Gear design limitation?

I was looking at the tank gear design contest winners
Link to Contest Result

http://img.finalfantasyxiv.com/t/4f1...5f04e636_2.png

the comment for this runners-up design was...

"Design-wise this was extremely cool, but if we were to actually create this, it would be quite difficult to capture the proper design since the number of polygons would be high and cause certain aspects to fall short of the original idea."

what do they mean by "number of polygons would be high"?
what limitation does the current system has?

p.s. i'm hoping to see more gears with glowing parts like ironwork... still my favorite tank gear today.

The closest they have gotten to something like this are some of the pvp armors and what usually happens is that they just add a floating flat layer above the rest of the armor which some clever shading.

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Originally Posted by GrizzlyTank

The closest they have gotten to something like this are some of the pvp armors and what usually happens is that they just add a floating flat layer above the rest of the armor which some clever shading.

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the PVP gears are why i don't understand they can not make the said armor.
SE has trouble creating "non-flat" or 3D surface?

By "number of polygons would be high" they mean the model. Each model is made of many, many 2D "faces" that are called polygons. The more polygons something has, the more processing power it takes a computer to load that specific item. In all games, items have quotas of polygons they can't go over, lest it start lagging people around said item due to much processing going on.

What SE is saying here is that, to make the armor as close to the design as they would like, it would be far too many of the faces or polygons, which would in turn degrade the gaming experience for players around the person wearing the armor.

This isn't a limitation of the game, really, so much as it is a limitation of the "standard" PC that plays this game.

As an addendum to what Indiction said

A lot of the more complex 3D models you see in games use various tricks to give the illusion of depth where there is none, and in this way they can make relatively simple shapes looks more complex than they really are. This is especially true when a surface produces no sillhouette - ie the player will never see the detail at such an angle where they can *see* the object is flat, but textured to look 3 dimensional

However that design has a lot of detail that can't be 'faked' - the deep ridges, the curved blades, the clips that support the blades, all of these would have to be actual 3 dimensional objects, because they all provide silhouette when viewed from different angles. While such models might technically not be that taxing for modern gaming rigs, if you put 40 players in one place all wearing the same armour, the GPu is going to start taking notice.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Furiea

I was looking at the tank gear design contest winners
Link to Contest Result

http://img.finalfantasyxiv.com/t/4f1...5f04e636_2.png

the comment for this runners-up design was...

"Design-wise this was extremely cool, but if we were to actually create this, it would be quite difficult to capture the proper design since the number of polygons would be high and cause certain aspects to fall short of the original idea."

what do they mean by "number of polygons would be high"?
what limitation does the current system has?

p.s. i'm hoping to see more gears with glowing parts like ironwork... still my favorite tank gear today.

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Basically they said that they couldn't do it justice with the usual "flat" designs in FFXIV.

Sucks cause it was one of the better armors submitted in. Seriously we need more edgy armor sets. For all jobs and roles.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Furiea

Link to Contest Result

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I was more partial to the Void Forged one submitted by Zero Signal(would link, but on work computer and about to head home)

I prefer the barbarian set by OnionHolic in there. We don't have many options along those lines, although the new WAR AF and the gear worn by Fordola the Skulls seems to indicate SE's become a bit more open to the idea of a tank set that isn't a fancy steel brick for things to bang against.

I think what rubs me wrong about the winner is it looks like the same armor from one of the 60 dungeons only that it is white instead of black/dark blue. The name escapes me and I couldn't find it, the Tactic Ogre Terror Knight armor.