Each and every developer has a different way of approaching hair and it's problems, FFXIV ARR went for a low-performance, easy to design/implement and adjust method, albeit at the risk of clipping.
Almost ALL of the hairstyles that came out in 2.0 were short (for a good reason), it was only after large players requests that they dabbled a bit further.
Hair Clipping has
some possible solutions. But from a developers point of view, it's very very difficult to avoid clipping, especially when you're encountering numerous gear types/shapes and possibilities. Long hair in a game like this using skinned weights as opposed to independent physical hair simulations, clipping
IS going to occur, unless countermeasures are taken such as;
The easiest one being
mesh deformation, where the hair simply takes into account the surrounding topology and whether it's more appropriate for the hair to sit over or "tucked into" the piece of gear. There's currently a system already in place (pending they carried it over from 1.0) that was developed to accomodate different gear types.
Simply put, if you have a pair of long trousers, and the character wore a pair of boots, the topology of the trousers would "tuck" neatly into the boots automatically, saving a metric ton of time and effort on the developers part, leaving room for creative freedom to experiment with all sorts of gear shapes and sizes.
The reason I'm explaining this is because the same thing
could be used on hair, but that being said it would have it's own share of issues.
As all of the hair is rigged to the Head>Neck>Torso/Shoulders (just like a piece of clothing is), this isn't a particularly easy task without causing the topology to bend, stretch and distort.
If the hair was an independent physical simulation then the problem would be solved, but having 20-100 characters+ on screen at once with independent physical hair would be a nightmare to optimise.
(With the PS3 currently it's just not worth the implementation time/effort).
"What do you mean rigged hair?"
Basicly, 3D animation relies on the animator to 'assign' what areas of the model are assigned to what 'bone' so, obviously you want the 3D faces for the head to be different from the 3D faces for the neck when you're animating.
Essentially you 'paint' what areas you want to be manipulated by each bone (fading the colours into one another for a smooth realistic body-type frame).
As shown below, the "painted" areas are where the skeleton will know to manipulate the 3D model.
https://fromgray.files.wordpress.com...5/skinning.jpg
Hair (for the most part in games) follows this rule also, where certain segments of the hair will be weighted to the head, neck, back or any other joints that are assigned for the animation skeleton.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IjYB6Zmo3W...HairRigSim.jpg
"Why does that matter again?"
Basicly, the hair is stuck in one position, it may animate/move a little bit giving the impression that it's "free flowing" but it's still rigged to the body, an independnt physical simulation would not have this issue.
But as you can see that would have it's own problems;
http://media.tumblr.com/1ae103569794...6lv1qalhg6.gif
As for the Glamour Restrictions, that's just obvious.
As liberal as FFXIV has become in terms of gear and the overall world/design composition, it's nice to have
some integrity that tanks will look like tanks for the most part and casters like casters.
It's a silly restriction by this point, but from the developers point of view I can see why they'd want to keep it restricted this way.
