Is most of FFXIV's failings due to their choice of engine?

[Preypacer]

Which is why the game has been delayed on PS3. To solve the memory constraints *without* incluencing the PC version. People wrongly assume that since they used tiling for *some* areas of the game they did so due to memory constraints (and not simply due to time/dev resources management loke logic would dictate). Memory is so constrained that, unlike most other games, there's no zoning between cities and outside areas, and between outside areas and dungeons.

This is a load of crap.

I've been reading your posts where you so smugly "educate" everyone else about how game engines work, etc... asserting your own opinions as 'facts'. It was only a matter of time before you inevitably talked yourself in over your own head.

All the wilderness environments are 100% tiled. Every single one of them, from one corner to the other. It's only a handful of those tiles with large, recognizable structures that stand out more than the other, especially when they're placed close together. If you look closely in-game or, even better, at the overhead maps, the entire regions are built out of large terrain tiles.

The only areas that aren't clearly tiled are the cities and some of the unique locations, like the small outposts, etc.

Even Tanaka commented in an interview that they had to go with tiled environments due to memory constraints they have to deal with. The interviewer wisely asked him why it was a problem for SE on newer hardware when other developers had been avoiding that "trap" for years now, on inferior hardware. Tanaka kinda dodged that question.

As for your argument about how there's no streaming between cities and wilderness or dungeons and wilderness... It hasn't gone unnoticed that you conveniently ignore the most obvious case where isn't streamed... between wilderness regions.

The cities, just like the dungeons and each region within a given zone are streamed in while you're going through the narrow corridors between them. For Ul'dah, it's the curving corridor between the main entrance and where you enter the city proper. In Gridania it's the long pathway along those bridges separating Black Shroud from the city. In LL it's that really long bridge between the wilderness zone and the city itself. Out in the wilderness, it's those long and very conspicuous valleyways separating one region from the next.

A tell-tale sign that there's background loading and unloading going on there is when you're running along with another player. Who ever is in the rear will tend to notice the person in front of them temporarily disappear when crossing the borderline, and then reappear again a moment or two later.

So, even in the case of its wilderness areas, FFXIV does not have true, large scale world-streaming. It's actually rather limited. And this limitation - why each region is broken up into smaller "zones" separated by long loading corridors is due to, you guessed it, memory constraints on the PS3 and possibly on the 360. There's no aesthetic or immersive value to how they handle it. It's purely them working around technical limitations.

Look at an older MMO, like Lineage 2, built on 6+ year old technology (Unreal Engine 2)... That game has true 100% complete world streaming, in and out of dungeons, in and out of cities and towns, and between every area of the world map. No long, conspicuous corridors are required to "mask" that there's loading going on, because the entire world map is streamed, in real-time, as you're playing.

Incidentally, FFXI's regions were built out of 3D tiles as well, only SE's designers did a far superior job of masking it in that game.

It's funny to see people throw wild theories about memory cpnstraints infliencing the engine when they didn't see a line of code of said engine.

Says the person who's been doing exactly that regularly in this thread so far.

Are you trying to be ironic?

[gifthorse]

Considering that the developers made the admission themselves that they had to work with memory constraints, saying otherwise is probably dooming your argument.

Zone boundaries are an obvious consequence of memory limitations. One way of getting around this limitation, however, is to use an engine that has gameworld streaming technology. No surprises for guessing which feature Crystal Tools lacks.

[viion]

Minecraft is a pure example of why graphics mean nuttin.

(And MapleStory XD the most subscribed mmo there is)

[SuzakuCMX]

No, but using a horrible engine sure doesn't help.

EDIT: @viion: I'm pretty sure WoW has more subscribers than MapleStory.

Look at that line go!

[Vesperia]

I mean, another thing, why are markets instanced?

SE wanted players to make a robust and thriving economy and yet all the market wards are instanced into little rooms. Why not have a seemless mall or marketplace that was more realistic and easily accessible? Why put everything into a labyrinth?

Oh right, because both SE's graphical engine and their network coding are too inept to hold that much info in a single zone.

[Dragonheart]

This engine is so heavy, and "static" ... So i think a lot of failure are to attribute to it .. (Jump, swim, maybe fly, more dynamic and challenging fight, slow and awful ui.. etc. )

[Vesperia]

This engine is so heavy, and "static" ... So i think a lot of failure are to attribute to it .. (Jump, swim, maybe fly, more dynamic and challenging fight, slow and awful ui.. etc. )

I know right, half the reason everything is so slow is because they have to ask "how the hell am I supposed to implement this when I face 43284328 obstacles with the current engine?"

[Draco]

After looking at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgaAJ...eature=related

I can't help but wonder why a game by SQUARE ENIX of all companies doesn't really even compare to the environmental visuals of a Korean Grinder.

It seems small, but individual shadows really adds a lot of detail to the environments, not to mention wandering NPCs, voice-overs, swaying grass and trees, and the ability to jump!

No, that is not a reason for their failure thus far. The reason ( imho ) they have failed is due to the lack of basic systems that make an MMO a success. Lack of an Auction House System ( say whatever you want, but a retainer system is not and will not ever be as good as a simple auction house system no matter what you do. Stop re writing the book and embrace the basics. ) lack of a mailbox, lack of a recipe list, way too many menus to cycle through, unnecessary load time when beginning and ending battle, and other things. I know they are working on a lot of these things, and I am not complaining about them. I just wanted to throw in my opinion on the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are not going to choose to stop playing your game mainly due to your choice of graphical style.

[Blitz0309]

This just goes to show how quickly SE is running out of time.. if not already out of the running. At this point they should just contact everyone who has purchased the game, refund it and cancel the project and use what they have as a base for a new MMO. Change the names of the characters again, break up the zones, basically make a game that won't be a steaming pile at launch.

They have a whole forum who plays their game and still isn't satisfied. New MMO's are coming out and its not like there is a slim market. They will take away from this that you can't recover from a bad launch anymore in the gaming world as it's too competitive. This game will probably go P2P at some point... but its numbers will likely not cap the current ffxi numbers. It may one day even be fun to play and have a handful of people that love it... but its never going to be anything near successful.

Hell, ffxi is casual as hell now. And even with that, all the content and how good that game is (story, game play, etc..). People still won't play it because of the stigma it got as a "hard core" and "time consuming game".. they won't even try it for $10.. You really think people are going to play a game that has gotten nothing but slammed since it came out?

Its a final fantasy game.. and people who played ffxi came in and hated this game. If you can't keep your current customers happy, whats the point? Sure i understand they wanted to have people play ffxi and this at the same time, but they have to realize most people that played ffxi for years wouldn't want anything like ffxiv.

And the 20 or so of you that played ffxi and love this game... i don't care. I've run across 100's of people that have new characters on the asura server of ffxi that bitch about how this game is a flop and how ffxi is better at even being casual than it was. Of course, they've killed 11 too as you can level so damn fast its not even funny.. but they are trying to capture the casual market, and failing while pissing off anyone who actually likes a sense of accomplishment in a game.

I guess that's just SE not knowing their target audience. At least they have the blind loyalty of the fanboys. But really... final fantasy games have always been time consuming and challenging. Thats the point. If we didn't want that we'd never of picked them up in the first place.

[Janglo]

Wasn't 13 based on crystal tools and ran on PS3?