Question for Devs: why v1.0 looked so nice...

Was hoping a dev could jump in o0pn this one. was looking back at some 1.0 screenshots and was still blown away at how good it looked. v2.0 does look amazing, but max 1.0 vs max 2.0, 1.0 was still a lot nicer in things like lighting and model textures.

I was wondering what the difference was in modeling technology was between the two??
Was the modeling in 1.0 done using a different method? if so, what? Or was it just some sort of higher detailed version of what is currently implemented?

If that's the case, could someday a sort of Extreme mode graphics preset be added to make it look more like 1.0? I know 1.0 was very hard to run, but for those of us with high end PC's, it would be cool to crank it up even more, especially if 1.0 type graphics could be achieved.

Thoughts?

2.0's lighting is miles better than 1.0's... mostly because it actually has lighting effects.

As far as stuff they have said on the matter, 1.0 used the same engine as FF13 which makes some pretty textures but is horribly unsuited for MMO games where a ton of characters need to be displayed onscreen. I believe 1.0 could only display 30-40 characters onscreen, both Player and NPC included in that number.

And just FYI there is a Direct X 11 client in the works that is going to be intended for high end PC's.

Since we are in a sharing of personal opinions. I think 2.0 looks miles better than 1.0.

/wander off

1.0 was an amazingly beautiful game but because of the horrible optimization you'd need one of NASA's super computers to see it in it's true glory.

Because graphic got a higher priority than gameplay.

As example limited display of 30-40 objects (players, NPCs, enemies)
And big lag if there were more objects than it can be displayed. As example during the Atomos event, a teleport to a camp where Atomos showed up needed 5 minutes to success. You pressed on Teleport, chosed the destiny and then you waited and waited until your character teleported already. And that was during 1.23

Yep, all they had to do was redo 1.23 on a new engine - majority of XIV's problems was engine choice. Crystal Tools is an amazing engine, just not for MMORPGs.

More attention to detail in characters, better use of shaders and bump/normal maps, higher quality textures, better gear reshaping system to reduce clipping, use of filters to accentuate scenes, more intense shadows and better use of contrast. Also just because some people will be itching to reply "well yeah but it got a 4.0 and had copy pasted everything and you needed a super $200000 computer because I don't know how computers work or I'm stuck playing on a 2005 laptop", you can have both good graphics and also improve and optimize everything else, yes you can have your cake and eat it if there's enough effort put into something instead of rushing it again to meet deadlines, but I guess some people don't know what a middle ground and will always go for extremes.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_oSmneHSBf4...dead_horse.jpg

Also the cutscenes were so much better.

http://youtu.be/CqV84_rKfxU?t=5m17s

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Originally Posted by Magis

Also the cutscenes were so much better.

http://youtu.be/CqV84_rKfxU?t=5m17s

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Yeah, just don't get anything from the 1.0 cutscenes.

Warning: Spoiler for 2.0 players so beware of clicking this.
http://youtu.be/5_jckKzlQj8?t=3m53s

I think 2.0 is better... since it's actually playable. I tried 1.0 and it ran like sludge. Could be in the world with little problems but would get 1fps in towns

Yeah, 1.0 looks so good because it was built to be pretty first, everything else a not very close second. As such, only specifically built computers could handle it. Furthermore, it was designed to run almost entirely off the servers, making the game lag at everything. Even in some things that really should have been locally handled like the UI. Yes, the UI. We have a nice blend of compromises in 2.0, I wouldn't want to go back to the mess that was 1.0 for anything.

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Originally Posted by Linadae

1.0 was an amazingly beautiful game but because of the horrible optimization you'd need one of NASA's super computers to see it in it's true glory.

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Oh please that is not true.
Maybe that day, it needed a high end pc, but the game looked gorgeous.
ARR maximized doesn't even look close.
I have v1.2 installed and it looks great, far better than ARR and also you could even get lost in v1.0

I clicked into this thread expected the OP to be about mithra arse sliders lol

I'll always miss the detail on characters and weighted animations.

But some people gotta have their FPS's and somehow blame "Lag" on things, claim that a "Super computer" is required. Ran the game on Max rather comfortably with a rather old PC (going on 5-6 years old now?)

Oh well what can you do? FFXIV still looks great, all it really needs is better textures some of them are laughably bad if you don't "Zoom out please" the entire game. I'd love for weighted animations to make a comeback, but that ships sailed SE isn't willing to invest in allowing us to interupt animations so they just cut them out entirely.

The main thing I hated about 1.0's engine was lightning, it was completely broken, plus there was no shadows at all besides the NPC/Character's ones, trees and terrain itself didn't cast any shadows, which was kind of ugly and glare was ridiculously exagerated, I still remember the first time Cid showed up, he looked like he was incandescent because he had a lamp above him.

And there's also the fact that the engine itself could only display a low number of characters on the screen at once, you could never see something like Revenant's Toll, popular FATEs or a pack of people near a Market Board in 1.0's engine.

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Originally Posted by Icarian

The main thing I hated about 1.0's engine was lightning, it was completely broken, plus there was no shadows at all besides the NPC/Character's ones, trees and terrain itself didn't cast any shadows, which was kind of ugly and glare was ridiculously exagerated, I still remember the first time Cid showed up, he looked like he was incandescent because he had a lamp above him.

And there's also the fact that the engine itself could only display a low number of characters on the screen at once, you could never see something like Revenant's Toll, popular FATEs or a pack of people near a Market Board in 1.0's engine.

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Well people on ps3 can't see anything like you mentioned before lol, because they are playing with old tech.
Maybe you were to? because i never had the problem you mentioned before.

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Originally Posted by darthkyron

Well people on ps3 can't see anything like you mentioned before lol, because they are playing with old tech.
Maybe you were to? because i never had the problem you mentioned before.

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It was the engine itself, it had nothing to do with the hardware you had, you could have had the best computer around and that wouldn't have made any difference.

Same reason why you can't see everyone gathering around in an AH back in XI even if you had a top PC from 10 years after the game released. The 1.0 engine was only capable of drawing a certain number of models at once, and that number was pretty low.

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Originally Posted by Icarian

It was the engine itself, it had nothing to do with the hardware you had, you could have had the best computer around and that wouldn't have made any difference.

Same reason why you can't see everyone gathering around in an AH back in XI even if you had a top PC from 10 years after the game released. The 1.0 engine was only capable of drawing a certain number of models at once, and that number was pretty low.

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I understand your point, but i wasn't as low as you are implying.
BTW i'm not arguing im debating ok? :)

Not to mention comparing screenshots from 1.0 with ARR, environment textures had a ridiculously low colour pallete - the 1.0 Black Shroud for instance everything was five shades of green with maybe a bit of dark grey for good measure. It made patches of flowers stand out more because that was a splash of colour amongst a dull and bland background. ARR at least has variation in it's environments. And the poor lighting made it worse. It was obvious that was the trade off for having wide open seamless worlds and highly detailed character models. ARR clearly has slightly less detailed character models, but better looking environments.

Like everything in life, you have to make compromises and sacrifices, and personally I think Yoshi-P made the right choice with the design of ARR. But of course, too many people want their cake and to eat it too.

My understanding is that the original engine was simply too resource intensive - even the best PCs struggled to run it optimally.

This meant that the game was somewhat future-proofed and looked absolutely incredible on a high-end PC, but it also meant the opposite was true - that most players would have a hard time running the game at all, especially PS3 users (the PS3 simply did not have the RAM to handle to the original engine which is why it got stalled for so very long).

I was NOT saying that 1.0 was a better game than 2.0. 2.0 is FAR superior in 98% of things.

I was asking a technical question. What the actual difference was in model design between the two.

Of course 1.0 was very resource intense. But not as much as people make it out to be. I built a custom machine for the 1.0 launch with hardware that by now is quite old (AMD PhenomII x6 and AMD 6870) and it ran at about 40fps on max. More than playable.

But that resource hunger was because as a few have stated, and i agree, that the graphics were prioritized over play-ability. But with todays hardware on high-end systems the original graphics quality could probably be ran just fine. My 8-core 4.7GHz, AMD7970 machine doesn't even max out usage at 60fps.

I was merely curious if it was simply a higher degree of detail that the current engine could scale up to, or if it was accomplished by some other means.

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Originally Posted by darthkyron

I understand your point, but i wasn't as low as you are implying.
BTW i'm not arguing im debating ok? :)

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IIRC, it was about 40 models at once, including NPCs, while not -extremely- low (the PS3 doesn't show that many with ARR from what I hear, I haven't played it), it was still low by MMO standards, it was quite noticeable going into a city or popular camp compared to ARR, both with high end PCs.

After all, the engine wasn't made to be used for an MMO, Crystal Tools was made for their single player games (FFXIII and its secuels), that's why they changed the engine, it wasn't some awesome futuristic future-proof engine, it would have ran like shite no matter what hardware you used because it wasn't made for what it was used in 1.0.

You could have some quantum computer 20 years from now on, the game would still struggle to run it.

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Originally Posted by Bigtotoro

I was merely curious if it was simply a higher degree of detail that the current engine could scale up to, or if it was accomplished by some other means.

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It was a mixture of things, take a a look at this for example, the scene is very bright. A trick used in 1.23 all the time, the brighter the object the more detail you can trick into it, especially for a lower poly object (See Kingdom Hearts as a great example) The normal maps used to create this scene are what make the detail you see:

http://static3.wikia.nocookie.net/__...rthas-view.jpg


What is a normal map?

A normal map is essentially an RGB texture that the engine reads and creates detail based on the light sources in the scene to give the illusion of detail.
The object is still a low poly object but with the texture it has the illusion that its of a much higher detail:

http://th02.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/...44-d4s33f7.jpg

We have to start in saying that a little bit of understanding and maturity goes a very long way, we can't always have what we want and sometimes we need to make compromises.

Not everyone has a beastly PC, very few infact. The average market of people playing this MMO still don't have a top of the line PC that would have run 1.23 and that's why you're seeing the overall design decisions you're greeted with daily now.

Marketing
1.23 failed, it was a financial scare for the entire company and sent ripples through the entire company.

They didn't want to make the same mistake twice, when it came to planning 2.0 choosing the common denominator after deciding to rebuild the game was the safest option, instead of going for a smaller market of people with better PCs in the hope that the PC market would tide people into 1.23 eventually over time due to its beastly rendering costs (overall). Which they soon learnt people wern't going to stick around for (even when they could run the game).

They had to consider "What is our target market, what does the average PC user, Final Fantasy Fan and MMO player have in common for hardware?" to which the answers came back with an average specification for systems along side the Playstation 3. So a target was set and the development of models, textures, rendering, area size, UI size/information, and memory limitations were all set in stone before development even began.

Necessity vs Luxury


The problem with MMOs

There are a lot of unique characters on screen at once, this poses as a problem in that rendering many of these at once drastically increases the rendering cost, so keeping this down helps improve on performance and also allows more room for a 'default number of characters on screen' which currently is quite high compared to 1.23

Ontop of all this, you still have the entire environment to render on top of NPCs through the world, and even more-so during battle you have a firework display of effects, animations, sounds, particles and effects left right and centre to render.

It's very difficult to balance this, so keeping things revolved around the average markets hardware can work best at times for this.

Lighting & Shadows
The particular method used for casting shadows based on light sources in 1.23 was very scalable and could produce a fantastic quality shadow as a result, but at a very high rendering cost and made it a resource hog and overall produced a kinda crappy look and feel to lighting for the most part.

2.0 uses Deffered Rendering which allows them to use a quick and fast and very scalable quality for shadow/lighting sources, you'll notice a green glowing bush will have its own light source which will defeat the other light sources it comes into contact with, as well as producing its own shadows should'st you walk near it.

This particular type of rendering can be adjusted to produce a low quality or high quality output making it the perfect option for future scaling.


(The Ambient Occlusion method used too was nice, yet intensive)


Textures:

Textures take up quite a lot of data, essentially you have a sub-set of textures, shader data and materials for various things such as the base texture, normal maps, specular maps, parallax maps, specular maps, environment reflections and more to consider.

The higher the resolution the more data is required. Keeping the client small for the PC and PS3 release was an initial idea on how to keep download and weight of the entire client small initially with the potential to expand it later. (Updating textures in the future is no easy task but a doable one)

1.23 had beautiful textures in that very few of them were ever heavily compressed. Gear, hair, skin all had high resolution diffuse, normal and a wide-set of shaders to make the gear look very appealing at a high rendering cost.



Animations:

Sadly 1.23's animations although vastly suprerior and very beautifully hand-crafted had the issue of inertia where your character had weight and progression into and from each animation, to do this they added in an animation lock to abilities which if you recall locked you in place till the animation was done which in an MMO which usually revolved around dodging/avoiding mechanics was a nightmare and wouldn't have worked in 2.0

1.23 also had the issue of un-unique animations for things such as casting spells which is something the 2.0 team wanted to change, this was in some ways an improvement in others not so.


Cutscenes:

These take a long time to make, to make them very elbaorate like in 1.23 where a lot of work and unique coding took place took more time than it was worth in 1.23 which led to its own problems and costs. 2.0 made a smaller time frame and budget for creating cut scene and therefore the quality was reduced, this was unavoidable for the most part.




Was it all worth it though, so sacrifice some of the great assets from 1.23?

Yes, it saved the game, saved the company and has breathed new life into the game at the expense of a few luxuries. Some of these can be corrected, some cannot but we often take it for granted that "FFXIV isn't the same as before" when in reality it's a very detailed and beautiful MMO.



EDIT/ADDITION:

To the "Uber Quality" comment;


Oversampling
In 1.0 you could oversample the game to draw the entire scene at double the resolution for minor increase in overall drawing quality at a huge processing expense, the problem with this setting was that it was never explained, so people mistakenly put everything on high including 'Drawing Quality' which led to a HUGE FPS drop, (Example: Standard would have left it at your monitors resolution, the next two settings drawing the scene at 1x or 2x the base monitor resolution)

As for textures, it's just a matter of doing it. Yoshida mentioned at one point that him and his development team felt the resolution of textures didn't matter on a high-definition screen. (This is ridiculous in my opinion, a low resolution texture will look awful no matter what screen you're viewing it on). Although textures can have a large impact on space having an optional package for this would drasctically increase the look of the game.

Anti-Aliasing
FFXIV on release (1.0) had multiple options for Hardware Based Anti-Aliasing (AA) types to defeat aliasing on the 3D models and textures in the scene, luckily the way lighting and shadows was rendering in that particular engine allowed for hardware based AA in DirectX 9.

The problem with FFXIV:ARR (2.0) is that hardware based AA can't be used with Deffered Rendering (the method used for real-time dynamic lighting/shadows) due to a bug in the DirectX9 API. This however was fixed in DX10, 10.1 and 11 and is no longer an issue, sadly ARR currently only uses DX9 meaning ARR could only use FXAA (Fast approximate anti-aliasing).

Why does this matter?

There's so many types of anti-aliasing, some require more processing time than others, some less-so but to a lesser degree of quality.

With many hardware options such as ;

Multi-Sampled Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) This method doesn't work in Deffered rendering, but it's still commonly used (although less-so now) pretty much every GPU is packaged with this capability nowadays.

Super-Sampled Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) Very common and works wonders for textures, alphas and sharp edges in general, however requires a high degree of scene re-rendering to achieve the effect.

Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing (CSAA) Essentially a more powerful MSAA, running the 'hack' at a higher rate to produce a better result at a high performance cost.

Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) This was a GPU based solution from AMD using DirectCompute to try and 'speed-up' the AA process, seeing as it was such a resource hog. MLAA runs passes over the entire scene, leaving a very considerably increase in image quality (see below). As mentioned in its post on AMD's information page, it could inject itself into almost any DX9 (and newer) title which made it a nice option for people to turn on externally.

No MLAA
http://sites.amd.com/PublishingImage...avp_nomlaa.png


With MLAA
http://sites.amd.com/PublishingImage...A/avp_mlaa.png


Almost all hardware based AA detects the polygonal edge, alphas and shaders in the scene and smooths ONLY the jagged edges and ignores the rest. This is the best option as it doesn't blur the entire image and produce any undesired results on textures, UIs and other objects in the scene that don't require AA. (See the trees in 1.0's Coerthas for a great example of hardware AA working on the alpha textures for the leafs whilst retaining detail on the original texture)

Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA) This is simply an overpass of your entire screen, and it is extremley efficient and costs virtually nothing in processing time. Compared to hardware based AA solutions it doesn't detect geometrical or alpha edge data, it simply runs the anti-alias pass to every pixel being displayed. The problem ARR has with this, is the user-interface, luckily the set FXAA overpass provided in ARR doesn't affect the UI, but sadly external programmes you can set up will affect the UI.

FXAA is generally doesn't achieve as nice an effect as hardware based AA, but sadly only the DX11 client would be able to support this, hopefully Square Enix will add this in the update.

I just want to say bravo for that informative and unbiased post Shioban. You've summed up exactly the sacrifices that SE had to make in the development of ARR which sadly too many 1.0 fans just blame "PS3 limitations/casual players/insert random baseless reason here' for. Well done. :D

The real reason the source engine had to be scrapped and you will not believe what I am telling you.
It was slow on purpose to combat RMT. SE in those days were coming from ffxi rmt hell and wanted to do something about it. Anyone remember moving items from inventory to retainer? Took a minute or longer just to move one item. They had that game built from the ground up to be slower and less responsive. The combat wasn't that bad it was quite good and fast paced. I ran the game with max settings at a very good frame rate. Even with one character on the screen some parts would slow down so it wasn't all because of the max of 30 or 40 on one screen. Think about RMT and you think real hard about how bad things have been. You will get what I am saying eventually. Security can really slow stuff down. Antivirus on and email server anyone? lol you see my point.

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Originally Posted by Shioban

Awesome explanation

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Originally Posted by WHS

The real reason the source engine had to be scrapped and you will not believe what I am telling you.
It was slow on purpose to combat RMT.

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That was the most ridiculous explanation I've ever seen for anything ever.

Absolutely everything you said made no sense.

If that was meant to be a 'loltroll' post it wasn't even funny. If it wasn't, then that's just plain stupid.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

I just want to say bravo for that informative and unbiased post Shioban.

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Agree completely!! Thats exactly what i was trying to discuss! Thank you for the info. I think for me, of all those points, the textures are the biggest things i miss. But yeah it was the whole package together. Forgot about the animation lock, which was annoying. I never realized it was due to weighted physics.
Wonder if the DX11 client will get closer to that ideal mixure of uberquality and practicality? (or a Mantle API client...though i'm not holding my breath)

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Originally Posted by Bigtotoro

Forgot about the animation lock, which was annoying. I never realized it was due to weighted physics.

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I don't think they'll bother with mantle simply because it's not 'main-stream' yet so to speak, the average user base isn't (and assumingly) won't be using it, so until then they won't touch it.

Yup! If you look at videos for 1.23 the animations were amazing, very realistic as was the gear which is exactly what the 1.23 team wanted, but they fell short in other parts of the development and things fell short of what they originally wanted to achieve, then the "rush to relase" happened and it was pushed out before they could even attempt to fix it.

Originally the development team thought they could release it 'as-is' and fix it as they went which caused a mass exodus of players and fans to completely avoid it.

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Originally Posted by Bigtotoro

Wonder if the DX11 client will get closer to that ideal mixure of uberquality and practicality?

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Well in the case of 'uber quality' this is something you can do easily, i've added it to the end of my post actually.

We'll probably not get the weighted physics and nice animations back to the same extent as 1.2X though. 1.XX was an extremely pretty game, which had graphics that could probably stand for up to a decade after release. It was unfortunate that it was a rushed game, as everything else that affect the play-ability and not the graphics, was not optimized, designed, re-thought or otherwise refined enough to make a good game at release. The graphics were also a bit too much for the main share of user computers at release, and definitely too much for the console of choice, so the game couldn't even boast a large userbase of awed-by-pretty people.

I think I sort of understand why that happened; Final Fantasy as a franchise has always been on the frontier of visuals in gaming, and when you present teasers and such to future customers and investors while the game is in development, it is an advantage to have something they can see and understand, so graphics got a lot of the early development and the engine seemed to be more coded for them than for it being an MMO at times. Then there was a rush to finish and release, and the rest just wasn't given the proper time to be refined and finished.

It's a bit unfortunate, IMO, that ARR went in the opposite direction rather than finding a middle-ground in this case, with toggle-able stuff ("Real Physics on/off" "Low/Medium/High Resolution Textures" "Detailed Animations off/player/party/all" "Depth of Field on/off" "Advanced Lighting Effects on/off"), perhaps with a hover-tip that says "Try to lower or turn off this setting if your FPS is below [30/60]FPS, as displayed in the upper-right corner of this window" and everything is always on medium upon installation. At least with Dx11 we'll be able to force a few things through our graphics cards, hopefully. *crosses fingers and toes*

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Originally Posted by Bigtotoro

I was NOT saying that 1.0 was a better game than 2.0. 2.0 is FAR superior in 98% of things.

I was asking a technical question. What the actual difference was in model design between the two.

Of course 1.0 was very resource intense. But not as much as people make it out to be. I built a custom machine for the 1.0 launch with hardware that by now is quite old (AMD PhenomII x6 and AMD 6870) and it ran at about 40fps on max. More than playable.

But that resource hunger was because as a few have stated, and i agree, that the graphics were prioritized over play-ability. But with todays hardware on high-end systems the original graphics quality could probably be ran just fine. My 8-core 4.7GHz, AMD7970 machine doesn't even max out usage at 60fps.

I was merely curious if it was simply a higher degree of detail that the current engine could scale up to, or if it was accomplished by some other means.

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Sure by that logic if everyone kept buying high end parts but there was also a good chunk of people who also played 11 on much older hardware only to be greeted with "please buy a new pc"
Why do you think a game like WoW has been successfulfor all these years? They scale their game so that people with pretty old hardware can play so they don't NEED to upgrade to the latest and greatest

WoW needs to die in a fire. Like 5 years ago. I spent 3 months playing it after Cataclysm came out and moved on. It's not that great, but I won't say it's completely horrible. The comedy in that game is good. Harrison Jones was pretty awesome.

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Originally Posted by Fiever

scale their game so that people with pretty old hardware can play so they don't NEED to upgrade to the latest and greatest

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1.0 wanted the look and feel of a Final Fantasy game that;

"Oh my god this looks absolutley amazing" reaction. Which in some ways they got, but couldn't sustain itself as there were very very large gaps in the game which I don't even need to mention.

Their intention on what they wanted was good on paper, in reality it didn't work.
The lack of development timing/planning and collaboration between teams, a failure to understand their market or any clear target market for that matter and a rushed release all lead to failure.


Had they been more careful and had more time, a game very similar to 1.23 could've been extremely successfully even with its lofty system requirements.


World of Warcraft had no such name to live up to in terms of stunning visuals, unique elements with every game whilst retaining familiarity (bar the previous few RTS games).
The pressure was on and it proved too much for such an inexperienced team to develop a AAA - MMORPG.