Hair texture quality, among other texture qualities.

This has been bugging me since 2.0 released. Would it be hard for the developmental team to increase the quality in the looks of how the hair texture is? Mind you, hair looks like it has horizontal and vertical lines going through the strands. It really does not look good to me, though others would beg to differ. Is there any chance now that since we have DirectX 11, that there could be an option to remove those pesky horizontal/vertical lines from the strands of hair so that it looks very neat?

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c2...psmfzugsul.jpg

Another thing is that a lot of armor still has some form of pixilation in finer detail. Is there any way that it could be fixed so it looks cleaner on DirectX 11? It may have the developmental team to look back at older gear, but it's just a few things on certain gear that really shows pixilation.

I think the problem is that the game is on the ps3/4 platform and those systems can't take it. Blame those players . jk...but slry is cuz of the ps3/4.

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Originally Posted by dekal

I think the problem is that the game is on the ps3/4 platform and those systems can't take it. Blame those players . jk...but slry is cuz of the ps3/4.

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Yup. If the PS3 is ever left behind I imagine there'll be a decent increase in visual quality, but until then we're kind of stuck.

The dream is that, eventually, max settings will be back to 1.0 quality.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

Yup. If the PS3 is ever left behind I imagine there'll be a decent increase in visual quality, but until then we're kind of stuck.

The dream is that, eventually, max settings will be back to 1.0 quality.

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People like to drum up the 1.0 quality, but it was honestly in a lot of really unnecessary and unnoticeable places. There was the particularly notable instance of potted plants having more polygons than player characters.

That specific hairstyle also looks really weird when it moves in the wind etc, and if you tilt the camera a certain way, it looks awful. But yeah, this really is down to the fact the PS3 can't handle it.

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Originally Posted by dekal

I think the problem is that the game is on the ps3/4 platform and those systems can't take it. Blame those players . jk...but slry is cuz of the ps3/4.

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PS3, yes. PS4 can handle a lot graphically. Not as much as PC's of course, but they definitely can handle more than people assume.

Some hair textures are better... The lalafell-only hairstyles have good textures I think. Why that diffrence?

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Originally Posted by Fevelle

Some hair textures are better... The lalafell-only hairstyles have good textures I think. Why that diffrence?

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Because only a lalafell's hair is high up enough from the ground to be in your field of vision.

to me, ridding of these 'unnecessary' stuff made the game feels like wow-level graphics, taking the plants you mentioned about for example, they're now just 'cards' stacked together
FF's always about graphic fidelity, and 2.0 got a downgrade on that.
the only graphic 'flaw' I could remember in 1.0 was the 2 tiered texture for distant terrain.. it switched instantly to lower rez texture at like I dunno 1000 yard or so distance
if they made that switch a blend-in transition it'd be flawless

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Originally Posted by Lanceton

to me, ridding of these 'unnecessary' stuff made the game feels like wow-level graphics, taking the plants you mentioned about for example, they're now just 'cards' stacked together
FF's always about graphic fidelity, and 2.0 got a downgrade on that.
the only graphic 'flaw' I could remember in 1.0 was the 2 tiered texture for distant terrain.. it switched instantly to lower rez texture at like I dunno 1000 yard or so distance
if they made that switch a blend-in transition it'd be flawless

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It's "unnecessary" because those resources that were spent fine-detailing those plants could have been better spent elsewhere. Most notably it was needed in map details because 1.0 maps were about 12 set pieces per country that were simply copy pasted ad nauseum. Rather than fancy plants, I'd rather see more clothes/armor/hair.

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Originally Posted by basketofseals

People like to drum up the 1.0 quality, but it was honestly in a lot of really unnecessary and unnoticeable places. There was the particularly notable instance of potted plants having more polygons than player characters.

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Is that level of detail not something to strive for? Especially in our own characters?
And it's not like they'd have to remove the lower quality assets. That should still be available for lower end computers.

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Originally Posted by Fevelle

Some hair textures are better... The lalafell-only hairstyles have good textures I think. Why that diffrence?

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They have to have specific memory and complexity(polygons) budget for everything in the game so they can ensure that the system can handle all situations with given limitations(visible player count etc.). So all hairstyles must meet this budget for memory and complexity, making larger volume hair have more stretched textures and thus appearing lower resolution. On that note lalafells' hairstyles are rather simple thus look better.

I really wonder why they can't give us option to use higher resolution textures as it should have nothing to do with the console versions.

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Originally Posted by Gramul

Is that level of detail not something to strive for? Especially in our own characters?
And it's not like they'd have to remove the lower quality assets. That should still be available for lower end computers.

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As much as I like fidelity, I have a system that allows me to crank up the settings to 11 here, most people do not have strong machines, it is fine to have settings for them so their systems can handle it, this is where the problem lies, many people that play FF14 are obsessed with graphics and will crank up the settings beyond acceptable performance and they will take these settings into group content and will be 'lagging' all over the place, I for one find this unacceptable as people who play FF14 don't seem to play within reason.

They can give us a higher resolution texture pack for the pc this won't affect the consoles at all. We need to be heard about that. I know a lot of pc players want better texture quality. The plants are also horrible looking. I hate plants that look like a small pile of cards. I think they don't do it because they have not the budget for it. They are focused on creating frequent content and patches rather than impr Going the visuals. Yoshi said that they will keep improving the game's visual quality but we don't know exactly what he meant. If we keep asking for this I'm pretty sure that they will do something about it.

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Originally Posted by raelgun

As much as I like fidelity, I have a system that allows me to crank up the settings to 11 here, most people do not have strong machines, it is fine to have settings for them so their systems can handle it, this is where the problem lies, many people that play FF14 are obsessed with graphics and will crank up the settings beyond acceptable performance and they will take these settings into group content and will be 'lagging' all over the place, I for one find this unacceptable as people who play FF14 don't seem to play within reason.

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People can do that now.
It's called the PS3.

Restricting better textures because some people might ruin their frame rate with it and bring their poor performance into groups seems like a really watery counterargument to me. If they're foolish enough to play in conditions where it hurts their ability to play, they probably aren't very good players anyway.

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Originally Posted by WinterLuna

That specific hairstyle also looks really weird when it moves in the wind etc, and if you tilt the camera a certain way, it looks awful. But yeah, this really is down to the fact the PS3 can't handle it.



PS3, yes. PS4 can handle a lot graphically. Not as much as PC's of course, but they definitely can handle more than people assume.

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What people readily forget is that the texture sizes are already reduced on the consoles, and when you play it at a lower resolution the mipmapping itself uses lower resolutions. Hence, SE will ship higher resolution textures on the PC version, and the GPU will scale it down to what it can use, where as the PS4 and PS3 will actually ship with the lower resolution textures to begin with to conserve video memory as part of the optimization process.

This is how you end up with the same game performing the same across multiple platforms. The performance of the game dictated by the lowest-capable device, but the visual quality is dictated by the highest capable device. Hence all the chopped up maps, that's why the PS3 version of V1.0 never materialized. A high end PC in 2010 and a High end PC in 2015, V1.0 still performs worse (go test the bechmark if you don't believe me.)

FFXIII uses Crystal Tools as well, and they locked it to 720p on the PC at release. The performance issues for it mirror that of FFXIV V1.0, No surprise.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

Yup. If the PS3 is ever left behind I imagine there'll be a decent increase in visual quality, but until then we're kind of stuck.

The dream is that, eventually, max settings will be back to 1.0 quality.

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From what I've heard (forum rumor, I don't have a source, sorry)-- SE does have HD textures. But yes, we're not getting them to keep the platforms relatively equal.

Pity really. The pixellation is also painful on my WHM AF...

they want to make revelant to get the console version, if the pc version was able to use all the texture and such, the game will be too beautifull and poeple on console will have no real reason outside have the console.
now most of the new pc can run the game with the graphisme in high... you don't need a big computer for this. and a lot of people own a pc now...

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

SE does have HD textures.

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Always they are done like that and then reduced the size. That's why i don't understand why so many gaming companies slack providing HD textures.

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Originally Posted by Jin-

Always they are done like that and then reduced the size. That's why i don't understand why so many gaming companies slack providing HD textures.

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To avoid a repeat of "ugh the game is too slow" and "ugh the loading time takes forever" and "ugh omg why is this download 50GB"

The textures in the game are a compromise between all three. Not everyone has a SSD to install the game on, and not everyone has 8GB video card from which to be able to use them. If you look at GPU-z you'll probably find less than 1GB of the video memory being used, because that -is- what the average video card has. A lot of crappy video cards have 2GB, it doesn't make them capable of actually using larger textures. Depending on the generation of GPU, it can vary significantly. DX9.1 is 2k x 2k max. DX9_3 is 4k x 4k, DX10.0 is 8k x 8k, DX11 is 16k. And until DX12, there is still a limit of 128 textures.

128 textures works fine in a Single player game, but not a MMO where everyone wants to be a snowflake. You work around this with texture atlases, so that you get more out of one texture, at the cost of effectively making the "texture" smaller.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

To avoid a repeat of "ugh the game is too slow" and "ugh the loading time takes forever" and "ugh omg why is this download 50GB"

The textures in the game are a compromise between all three. Not everyone has a SSD to install the game on, and not everyone has 8GB video card from which to be able to use them. If you look at GPU-z you'll probably find less than 1GB of the video memory being used, because that -is- what the average video card has. A lot of crappy video cards have 2GB, it doesn't make them capable of actually using larger textures. Depending on the generation of GPU, it can vary significantly. DX9.1 is 2k x 2k max. DX9_3 is 4k x 4k, DX10.0 is 8k x 8k, DX11 is 16k. And until DX12, there is still a limit of 128 textures.

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That's why some games have an HD client, or a tickmark in the launcher to download the highres texture packs.

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Originally Posted by Jin-

Always they are done like that and then reduced the size. That's why i don't understand why so many gaming companies slack providing HD textures.

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I think a lot of it is logistics. The company now has to maintain two production chains for textures. Not a huge deal if they set it up right... two output settings, one goes to one set, the other goes to the other set, but it's not zero effort either and if they're already slammed...

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

To avoid a repeat of "ugh the game is too slow" and "ugh the loading time takes forever" and "ugh omg why is this download 50GB"

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And the easy way to avoid that is to have two versions. "Standard client" and "HD graphics client". Those who want the HD graphics (and have the machines for it) can download that. Those who aren't too bothered, or don't have the machines for it (whether it's because their PC isn't strong enough for it or they are on console which wouldn't really be able to use the same DL system anyway doesn't really matter), or who simply don't care to download "omg 50gb data" can go with the standard client. I just... don't see why people would argue against such a system. ^^;

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Originally Posted by dekal

I think the problem is that the game is on the ps3/4 platform and those systems can't take it. Blame those players . jk...but slry is cuz of the ps3/4.

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PS4 is fine, PS3 is the problem.

The PS4 runs the game great.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

From what I've heard (forum rumor, I don't have a source, sorry)-- SE does have HD textures. But yes, we're not getting them to keep the platforms relatively equal.

Pity really. The pixellation is also painful on my WHM AF...

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I know Microsoft has introduced contract clauses that require the PC versions to be downgraded to be somewhat on par with the consoles, don't know if Sony has done similar stuff. Wouldn't surprise me.

I don't mind most textures, like the hair doesn't really bother me, but there are some that are just really, REALLY bad, and SE doesn't seem conscious of it when planning close ups in cutscenes. For example, in the story Leviathan quest, when he's being summoned or just after (I don't remember exactly when), there's a close up of... I think it was the head priest(?) and his whole head texture had me reeling back and wincing, in a scene that had otherwise engaged my attention in a positive way. I mean, if they absolutely must use horrible textures like that, the least they could do is keep it to characters you don't see epic close ups of. That sort of crap is really for background characters you don't see well or much of...

I think at least a compromise is in order, where cutscene and main character textures should be high calibre by default, if maybe not everyone and everything else. Of course, making your main character high res means having high res versions of all possible character appearances, gear, etc, but the game doesn't have to call on so many of them at once. Theoretically it allows some with high end machines to put it on everyone but those with low end machines will still get the benefit as well.

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Originally Posted by dekal

I think the problem is that the game is on the ps3/4 platform and those systems can't take it. Blame those players . jk...but slry is cuz of the ps3/4.

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Oh really? the ps4 ver don't have the DirectX 11 update at all so how is it the ps4 holding anything back? PC rust race never think :P and fyi the ps4 can handle the DirectX 11 stuff it's just the ps4 don't use DirectX so SE never bother with it.

Lighting is great, shadows are great other effects are great but the texture quality is really really really bad. The cutscenes look horrible, the armours look horrible, indoor objects like tables chairs etc look also horrible. C'mon SE drop the excuses and announce that you will start on working on a High Res texture pack for the PC.

IMHO it has nothing to do with the consoles. It's trivial to have multiple levels of quality for textures for different platforms.

Not to mention, the PS4 having 5GB of RAM available to developers, I really don't see how it could be a problem.

The real reasons are probably load times - and traditional hard drives (with their limited speeds) are still the most widely used secondary storage medium. Given the frequent loading when transitioning zones, long load times will get annoying fast - not to say seamless zone transitions will fix anything; it's really just loading in the background and your textures will have to be even lower resolution.