Poll: Seamless+CopyPaste VS. Zones+Variety

[Crowley]

Does this game even support dynamic texture streaming? I haven't really observed my hard disk usage much in-game, but it only seems to work hard when I first log in and when I teleport to different zones.

Then again loading times aren't that noticeable to begin with on my system since I use a SSD.

The files aren't optimized for access times. Too many 4k files, which even have crappy SSD access times. I noticed a huge difference in initial load times and teleport load times when I switched to SSD boot drive.

The local game (client) is 15GB, so I think all the graphics are stored locally.

Renta, I still don't get what you mean by smaller zones. Do you want there to be loading screens between let's say Eastern Thanalan and Western Thanalan or scraping those zones and making Thanalan a small zone and adding other zones where Thanalan used to be? Hopefully that last question makes sense.

We already "lose" auto-follow due to zone changes when moving about, so I think they are already there ... just no "loading" screen like most have. This would be a caching issue I guess (caching zones versus caching certain radii?)

[Xzen]

If it were possible to do with the PS3 limitations, then I would support your idea. Otherwise, they will have to separate into smaller zones. Not necessarily 1/4 of the map size, that would be too small. What seems to be going on in this thread is that people are guessing that the zones are going to be incredibly small and take less than 5 minutes to zone to next map. The zones do not have to be that small for the PS3 to handle, Im sure it can handle much more than 5-minute zone.

It's pretty simple to get around that problem. I also know that the terrible level design (copy pasta) is not because of the limitations of the PS3. It's BS.

[Rentahamster]

Renta, I still don't get what you mean by smaller zones. Do you want there to be loading screens between let's say Eastern Thanalan and Western Thanalan or scraping those zones and making Thanalan a small zone and adding other zones where Thanalan used to be? Hopefully that last question makes sense.

Well, whatever way would be best for the devs to do to create environmental variety. The main goal of the second option is uniqueness and variety in the overworld at the cost of a seamless experience.

The purpose of the question is to weigh what game characteristics the players value more. The purpose is not to try to guess as to how this is to be done technically, since none of us really know for sure.

[bsphil]

If we had to compromise, what would you take?

The world that we have now, with massive seamless regions, but a lack of environmental variety.

Or

A world that has smaller zones, with loading time in between zones, that allows the game to load a greater variety of textures per zone and give the artists more leeway to make the environments more detailed and less monotonous.

It's a false dilemma to assume we can only have one or the other. It is definitely possible to have both, and many game developers have known how to do this for years now. Procedurally generated environments provide high levels of realism and uniqueness with minimal cost. The only actual problem here is that SE is lazy and/or doesn't know how to do it properly.

Case in point: Retinas for entering/exiting buildings. Neat effect, huh? However, rather than use a procedural check for light levels on the screen and adjust them dynamically (giving the effect of needing to squint after exiting a dark cave or room into the bright sun), SE just hard-coded points along the map to change between two settings. So as a result, if you stand at an entranceway to a cave or building and look outside, it will be obscenely bright indefinitely until you move 1 cm forward when suddenly the light levels fluctuate drastically as the engine recognizes you're in an area flagged as "outdoors". It's pretty amusing to stand right on the border and step back and forth between the two. Valve made a game demo for HL2 (Lost Coast) highlighting exactly how the effect was supposed to work and even explained how it was done. In 2005.

It's a sloppy one-size-fits-all approach that doesn't account for variances in light levels in different types of indoor areas (remember when SE needed to manually increase how bright caves were?). More importantly, it is yet another piece of evidence showing that SE has a pretty bad coding team.



So, no, those aren't the only two options. You're just too used to dealing with lazy/inept SE programmers.

[Rentahamster]

It's a false dilemma to assume we can only have one or the other. It is definitely possible to have both...So, no, those aren't the only two options. You're just too used to dealing with lazy/inept SE programmers.

Yes, I know it's possible to have both, but the point of the poll is to see which concept players value more if they really had to choose.

[Mack]

No one is "defending the game", you people who dislike this game and company truly need to stop thinking anything that is other than "SE fails!" or "There are no excuses" and "WoW/Rift/Blade&Soul is sex" is defending. You don't care for logical reasons, you're a typical gamer.

You need to stop thinking like a developer and think like a gamer. Why the hell do I care that they can't make the game run properly on the PS3 when I dished out $1200 for a new computer to run this game? I don't. Why do I care that in order to fix the problems that arise with a PS3 version they need to optimize the game by reusing a lot of dull texture (that look good but are dull in color nonetheless) and reusing 3D objects (copy and paste everywhere)? I don't. SE new this would be an issue before they finished development on this game, what they should have done then is develop a less graphic intensive game and develop something more suited for the PS3 that will still look great on the PC. You get it now? I don't care about the technicalities and nor should I unless I was working for SE.

[bsphil]

Yes, I know it's possible to have both, but the point of the poll is to see which concept players value more if they really had to choose.

And my point is that they never should.

[Mack]

And my point is that they never should.

But IF they had to....

[Rentahamster]

And my point is that they never should.

Yes, I know that. Everyone in this thread feels this way, but according to the Tanaka quote above, apparently it's not that easy for the FF14 dev team for some reason. If it was, we probably wouldn't have ended up with the mess we got now.

The point of the thread is to asses player opinion as to what aspect of the game they hold higher in regard, so that when the dev team does get around to fixing the environment, they know what aspects of the game to prioritize first.

[Preypacer]

You can see from his replies that Tanaka didn't really understand the technology they're using and why Blizzard's implementation is vastly different from SE's, even if they work on the same principle.

Yes, WoW (and myriad other MMOs and non-MMOs) uses instanced geometry. The difference is that WoW does it with smaller items, things like houses, boulders, trees, grass, etc. Those are all stand-alone assets that are placed on a height-mapped terrain and are individually moved, rotated, scaled, etc.

The benefits of that system are that:
1) Height-mapped terrain can be loaded and unloaded (read: streamed) in real-time as you're playing. The heightmaps themselves are simply greyscale image maps that "inform" the terrain of how high or low it is at a given spot (to put it very simply). They aren't that large in file-size, and the textures used on them are tiled, so they only have to be loaded in once as well. Aside from that the only other data involved is the alpha masks used to show/hide a given texture layer (grass giving way to dirt, etc) and the data to let the engine know where to place the assets added to the terrain.

2) In a well-designed asset system, any given object (tree, boulder, etc) is only loaded into memory once. From there an "instance" is placed on the map, where each individual one can be scaled, rotated, etc. It doesn't use up any more resources once it's loaded in the first time.

SE's approach to it does not use height-mapped terrain. You can see that by the way the landscapes are designed... Each large chunk or tile of landscape is hand-modeled and textured in a 3D modeler (like 3DS Max, Maya, etc) and then brought into the engine as one huge chunk. Because of the larger size of the models, they do have to use higher resolution textures in order to keep them looking good in-game. On top of that you have matching specular maps, bump maps and so forth. All that does add up.

Their approach itself isn't the problem. They use the same approach in FFXI and did a much better job of it. You have to really look to see where any kind of repetition is taking place, and the instances of any one piece of geometry are usually pretty far apart.

I don't expect they're going to switch the whole engine over to a height-map based one, a la WoW, etc. I think they need to just focus on smaller areas and/or create smaller tiles that lend themselves to providing more options in environment design.

Another thing that would help would be to separate things like boulders, shrubs, trees and the such from the base terrain tiles and place those separately. Let the terrain tiles create an "empty canvas" for them to fill in with those smaller details. That alone would go a long way to breaking up the repetition.

Using one of those clearings with the stream going through it in Black Shroud, for example. With the ability to place and arrange different assets in each of those areas, they could give each an entirely different look/feel. It would be like taking the same living room layout repeated 5 times, and decorating each one in an entirely different way; using different decor, with different furniture options, arranged differently, etc. It's the same "shell", but each different setup gives an entirely unique impression and can even greatly obscure the fact that one living room is actually the same exact layout as another.

I don't think their tiling approach is inherently "bad". I just think they went way too far with it.