User Submitted Models, Textures, and Animations for an Official "HD" Pack for the PC

With the new UI and the new expansion pack coming, I've been thinking.

Final Fantasy XI is a beautiful game that has quite a bit of odd things that look strange and out of place. You'll have a beautifully crafted town, but a low res rockface. Or a wonderful looking Mog House with a blurry, 10 pixel carpet. Or a legendary armor set that looks as good as it is powerful, but a poor looking weapon that clips through the user's tail and gear.

Actually, we've all been thinking, and this certainly isn't the first thread to ask for a texture pack:

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Originally Posted by RagingAvatar

Just thought I'd gauge interest.
How many people would be interested in an HD texture pack upgrade?

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SE somewhat replied indirectly, via an interview, citing the difficulties of updating the graphics (admittedly, I seem to think in the back of my mind there may have been a different quote by the Community Reps citing this difficulty more eloquently, but that might be a figment of my imagination):

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"Several months ago we made what we called 'high resolution' improvements to the game, and there are some other ways we plan to implement high resolution graphics into the gaming experience," says Tanaka. "Right now we're testing other aspects of the user interface." However, Tanaka warns that a complete overhaul would be too much to expect with a world of Vana'diel's scale. "If we were to redo every model to support the newest version of DirectX, just with the massive amount of data that has accumulated over 10 years, it would be almost impossible. So, we will continue looking at individual aspects that we can improve graphically."

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Now the solution was obvious:

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Originally Posted by Vivivivi

crowd source it!

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Okay, details.

Square-Enix will announce that they are taking submissions in a thread for new textures, gear and weapon models, and animations, and give guidelines about how and what to submit and how to make it, and some legal to cover themselves.

SE will also decide what submissions go into an optional but official "High Definition" pack that will install all the new textures on the PC, taking some user feedback while doing so, and discussing some basic lore with players to ensure that submitted textures fit into the world of Vana'diel. They might even provide a slight carrot prize, such as some currently existing costume item and some tickets into special event BCNMs, or something like naming an item after the best contributors, or possibly even being credited in FFXI's credits.

Users everywhere, particularly those with advanced artistic skills, will work together to provide an upgraded graphical experience to go along with the new user interface for Windows PCs that SE is working on. They will craft the Eye Drops for adventurers with poor eyesight, and adventurers will get to see FFXI with new eyes. With some luck, certain resources will even go into the game proper, but for the most part, we'll remake the world in what is to be an optional but official pack for the Windows version of Final Fantasy XI.

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So what do you, the reader, need to do to make this a reality?

If you are an artist at heart, capture the hearts of Final Fantasy devs by smearing the whitespace of this thread with examples of how you can make FFXI look better while maintaining the look and feel of FFXI.

If you aren't so hot with drawing or modeling, you can still help. We need examples of what needs work, particularly screenshots of stuff that needs work such as a bad looking texture next to a masterpiece of art.

No matter who you are, we need feedback about this. We need constructive feedback that is clear and professional about what needs done and what needs fixed, and "Like" things in this thread that deserve it.

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I honestly don't know how far this can go. But we can try. Worst case we take a look at our world and reminisce about our adventures while watching the future pass us by... but if we're very lucky, we might see a revamped world that is a result of the ongoing collaboration between the game developers and the players that spans well over ten more years into the future.

I'm Kingfury, and I support this message /salute

I offer my illustration skills to those that would need it for this purpose (Gear, Weapon, Item, Monster, NPC, and any other concept art). While I'm adept to 2D art, I'm unfortunately a novice in the world of 3D art but nothings impossible to learn anymore so that could change soon.

This is an awesome idea, and as a player of this game from when it was released, I've been both deeply impressed by the many graphical details in ffxi as well as disappointed in certain key game details(Tarutaru's Eyes scare me). I would love to see my favorite game updated graphically as the future comes along.

You really have no idea of the scale of what you're suggesting. It's incredibly time consuming to do this for even one piece, both the texture work and the actual creation of the new model.

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Originally Posted by Stromgarde

You really have no idea of the scale of what you're suggesting. It's incredibly time consuming to do this for even one piece, both the texture work and the actual creation of the new model.

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Thats the point though, if you let the community add onto the graphics to the game then they can do the work while SE could continue with other things. Its really an evolution of what game companies need to do in my opinion, they can allow fans of a game to truly show their love for a game, while giving said fans a chance to get experience at it if they want to do it professionally later on, or do currently. And it also saves the company time, while allowing the game to get better and evolve into not only a creation of Square, but a creation of the Final Fantasy XI community as a whole.

The graphics of a game are not a major part of a game either, it can be left how it is, or upgraded, but this would let everyone have a chance to make it a truly beautiful world if the community works together to make it that way, SE could also monitor the changes by looking over them and implementing them, themselves.

It's also tough to implement things like this legally as it gets into who really owns the IP of these HD pictures and SE would have to protect themselves from people who could(and probably would just to be jerks) sue SE for some kind of compensation for them using their graphics. (It's generally why 99.9% of companies have policies that discourage being emailed new ideas for logos or improved products because if they coincidentally use something that somebody sent them, that person might think their idea was stolen)

Aside from certain sky and terrain textures, I think the resources would be best spent improving the graphics engine and reuse the existing assets. If you could get real antialiasing (8-16x), better shadows, lighting, reflections, weather and water effects, and also increase the draw distance substantially, I wouldn't mind sticking with the existing textures and 3D models.

I also think that's a lot less work to implement than it is to remake every texture in the game, because that is a lot of textures.

I know how to do it, it's just that no one else that knows how does it either because it's a massive time consuming pain in the ass and if you involve multiple people of varying levels of skill you're asking for an inconsistent outcome that looks worse than what you started with. You use the term 'crowd sourcing' like this could be run as a Kickstarter or something but the reality is that there is a very finite number of people with the skill set capable of doing this and even less with the patience to do so.

Yeah, I seriously doubt the end result of a crowd-sourced texture update would be very good. You'd have some super good textures, some bad textures, some textures that don't go well together with other textures, some bugged textures, and then of course someone who puts in a huge amount of artistic freedom, causing half the female armors to make it look like their tits were twice as big, for them to suddenly shrink to normal size as you changed to a different armor.

If you'd want to to turnout anywhere close to all-right, you'd probably need to pass every single texture through SE, and they'd end up dismissing 90% of the textures as "not good enough". And then those who made those textures would be butthurt and most would stop working on the project, leaving the last 10% of people to do everything alone.

Personally, as a videogame developer and engine programmer, I'd to go in and work on the engine for FFXI. It would genuinely be my dream job.