Rereleasing FFXI

[Dazusu]

I get the distinct impression that the OP wants all of us players without major-money gaming rigs (computer and console) to GTFO... Would I be correct in this assumption?

Pretty much correct. GTFO.

[Shiriokumo]

only you starcade. maybe casual also. stop looking to cause trouble where there wasnt any to begin with.

[Celedh]

Thing is, we could have gotten a 'high resolution' version for this game long ago had they wanted it.

What we're using is a client, all of the textures and important data, like wall collisions and such, are already on our computer/console. The only thing the server does is passing position coordinates and data like text, actions, damage and such. How the data is managed and then drawn on screen is entirely the client's work.

So technically speaking they could make a PC version that far surpasses the looks of the PS2, the Xbox360 probably could as well. But that would require going back into the 7gb of data already there, and redraw all of the pieces of gear, zones and what not, so they would be higher quality. Each piece of gear is also drawn differently for all races, so that'd be 5 (or 8 if they also count gender differences) times redrawing and refitting the equipment every time they add new ones, plus redoing the older ones.

Also, it would obviously increase the game size by alot to support both types of renditions, the new textures alone would take more space. It's alot of time and effort spent for an 8 years old game on the decline.

If they could separate the consoles like that, while at it they could also break out of the whole 'PS2 limitations' thing, but then it would also break the 'sync' between the consoles, which they have tried to preserve. The developers wanted all consoles to be equal, without one having an 'unfair advantage'. PC being able to handle higher resolutions is not an unfair advantage per say, PS2 at least has constant framerate at what it does, PC has too many variables involved in hardware and software.

Just to say that while not impossible to have a higher rendition of the game on PC or 360, I doubt they would put the manpower on doing this.

[Celedh]

I think something that would be much more beneficial right now is allowing the PC version to use the full power of current computers and graphic cards.

The system doesn't even let you use Multi-Core processing, so you end up using only the speed of a single core. I'm sure there are alot of options that aren't supported by newer graphic cards, I don't have the feeling my game is running more smoothly even after getting a new card.

[Mirage]

I think something that would be much more beneficial right now is allowing the PC version to use the full power of current computers and graphic cards.

The system doesn't even let you use Multi-Core processing, so you end up using only the speed of a single core. I'm sure there are alot of options that aren't supported by newer graphic cards, I don't have the feeling my game is running more smoothly even after getting a new card.

Almost all of the rendering takes place on your CPU, on a single core of it. The only stat on a video card that "really" affects the game is the memory bandwidth, and that stopped to be a bottleneck somewhere around Geforce 7900 (or equivalent). Multicore support wouldn't be very helpful to this game, I think. Except the graphics, there isn't a lot of things that needs to be processed by the CPU in this game. Just getting the graphics over on the GPU would solve practically all performance issues.

However, making the game utilize a GPU properly is probably quite a bit of work, and that's why we probably won't see it happening.

[Celedh]

I was tossing that in because it seems there are still instances that I'm not getting 30 frames a second.

Dualcore 2.8ghz, 4gb RAM, Geforce GTX250. It's not the top of the line, but it's miles beyond what the game should need. Yet, still having choppy framerate at times for some reason. Unless there are settings I don't know about, I'd say that giving it the whole CPU and GPU speed would help with that. I'm playing without Shadows or Weather Effects as well, makes no sense.

[Mirage]

It's not as easy as "giving it" the entire CPU, though. If you take away the graphics part, a single core of a modern PC would be way more than the game would ever need. The only reason why FF11 is very CPU dependent is that practically all the 3D rendering is happening on the CPU as well, not on the GPU where it really belongs.

If the game did the 3D on the GPU like every other game in the world, the fact that it only uses a single core would be of no significance, because apart from the 3D, the game uses very little CPU power.

[Atomic_Skull]

If the game did the 3D on the GPU like every other game in the world, the fact that it only uses a single core would be of no significance, because apart from the 3D, the game uses very little CPU power.

I don't know where this "FFXI doesn't render on the GPU" started but FFXI does not use software rendering. It does use D3D8.DLL so it doesn't use a lot of the features of modern video cards but it isn't correct to say that it doesn't use the GPU.

If this were the case it wouldn't require a card with transformation and lighting and it also wouldn't have compatibility problems with Windows Vista and Window's 7's pixel and vertex shader implementation because it wouldn't use them.

[Kiroko]

I guess if you really wanted to and had the means to you could update the game yourself if you had the programs, for all we know there is some person out there who updated most of their game in some way,shape, or form, and is playing in it as we speak.

[Miiyo]

Be happy that the game's life is being extended due to the fact that FFXIV is not generating any profit right now. Everyone that plays obviously wishes for an updated game. It's FFXIV. If they keep implementing changes based on what their player base (mostly Previous ffxi players) wishes, it'll probably end up an updated FFXI in a different world.