Hi Res Texture Pack

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Originally Posted by Raeletta

I'm up in the air for those suggesting Tessallation though

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Tessellation requires too much processing time to even bother putting it into an MMO. For the likes of a first-person shooter you have a smaller FoV (Field of Vision), allowing you to occlude anything not in the FoV.
Where-as in a 3rd person MMO with hundreds of mesh objects in the scene it's simply a waste.

The detail can be easily acquired from the use of normal/height/bump maps.

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Originally Posted by Shioban

Tessellation requires too much processing time to even bother putting it into an MMO. For the likes of a first-person shooter you have a smaller FoV (Field of Vision), allowing you to occlude anything not in the FoV.
Where-as in a 3rd person MMO with hundreds of mesh objects in the scene it's simply a waste.

The detail can be easily acquired from the use of normal/height/bump maps.

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Depend of your rig, the resolution and the amount of tesselation applied.

The Tesselation option would be "optional" with levels.

Low x16
Medium 32x
High 64x

In my gaming experiencies the tesselation is a game changer. This effect in moderate amounts is always noticeable.

I cant play Crysis 3 or tomb Raider without that.

Yes is a demanding effect but nothing a 780 TI or a R9 290x or CF/SLI cant handle.

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Originally Posted by CrAZYVIC

Depend of your rig, the resolution and the amount of tesselation applied.
I cant play Crysis 3 or tomb Raider without that.

Yes is a demanding effect but nothing a 780 TI or a R9 290x or CF/SLI cant handle.

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That's the thing, the average user simply doesn't have that kind of hardware, it's actually a very very small percentage of people, it would be considered a huge waste of time at the moment to focus on something only a relatively small amount of people will be able to use.

You'll notice that any game that actually uses tessellation, does so very sparingly.

Even a simple grid when tessellated can almost quadruple the amount of triangles to be rendered, this will always cause a huge performance hit as there's no way to avoid it, you're essentially adding in more triangles to be calculated per frame.

Tessellation is nice to go in and add detail where you simple didn't before. Let's say a cobbled stone road, after developing the area you feel more detail could be added, tessellation+displacement mapping would be perfect if you didn't have the time to go back and adjust the original level layout, however even on a low factor Tessellation can still cause performance and intended implementation issues.

Another big issue is artifacting with low sub divisions, usually forcing developers to use a higher tesselation factor per edge. It's an automated process, where something hand-designed will appear correct to the designer (A brick wall for example, then when a low factor tessellation is applied the algorithm won't understand that "This is meant to be flat, this is meant to be rocky", applying the tessellation at a low sub division to avoid an artefact appearing (A lump/bump where one should not exist) is a nightmare of a task. It's no easy task to go about fixing this issue either.

Tessellation is essentially subdividing and displacing the new triangles (and or not displacing), as with all mesh models the more triangles being rendered the more processing time is required to render the item, this still to this day requires a beefy GPU as you already noted. Until these 'currently beefy' cards are the standard I can't see Square Enix taking the leap to use it.

The ARR team don't seem to want to add anything that the average user can't use (And for the most part Tessellation would be ignored or turned off due to its requirements). So as many people would argue "Well why not add X and make it optional, I bought a $2,000 PC and I want to use it!", the team don't want to seem to add anything optional that only a small handful of people can currently use.

Overall however, if your 3D artists are capable, this should be at all costs avoided as it's an unnecessary "Oh crap this probably needs more topology" addition.

Personally I think the more options the better, but most likely they'd wish to invest their time in something the majority can actually use an enjoy.

Although tessellation would be nice as an option, this thread is focused on the textures, since Yoshi P stated he has no plans to increase them for DX11. :(

I support this proposition for Hi-Res Texture.

Signed and liked.

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Originally Posted by Tanama

I support this proposition for Hi-Res Texture.

Signed and liked.

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Same. Signed.

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Originally Posted by Kule

Probably going to need 1000 or more likes to get it taken seriously. Truth is I think yoshiP is right and most of their target audience don't care about textures sadly. :/

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You are most likely right that a good number of players doesn't care about textures. They probably didn't know that the textures were downgraded from the 1.0 version. If they know this fact, I'd think most of them would want the hi res option.

I think this is a much needed feature for FF14 if we want to see it age well in the next couple of years. Does this have to be a top priority request for the dev? Most certainly not, but at least acknowledge that it's a legitimate request.

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Originally Posted by Icehunter

If they come out with this and it keeps happy or gets X people; but in the end they lose money on it or waste valuable resources...<snip>...don't be surprised if they say no or just say "make your own".

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I'm highly sure that they still have the original HD texture assets from 1.0 and a little over a year ago, Yoshi boasted that they wrote some awesome conversion tool to push 1.0 assets to the 2.0 engines. This might imply that the 2.0 engine only support low res texture, but that should only be an issue for PS3 with memory limitation. For PC and PS4, I don't see how they could have just throw away the HD textures after the conversion.

At the very least, I think they should re-release the HD textures in increments if they don't have the manpower and resource to do it all at once. Start with HD character models so people can stop making threads about flatbutts. Then move onto gears, then monsters, then background environment. It's not a lot to ask but will please fans for years to come.

They are probably looking at this as well:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc

There's more than just pleasing a customer that is taken into consideration when developing something. Here are some examples:

Internal/External Customer Satisfaction
Initial Cost
Technical Debt (how much this will cost after it's done to maintain)
Market Desire
Current/Future Roadmaps
Device Support

If they come out with this and it keeps happy or gets X people; but in the end they lose money on it or waste valuable resources. They might reconsider. More than a few hundred million has already been pumped into this game and even more with the upcoming expansions and what-not.

I'm sure they are considering it; but don't be surprised if they say no or just say "make your own".

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Originally Posted by Namasu

I'm highly sure that they still have the original HD texture assets from 1.0 and a little over a year ago, Yoshi boasted that they wrote some awesome conversion tool to push 1.0 assets to the 2.0 engines. This might imply that the 2.0 engine only support low res texture, but that should only be an issue for PS3 with memory limitation. For PC and PS4, I don't see how they could have just throw away the HD textures after the conversion.

At the very least, I think they should re-release the HD textures in increments if they don't have the manpower and resource to do it all at once. Start with HD character models so people can stop making threads about flatbutts. Then move onto gears, then monsters, then background environment. It's not a lot to ask but will please fans for years to come.

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The original baked maps for each model (as well as the original Hi-Poly model) still exists, yes.

Some examples of some of the original hi-poly models are here;

http://i.imgur.com/PMIIKKa.png
http://i.imgur.com/mgTQ85k.png

The conversion tool they're speaking of it probably based on elements. Where-in you can select a "portion" of an object and then lower the resolution. This would be a very fast way of taking something from it's original detail down as far as it can go whilst retaining a balance of detail and the overall memory impact.

Essentially what you would do is, let's say for this body piece;

http://i.imgur.com/YmFszV5.jpg

There are multiple segments to it, and therefore multiple textures that were applied.
(1.23 had the great idea of taking one base piece of armour and then adding on pieces.)

So Linen>Felt>Wool Bliauds all have the same base model, but with more added ontop of them as the level increases (accessories/extra cloth.

Therefore, the multiple textures across the segments had to be adjusted.

As i've pointed out some, (and you can probably apply this to any gear in-game) is what they would have used this tool for.
"Okay, this segment will be 64x64 pixels, where-as this area willl be 256x256. A very streamline process to spead up the 1.23>2.0 conversion".

It would be time consuming but a possible task to go back and compress them less-so than before, so that not everything is sitting at 4096x4096 textures, but so that there's more detail retained than what we currently have at least.

A great example of how new items in ARR are made and how compression is affecting them badly is the 'un-segmented' gear we're getting.
The Crystal Tower/Titan Weapon/Gear pieces seem to be textured differently now in that thing are in much larger segments meaning the overall compression can be horrific at times.
(This is more apparent with the weapons than anything else.)

Example of bad compression:

http://i.imgur.com/2znGwgg.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KJUDAbl.jpg

Example of fantastic compression:

http://i.imgur.com/AGmYUK2.jpg

Signed.

I'm for it, it is sad to say but a good portion of CT gear looks like crap because all I see are right triangle jaggies in my armor. (Maxed out settings)

SE states they want to provide the best experience and want to push the limitations of devices. Well I'm on a PC and the game tickles my graphics card -.-;

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Originally Posted by Shioban

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Thanks for the explanation. I also remember watching that dvd that came with the 1.0 collector edition with Tanaka team showing off how well they craft each pieces of an armor and punish the graphic to the limit. It makes me even more disappointed that we can only show off a fraction of what FF14 was/could have been when comparing to the other next gen games.

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Originally Posted by Namasu

Thanks for the explanation. I also remember watching that dvd that came with the 1.0 collector edition with Tanaka team showing off how well they craft each pieces of an armor and punish the graphic to the limit. It makes me even more disappointed that we can only show off a fraction of what FF14 was/could have been when comparing to the other next gen games.

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This is why I'm disappointed I wanted this game to be bleeding edge, Pc's will only get stronger in time anyway, and these textures are worse than many ps3 games.

This post has many examples of how they already posess the hi-res versions of many assets.

I'd like to add that in most game projects most of the texture assets are often created in higher def than they end up being used especially now when ports to higher spec platforms are so likely.

I hope ps4 character textures look better as especially the decorations on most clothing look terribad when they're smushed down.

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Originally Posted by Seif

This post has many examples of how they already posess the hi-res versions of many assets.

I'd like to add that in most game projects most of the texture assets are often created in higher def than they end up being used especially now when ports to higher spec platforms are so likely.

I hope ps4 character textures look better as especially the decorations on most clothing look terribad when they're smushed down.

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I play on a high end PC, but PS4 has 8GB of fast RAM, and has plenty of room for HD textures, at least 4GB of that GDDR5 RAM is used for games. Why not add them?

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Originally Posted by Vasher

This is why I'm disappointed I wanted this game to be bleeding edge, Pc's will only get stronger in time anyway, and these textures are worse than many ps3 games.

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There's quite a lot of textures, on top of an entire UI to manage and fiddle into the memory, hence why the game looks so blurry and pixelated on the PS3.

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Originally Posted by Seif

This post has many examples of how they already posess the hi-res versions of many assets.

I'd like to add that in most game projects most of the texture assets are often created in higher def than they end up being used especially now when ports to higher spec platforms are so likely.

I hope ps4 character textures look better as especially the decorations on most clothing look terribad when they're smushed down.

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Originally Posted by Vasher

I play on a high end PC, but PS4 has 8GB of fast RAM, and has plenty of room for HD textures, at least 4GB of that GDDR5 RAM is used for games. Why not add them?

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Yup! The ability to do this is here now, sadly going back and re-compressing the textures from the original to a higher resolution will take a lot of time, so as possible as it is, if they do decide to do it, it's going to take a long time (even with the in-house conversion toolset)

Signed.

I would love this. I know how much better skyrim looks once custom HD textures are added.

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Originally Posted by Shioban

Yup! The ability to do this is here now, sadly going back and re-compressing the textures from the original to a higher resolution will take a lot of time, so as possible as it is, if they do decide to do it, it's going to take a long time (even with the in-house conversion toolset)

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While I don't know what in house tools they've developed, the process should be akin to opening a file, resizing it, and exporting it. Unless they get incredibly specific about tweaking compression levels on a per texture basis the process could be entirely automated. Now that I think about it though, there are some texture files that may not have high resolution assets. Usually people paint in a higher resolution because it's easier to use the space effectively. Normal maps, however, are 'baked' from a high resolution 3D model onto a low res model (in game model) and quite possibly at the resolution that they're using. Those would be a pain to redo, but just the sort of mind numbing work to give to interns. They could be using a few other types of maps, but the resolution on those is mostly irrelevant (spec maps and the like).

I really hope they do add High Resolution textures or maybe even a separate version for High Resolution Textures so that people who don't have capable hardware can still enjoy the game as is and other people who have the hardware can enjoy the High Resolution textures. It just adds to the experience and makes you enjoy the game and the world that much more when you can sit around and look in awe of how beautiful everything looks.

I would be happy with any progress in this area. Say in next patch if they added "ps4 and PC version bard gear number X doesn't suck anymore." I would be happy to know that progress is being made.

i'm in. need this

Wow lots of support so far, over 180 Likes!

The in-house tool-set they're using isn't something they just ran automatically across an entire model (It may have this option, I have no idea). As they've already explained (and you can even see it for yourself) sections of the gear are separated and compressed based on these segments, where detail isn't needed or could be reduced to lower the texture memory impact they simply lower the resolution for that area.

A simple "Does this segment look okay? Yes, >Save"

As segments of the gear/items are compressed more than others.
It's not a particularly difficult process with a tool like this, just time consuming (although less-so than doing it manually) This is what they used to convert 1.23 > 2.0's models originally to speed up the process.

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Originally Posted by Nutz

Usually people paint in a higher resolution because it's easier to use the space effectively.

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I'm aware of this, and you sculpt at a higher subdivision of polygons and or triangles, it's not resolution based.

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Originally Posted by Nutz

there are some texture files that may not have high resolution assets.

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That would be very very unlikely unless someone decided to completely throw the standard asset pipe-line out the window.

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Originally Posted by Nutz

Normal maps, however, are 'baked' from a high resolution 3D model onto a low res model (in game model) and quite possibly at the resolution that they're using..

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It's baked from a high-poly model, not a high-resolution model. And they've shown in the past that the original baked maps are of a much higher resolution.

When applying a normal/bump map to a low-poly model the overall resolution of the texture(s) can be as high or low as you want, there's no real restriction. (Well, roughly 8192*8192 is the limit, but we're not making a movie here)

The resolution of both the diffuse and any bump/normal mapping makes a HUGE difference. The pixelation caused by lowering diffuse and normal maps is very easy to see. It's mildly frustrating but nothing game breaking.
This is evident more than anything in the texture compression.

Which is why the break-blade looks so horrific and even more so when a light-source is shading the normal maps on it.


However the textures in this game aren't horrific in any way, but the originals are sitting there, it would mostly be a "Is it worth the time?" Q/A.
If they firmly said "Nope, never" to it, I wouldn't care too much but as you said, it's something you could leave with a few interns to do.

I agree, devs, please work on it!

And fix those UGLY ass shadow LODs man SERIOUSLY DX11 save us!!!!!!!!!!!

Vanya on Roegadyns -.-
or basically any equip on Roegadyns.

My PC could never handle high res textures. It's on 27fps on low as it is.
Though I definitely would like the option for the future :P

Count me in

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Originally Posted by Vasher

Wow lots of support so far, over 180 Likes!

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People keep this thread going!!! Gogogo!

lots support already, i didn't read all posts, so someone might have already mentioned it.
I would love higher textures as well since putting millions of filters and anti-aliasing
on foliage etc. will most likely hurt the performance more then just have a bit higher
textures...

but even if they don't increase them. They should at least have textures of the same
quality.

If i look at my archer. i can see nice details on the gearpieces. Leather structure etc.
Not bad (closer look ofc isnt that great) but even zoomed out that Titan bow (same with all titan weapons) looks fugly. (not the design, that is well not great either) but
the details are just horrible. and they seem less then half the resolution of my other gearpieces.... WHY?

Another example is Coil. The yellow/orange structures/Background.
Some parts are so horribly bad and scaled up. its worse then games from more then
10 years ago.

Signed. /10char

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Originally Posted by HReincarnate

My PC could never handle high res textures. It's on 27fps on low as it is.
Though I definitely would like the option for the future :P

Count me in

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I don't think anyone's PC has enough memory bandwidth to support drawing 24 characters on screen at once, each using many tens of megabytes worth of textures. And it would also offer very little visual improvement under almost circumstances. Every screen shot I've seen about the games "low resolution" textures are of their own character zoomed in almost all the way. People don't play the game this way. No one goes fighting titan with the camera zoomed in so close they can't see the behemoth. Or more importantly, the battlefield. Where high resolution texture ARE appropriate is environmental textures.

And if you for some reason beleive the PS3 is to blame for the games current visual state, you should know that the PS3 version uses simpler, less vibrant and lower resolution textures than the PC version. Here's a nice comparison.

What is perhaps most peculiar about these "high resolution" textures, is that the one pacewhere the game uses low resolution textures when much larger ones presently exist, are the icons used for actions and inventory items. They're 40 by 40 pixels in the game. Yet, 64x64 and 128x128 icons exist on the loadstone.

This is what the game uses... http://img.finalfantasyxiv.com/lds/p...5d057c177c.png And this is what exists on the loadstone... http://img.finalfantasyxiv.com/lds/p...44a830d06e.png

If that doesn't bother you, then don't expect me to think your serious about wanting higher resolution textures for the ACTUAL bow.

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Originally Posted by Khronikos

And fix those UGLY ass shadow LODs man SERIOUSLY DX11 save us!!!!!!!!!!!

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Have you tried setting "Shadow Softening" to "Weak"?

Well I can finally say after working on ps3 and 4 projects that ps4 really does have tons of memory for absolutely ridiculous things compared to previous gen. I hope the ps4 has better looking surfaces especially on characters and ground.

Why there was no DX 11 or Hi res pack out of the box for PC? or why they downgraded the graphic at the first place? there was a low setting in the graphic option in 1.0 version and I believe most PC can play FFXIV just fine with a low-mid setting.

It's because the PC version would look a lot better than the console version, it can even make the PS4 graphic looks boring, and the brand new PS4 would not be amazing at all. If PS4 was not amazing, Sony would not be very happy so SE would have to do them a favor.

It's time to do business straight, Both Sony and SE. If PS4 don't have the power to run a 3 year old game, just let it be.

Japanese people I know they have pride and they are so creative, just saying.

ps. I'm an ESL student and my English can be horrible and hard to understand.

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Originally Posted by EvelynE

Why there was no DX 11 or Hi res pack out of the box for PC?[...]

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They had to dial back on the fidelity to make it compatible with the PS3 and lower end PCs without making it look like mud. 1.0 was gorgeous on the details, but even at its lowest it chugged. Unfortunately we just have to sit back and wait for the improvements, which probably wont have a high res texture fix, but more shader and specular map upgrades.

this game will be forever doomed to be limited to ps3 technology. Though, I think lighting is the problem in ff, and lack of bloom, not textures....

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Originally Posted by EvelynE

or why they downgraded the graphic at the first place?.

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Because the original game was absolutely ridiculous. A flower pot has as much detail and shader code as a player character. Due to this very few characters could display at once and the game required such high end hardware that it melted machines. It was brought back down to a far more realistic level, and this was for the best. Also, the original game engine was not designed for MMOs and should never have been used on one.

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Originally Posted by Sessurea

this game will be forever doomed to be limited to ps3 technology. Though, I think lighting is the problem in ff, and lack of bloom, not textures....

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Well, we are getting a DX11 client at some point, so that should make it look better. FFXIV, IMO, is still the best looking MMO on the market right now.

I'd also say we aren't being limited to PS3 technology. If that were the case we wouldn't have Direct X at all.

Resurrection. Because seriously, the textures in this game are terrible.

I'm zoomed out too far playing the game to notice/care. I'm more entertained when I'm gaming the game looks fine and I run at 60fps

I highly agree, textures in this game are way too low for todays standards