Would you use an external character creator?

Just say the devs can never untangle the spaghetti code and the character customisation will never improve significantly... would you use an external OFFICIAL character customisation app that you can import into the game? (Imagine something like the benchmark but just for making your character.)
I've heard people have copied dat files to/from the benchmark to see truer representations of their characters, and it got me thinking about how that could potentially sidestep the in-game code.

Thoughts?

From my (admittedly second-hand) understanding of the purpose for copying character data into the benchmark, I think you may be overestinating what it is achieving: it is just importing the character's appearance from the game with things like unlockable hairstyles that aren't naturally accessible in the benchmark character creator but must still be there in the program. Or even simpler, copying over the character to save you manually inputting each option and to ensure you don't make errors.

It isn't going to magically insert new gear models or do things that can't be done with the character, it's just instructions of which normal settings have previously been applied.

If a thing could be officially done within the game, there would be no point to placing it in an external program.

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Originally Posted by CamuiKushi

Just say the devs can never untangle the spaghetti code and the character customisation will never improve significantly... would you use an external OFFICIAL character customisation app that you can import into the game? (Imagine something like the benchmark but just for making your character.)
I've heard people have copied dat files to/from the benchmark to see truer representations of their characters, and it got me thinking about how that could potentially sidestep the in-game code.

Thoughts?

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Assuming they are not updating character creation due to "spaghetti code" is quite the assumption. And anyway, your proposal would work only if the limitation was "the ingame character customization UI", which is frankly an absurd theory. With your proposal the hard part of the work, ie adding bones and additional mesh/texture variations to the character, would need to be done anyway.

I think the biggest limitation is bandwidth. The game have to send out character descriptions to every other player in range. This uses upstream bandwidth from the server, and this can balloon very quickly when a lot of players are clumped together (think limsa): every player character description have to be sent to every other player in view range, so it increases quadratically. And upstream bandwidth is expensive.

So they are probably counting bytes when it comes to character descriptions. That is why they rarely expand it (you see the same thing happening in WoW btw), and when they do, its parsimonious. This is why for instance there's a preset set of dyes rather than RGB sliders. Currently they can use just one byte per dye, because there's less than 255 of them.

After all these years all they're willing to give us is a secondary dye slot, that is, just 6 more bytes (assuming weapons also get a secondary dye slot, otherwise it would be just 5). That should give you an idea of how much they want to keep the size of character descriptions down.

Fair point. I do recall they mentioned they were planning to rework how the model bones/meshes etc. work at some point in the future, so I guess there'd be no point until then.

But I'm mostly asking as a hypothetical 🤔

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Originally Posted by Taliriah

After all these years all they're willing to give us is a secondary dye slot, that is, just 6 more bytes (assuming weapons also get a secondary dye slot, otherwise it would be just 5). That should give you an idea of how much they want to keep the size of character descriptions down.

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I've seen people theorising that they might not even be assigning "six more bytes" but repurposing some less important data that is currently being transmitted.

Likewise, the new glasses slot is probably repurposing the old belt slot with some new way of recording what is equipped there.

I also recall someone saying in the Hrothgar megathread that adding their hairstyle customisation option was done via weird stuff in the back end with a multitude of copies of each head type and a hairstyle attached, rather than one head with a hair model applied.

Honestly, at this point, they need to stop using "spaghetti code" as their excuse for everything. SE is a massive company. FFXIV is their biggest, most consistent cash cow. They absolutely could throw some money at the game and fix their old code if they wanted to.

The big issue with updating old code is mostly that ffxiv is a live service game. They can't ever really take it down for long periods to fix it up, all edits need to be assured that they won't take out the game. The fact that it's old enough that it's likely many of the original programmers no longer work for CBU3 even if they're still in S-E and it was created under very extreme circumstances doesn't help, but the biggest issue is just that mmos cannot go down for extended periods of time or they start to hemorrhage money.

In any case I don't see much point in something like the suggestion in the OP.

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

Honestly, at this point, they need to stop using "spaghetti code" as their excuse for everything. SE is a massive company. FFXIV is their biggest, most consistent cash cow. They absolutely could throw some money at the game and fix their old code if they wanted to.

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But then they wouldn't have as much money to throw at other projects. Like Forespoken. You remember that one, right?

I'm really confused. If the character creator was external, it would still be just as limited by the constraints of the game, how does making it external fix the problem, this would just add another step.

It could probably be done easily. After all, the Benchmark itself is effectively an external character creator. All they do is produce a file that can be imported when creating a character in the actual game.

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Originally Posted by CamuiKushi

I do recall they mentioned they were planning to rework how the model bones/meshes etc. work at some point in the future

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They mentioned that this system was designed with the future in mind so that they can adjust it as systems improve.

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

they need to stop using "spaghetti code" as their excuse for everything

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I rarely see them say this or anything similar to it. They have said it's difficult to turn S ranks into FATEs and that's about all I can remember.

They usually blame hardware, network and database considerations, which are reasonable. They don't use cloud servers, so there is a genuine gap between area servers, world servers and data centers. They often say that too much database or network traffic would cause major issues.

None of this is spaghetti code. From their perspective, they are hardware limitations. My personal experience doesn't agree with many of these "limitations", but I'm just pointing out that SE isn't blaming their code; they are blaming their hardware setup.

They have denied there is spaghetti code from 1.0 (see my signature), but it's logical to assume there is spaghetti code from 2.0, because the rest of the game is built upon the foundation of 2.0, yet we have moved away from many of the principles of 2.0.

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Originally Posted by CamuiKushi

Just say the devs can never untangle the spaghetti code and the character customisation will never improve significantly... would you use an external OFFICIAL character customisation app that you can import into the game? (Imagine something like the benchmark but just for making your character.)
I've heard people have copied dat files to/from the benchmark to see truer representations of their characters, and it got me thinking about how that could potentially sidestep the in-game code.

Thoughts?

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Rest assured, benchmark uses the exactly same character creation like the live game just with updated graphics. No extra options in there. That is why it is compatible with the game.
No clue how hard would be to add for example a new face to already existing race (with each face has its own choice of nose, eyes, mouth, tribal marks, etc). I guess it has nothing to do with a bad coding or anything, maybe the game engine would strife due to loading more character variables during gameplay.:confused:

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

Honestly, at this point, they need to stop using "spaghetti code" as their excuse for everything. SE is a massive company. FFXIV is their biggest, most consistent cash cow. They absolutely could throw some money at the game and fix their old code if they wanted to.

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Before endwalker i would have agreed with with u about that excuse but with the Endwalker launch problem. (1.0 code issue) And resent Benchmark problem is do to how the character creation's was set up for the ps3 way back(like its been what 7 years since support ended), this excuse dose not bother me so much anymore