If metallic dyes are fine, why not plaid, iridescent , luminescent, or fluorescent?

[Shioban]

If they're willing to make dyes on certain materials shiny for really bad reasons

It wasn't a bad reason. I put up a thread requesting for metalic gear to retain it's shine after being dyed a different colour.

How was that a bad reason?

If they're willing to make dyes on certain materials shiny for really bad reasons, why not have plaids, iridescent dyes, luminescent dyes, or fluorescent dyes? Real, bright garish colors, or whatever?

Before I say any of this, please do read it through before replying, and also bear in mind that the dev-team already confirmed in my thread that they're going to be adding in more metalic shaders to gear in the future.
(As they've already shown with darklight)

However I'd like to explain why they most likely won't be adding 5-10 different choices;

This is all very possible in theory, however it presents a few issues.

Data

Each new 'shiny' surface materials requires shader code;



Each new shader eat up more GPU memory.
Now, assuming the 'base' memory limit for FFXIV is 512MB of memory, this could become a problem very easily, as shaders can sit at around >0.5-1~MB per shader, with the various shaders already used in the game, for example;

Current Metal Armour, Wet Surfaces, Aetheryte (And other crystals) and I'm sure many more I've missed, it's not something that cane be added "Because we feel like it today".


There's always going to be a processing, rendering or memory cost somewhere.

Why does that matter?


Consider how many textures are being help on your GPU's memory at any given time when playing the game, adding in any additional stress could spell issues for users playing on the bear minimum.
And the development team so far aren't fond of having multiple toggle-options for these kind of additions. (UI, Characters, Particles, Skyboxes, Shader Data and much much more)

Development Time


FFXIV's gear system works in pieces. Each armour has a sub-set of textures to compress down areas where detail is not needed. Or vice-versa to add detail where there is more needed.

To add in more metallic shaders would require going back and addressing each piece of gear to make sure the shader works correctly.


This is a two headed issue in that it could be very easy or very time consuming. If the material can simply be assigned under a dye tag for each texture set as a 'dyable' area on the armour then this task will be easy.
If each piece of gear requires being checked, or adjusted to suit the new shader then the process is going to take a hell of a lot longer.



However! All this being said, the DirectX 11 client coming up will be completely direct at players with a high-end gaming computer, you'll most definitely see this and much more around the time this client is released, where it does not affect the base average user who simply can't handle the additional stress.

[Nayto]

-snip-

Careful... when you have to explain memory limitations. People tend to blame a certain hardware... or blame that developers are lazy to not find magical loopholes around this because their 15$ a month should be enough to fund some ingenious technology to make it easier to stream each and every material instance.