is drawn to 1440.

Related to the above, user defined aspect ratio, or alternatively just have FFXI assume square pixels. Almost all displays these days use discrete pixels anyway. Combined with the above they would allow FFXI to work with eyefinity three monitor setups. FFXI can already run on three monitors because they simply look like a single very wide display to applications. The only problem is that FFXI is limited to 16:9 and the UI spans all three displays, so while it works it's not very useful.


EDIT: Adding two extra items.

Add a slider to increase draw distance of terrain. Modern PCs have no problem with longer draw distances.

Add a slider to adjust distance for level of detail adjustment (LOD) as well as an option to turn it off completely. As with longer draw distance modern PCs would have no problems with this.

[Smoothdome]

Awesome thread is awesome, I support!

[Atomic_Skull]

ATI and Nvidia's DirectX 8 support seems to get worse every driver release. They simply aren't concerned with decade old games anymore because they don't drive sales of new graphics cards. Even Microsoft is said to be dropping support for DirectX versions earlier than 9 from Windows 8.

[Sesh]

< 4th'd

[Shadotter]

I'm not sure how feasible this all is, but I support it wholeheartedly

[Atomic_Skull]

I'm not sure how feasible this all is, but I support it wholeheartedly

These are all just improvements to the existing client and wouldn't require any changes to the actual game assets. Most of these improvements would be trivial to implement. Certainly no more difficult than when they added a built in Window mode.

The only two that would require real work would be MSAA support and updating to DirectX 9, and even those are just something you put an intern on for a few months.

[Juilan]

LOL they all require less work than changing the value of a drop rate, which they've done, or are planning on doing in abyssea, you don't need to deal the spigettehti code for three terminal types you just tweak things for windows... less trouble shooting and since most of it isn't game side they'd have enough less debugging

[Fearforever]

I support this to, its annoying how my laptop can run a brand new game on max. settings but my fps drops and I lag around Maw's and fluxes would be nice to have DirectX fixed, or rather updated.

[Myrid]

I totally 100% agree with the OP. We need some small engine/settings upgrades. We can only hope that Microsoft completely breaks DX8 in Win8 and forces SE to upgrade us to DX9.. or risk losing everyone that upgrades their OS..! /crossesfingers

Thing is they won't do it unless they have to; new players very rarely come in nowadays. Those of us that are already playing are hooked and won't quit over not having graphics/engine upgrades.

[Gokku]

as much as i agree if the dev teams latest post trend stays the same the answer is "we thought about it but its to much work so heres some other shit "

[Duelle]

I'll add my support to this thread as well. Might help with the FPS drops in places like Newton Movalpolos as well as around Maws.

[Andylynn]

Shocking, a suggestion that is actually presented in a cohesive, professional way. This one gets a like button from me, good going, that doesn't happen often :P.

[katoplepa]

I support this to, its annoying how my laptop can run a brand new game on max. settings but my fps drops and I lag around Maw's and fluxes would be nice to have DirectX fixed, or rather updated.

I'm about to buy a new , last generation , notebook, do you think I will not see a better look on the game?
my actual pc is old like ffxi itself...

[Fusionx]

I'm all for this.

I'd also be for them adding all those configuration settings (resolution) in game. Both XI and XIV force you to log out to change the game's resolution, I can't think of any game in the last ten years that has done that.

Also fully support a DirectX upgrade, not sure how feasible it is.. but maybe it would make the game run better. There's no reason shadows should lag the game on my PC when it's an almost 9 year old game. Optimize the engine for PC!

[Rambus]

nice list, add your like to OP

[Coephoros]

I think this is the first intelligent, lucid, and actionable request I've seen posted in the General Forum. Kudos and a rate up.

[wish12oz]

Any sort of graphical improvement is ok with me. Esspecially if it makes the game run smoother. I have a really nice, new PC, and I used regedit to push the graphics way up, and I lag sometimes =[ Mainly when a conflux or telepoint is really big on my screen, well actually, that's the only time, but whatever!

Nicer looking game is nice.

[Atomic_Skull]

Also fully support a DirectX upgrade, not sure how feasible it is.. but maybe it would make the game run better. There's no reason shadows should lag the game on my PC when it's an almost 9 year old game. Optimize the engine for PC!

Really they just need to optimize the rendering code on the PC. Code that doesn't touch the hardware is fairly agnostic about what platform it's running on. It's likely that these are separate from the main code anyway. I suspect that they use a common "core" for all three versions and then separate modules that they compile in for each version.

Converting a D3D8 application to D3D9 isn't really that hard, just convert the calls and then bugtest. Later they could do additional refinements by improving how the game renders the 3D scene by replacing some of the old rendering methods (more efficient shadows for example)

Vista and Windows 7 use a wrapper for D3D 8, removing that extra layer will improve performance just by using D3D9 directly.

Also added increased draw distance and ability to adjust and remove LOD levels to op.

[Remember]

What are the chances of the Dev team implementing some of this stuff?

[Vold]

Pretty flipping high after they get this FFXIV stuff out of their system ie it fails once and for all. And it will be a hard lesson learned. The moral of the story: Don't eff'n abandon your still new born and incredibly popular MMO. The world was not ready for FFXIV. SE was not ready for FFXIV.

[Alex]

Keep your background res a square or you'll get skewed particle effects ^^ 2048x2048 (probably) puts you higher than your display anyways, so it AAs in a sense.

nVidia worked on improving FFXI support in their drivers shortly after the Fermi cards came out. The game was initially unplayable, but it's improved dramatically. Still the framerate can dip from crowds, shadows and confluxes. I think newer cards are struggling with older versions of DirectX, and DX9 may help.

Oh and the 360 gets better shadows and surround. I'd love that on the PC.

[Mirage]

Keep your background res a square or you'll get skewed particle effects ^^ 2048x2048 (probably) puts you higher than your display anyways, so it AAs in a sense.
Huh, really? I never noticed.

[Atomic_Skull]

Keep your background res a square or you'll get skewed particle effects ^^ 2048x2048 (probably) puts you higher than your display anyways,


The aspect ratio bugs associated with not using the old square 256/512/1024 square resolutions as well as the bug where onscreen battle messages become progressively more off center as you increased the resolution were all fixed last update. They finally noticed this after they added support to FFXI's config utility for custom background resolutions. (scroll down past 2048x2048 and you'll find every desktop resolution supported by your graphics card's drivers)


so it AAs in a sense.

It's not "in a sense", it's supersampling, which is a type of FSAA. It *is* AA. It's not driver based AA, but then DirectX 10 and 11 based games don't use driver based AA either (In D3D 10 and 11 driver based AA is not allowed, it's up to the developer to implement AA in their game) Even in some DirectX 9 games Nvidia's and ATI's drivers automatically disable driver based AA because it causes problems (FFXIV is one such game)

[Tagrineth]

Super/multi sampled AA is by definition really slow. You can't really accelerate drawing the scene 4 times instead of just 1 by driver magic alone. lol

[Zirael]

How about not CRASHING the game when Alt+Tabing from full screen mode on PC? Or when your Skype/Antivirus decides to pop-up an intray message..?

[Kaisha]

How about not CRASHING the game when Alt+Tabing from full screen mode on PC? Or when your Skype/Antivirus decides to pop-up an intray message..?
I play in windowed mode for this reason, even if it has some ill consequence of making your PC run like crap if you try to multi-task with other applications.



You know what I'd like fixed in FFXI visually? The day/night cycle. The second the game clock hits 'night time', the zone goes from bright to dark in the span of a single second. Why isn't this a gradual transition over the course of the actual game day? It's even more prevalent if you have bumpmap lighting on.

[Atomic_Skull]

I play in windowed mode for this reason, even if it has some ill consequence of making your PC run like crap if you try to multi-task with other applications.



You know what I'd like fixed in FFXI visually? The day/night cycle. The second the game clock hits 'night time', the zone goes from bright to dark in the span of a single second. Why isn't this a gradual transition over the course of the actual game day? It's even more prevalent if you have bumpmap lighting on.

Even seen a day time compressed into 1 hour? When the sun comes up over the horizon the transition from darkness to morning is almost instant.

[Aselin]

As much as I'd like to see graphical tweaks or client updates that will help improve FFXI on the PC, the one deterrent is and always will be the Playstation 2.

Several years ago when SE announced a switch to DirectX 9 by the time Wings of the Goddess was to be released but rescinded it, SE themselves mentioned during an interview or Fan Festival or gaming event that they want to keep the PS2 and PC versions the same. In other words, one-to-one feature parity.

Why?

It saves Square-Enix money. Let's admit it, SE is lazy when it comes to updating XI and providing much needed fixes and improvements. I've been playing the game since 2004. While Blizzard has updated its graphics engine for WoW, CCP for EVE Online, and SOE for Everquest, SE has remained ever vigilant to stay behind the crowd. Heck, CCP has been diligent enough to talk to the playerbase and communicate to them when the DirectX 9 update, Trinity, was to be released. It may have killed off the very few players that had outdated systems but it's best to move forward not backwards. The results in the end shows, and EVE is one of the better looking games out there right now. That's until TERA, ArcheAge, Blade and Soul, and Guild Wars 2 are released.

SE has already admitted that they did not want to upgrade the graphics for FFXI nor port it to the PS3 as a natively programmed game because the time and resources spent would be better spent making another MMO. This was in another interview done years ago between CoP and ToAU release. So, in other words, SE is too cheap to do it and too ignorant to do it. Cue Final Fantasy XIV and its lackluster launch a year ago with poor graphical performance, little to no content, and half-baked game that felt more like beta than gold/release candidate version.

The graphics issues prevalent in the game are as follows:

disjointed textures. I've seen this mostly in tunnels where textures overlap or flicker. Or, the textures are incorrectly shaded.
flickering textures
slow graphical performance in crowded areas
slow graphical performance with higher settings regardless of computer hardware
separated polygons. You can see this when two triangles meet but there is a small gap between them.
low resolution textures especially when up close
recycled polygonal models for zones, armors and weapons
no real time lighting or realistic lighting. FFXI is using an outdated or poor method at lighting and shadowing; possibly stenciling or similar.


(Note:
This is on the following system:
- AMD Phenom II X4 805 @ 2.5 GHz
- MSI HAWX Radeon HD 5770
- 8 GB DDR2 RAM
- MSI K9A2 CF motherboard
- Windows 7 64-bit Service Pack 1)

Issue #1 and #2 is more prevalent on Windows Vista and Windows 7 systems. A friend proved it after four hours going back and forth with him about it. It's because Vista and 7 are natively DX10/DX11. Starting with DX10, Microsoft redid how DirectX is done and programmed. Yes, it may provide good support for DX9 games but DX8-based games and older are being deprecated. Deprecated meaning-- no longer in use; past use. I have not tested it yet with Windows 8 Developers Preview, but I know it does run after reading another forum. I assume it'll run similarly as it does in Windows Vista/7.

When my friend installed Windows XP on a separate partition and installed FFXI, the game ran fine. No more texture flickering, etc.

Here's a good blog post explaining how SE's method of recycling zones and textures isn't really saving the game disk space:
http://parchmentpaper.blogspot.com/2011/03/explaining-why-reskinned-graphics-dont.html

Now, with all that said, I'll definitely support an update to FFXI that reduces or eliminates its current issues including graphical upgrades. (Yes SE, there are issues with the game still. Did you know that even the PS2 version STILL suffers from crashes that my other friend keeps complaining to me about? Heck, my friend had to buy a PC just to play the game she's been playing since 2004!)

However, any update to FFXI will require SE to do one of two things:

COMPLETELY drop PS2 support and/or reprogram it for the PS3. Upgrade the engine for the game and graphics for PS3, 360 and PC to be one-to-one parity.
OR
Create two separate game engines-- one for PS2 and another for PC/360. PS2 retains the older, lower resolution graphics while the PC and 360 get a modern DirectX 9 update similar to CCP's update to EVE Online.


Square-Enix will also have to overcome DNAS issues as its possible and highly likely Sony has locked them to a 10 GB partition. (This is the same amount of space allocated for PS2 System Data on PS3.) And, according to someone posting on FFXI AH:

The problem with the Playstation 2 is the COPY PROTECTION system it uses:

DNAS (Dynamic Network Authentication System) is designed to prevent copying of contents from a drive to another and to keep a installed piece of contents from working in a different PS2 console. It's what forces you to format the HDD if you need to move it from one console to another.

The whole debacle comes from the fact that to enlarge the partition designed for the FFXI game they need to submit an application to SONY for the required new partition size. And apparently SONY is no longer accepting such requests.

So if YOU hack it around and artificially enlarge the partition, it fails DNAS check and you have to format the HDD to install again.

I knew it would fail so I didn't try it myself but I have witnessed others try and end needing to reinstall everything.

SONY already shut down most of the DNAS servers for the PS2. The only few exceptions are POL/FFXI and Nobunaga Online for the PS2, apparently and only because these titles can be played on the PS3 which has back compatibility.

So while I don't see anything big being made for FFXI, I don't feel like they would drop it either.

I don't know but I believe that there might be a slim chance that SE could talk SCEI into allowing them to add another 5 or 10 GB to the FFXI partition size.

In a nutshell it's technically doable, but politically tricky to do so.
http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/24097/do-you-expect-a-ffxi-expansion-for-90/#1459987


SCEI, Sony Computer Entertainment America (“SCEA”) and their affiliates cannot guarantee the continuous operation of the “DNAS” servers. SCEA shall not be liable for any delay or failure of the “DNAS” servers to perform."
http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/6307/authenticating-dnas/#317166

So, any client tweaks will be PC/360-only. Any new zones that risk increasing the size of FFXI may run into issues with the PS2 as it's highly possible it's locked to 10 GB partition. It would also explain why the PC version is 10 GB in size approximately. If SE is intending to keep features the same as the PS2, we will more likely never see an update to the PC or 360 ever. SE would also have to talk to Sony in regards to being locked to a small partition out of the 40 GB PS2 drive if SE intends to keep the PS2 version and ever add new zones and items to the game.

It is just better to drop the PS2 version, move it to the PS3, and upgrade the graphics on all 3 systems-- 360, PS3, and PC. That way they still remain 1-to-1 feature parity. However, for goodness sakes, don't make the PC version a port of the PS3 like it is now-- PC is a port of the PS2 version; 360 is a port of the PC version. That makes the 360 a port of a port. Lovely, huh?

And, I honestly will not be surprised that this thread gets locked, my post gets deleted, and/or I get banned from the forums. I'm sure Square-Enix would not want anyone insulting them even someone from their own playerbase, a paying customer.

(I've already made a copy of this post to my blog.)

[Arcon]

And, I honestly will not be surprised that this thread gets locked, my post gets deleted, and/or I get banned from the forums. I'm sure Square-Enix would not want anyone insulting them even someone from their own playerbase, a paying customer.

(I've already made a copy of this post to my blog.)

Aside from the fact that you're way too paranoid, this is a very nice post and sums up pretty much all the issues. SE looks at FFXI as a dying game, but the sooner they realize that it's the only thing keeping their reputation up as of now, and their only active and major cash cow, the better for everyone. I've recently read that they're planning another MMORPG (not necessarily FF-line, but still), which will kill them for good, and it will serve them right, at our expense. I can't believe a company can be this short-sighted.

[Sanhime]

Upgrading to a PS3 sounds possible, Sony has add a PS2 Classics section on PSN, where they converted the PS2 games to PS3. If SE can do this for FFXI, then a lot of the restrictions could be overcome.

[Raxiaz]

MUTE TOGGLE FOR SOUND.

That is all.

[Alex]

COMPLETELY drop PS2 support and/or reprogram it for the PS3. Upgrade the engine for the game and graphics for PS3, 360 and PC to be one-to-one parity.
More likely: Drop the PS2, and not touch the PS3. As you said, it's more effort to them than it's worth.

I've recently read that they're planning another MMORPG (not necessarily FF-line, but still)
I think that MMO is just Dragon Quest X.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

I just want them to fix it so you don't lag out something rotten at the Dem's and Conflux.