Consoles are holding this game back (graphically)

[Imoen]

From a designer standpoint for a unmoveable background object in a MMORPG, 1k is overkill.

Lol I think the 150 shader instructions was more of the issue , I'm not defending the flower pot.

I made this in like 30 seconds and it is pre optimized... I'm not defending the flower pot. (Granted I don't have the foliage for it but this is ballpark, I compensated by having more 'round' segments than I normally would for an object like this.)


500 Polys or in other words 1k TRIs seems like a good target point for an asset like this, (Assuming pot and foliage) one that it should never ever go above though. It should be ideally a bit lower (no more than 500 tris excluding the foliage and that is if there is no inside as well, then u can push like 300 with jagged edges with a 16 sided cylinder which is what we have now... or you could 572 tris with no rings and a 32 sided for a more round look)

As you can see though, I am already at almost 500 Polys (1k tris) just for that, and this doesn't have any chamfers and pretty low quality already. It also Isn't shelled (no insides) also doesn't have caps on the bottom or top.

If you want to try making this cheaper without it looking like total crap be my guest. (Excluding the extra round segments that I put into roughly estimate foliage being placed inside.)

You could save a few by baking it down and not having any geo rings (Which is how it is now - roughly 16 sided with one extrusion and 1 inset), but again this is without the foliage IN the flower pot.

Point is, 1k is not much, so giggling at how some dude/tte (Not saying you were) ended up with 1k for a flower pot plus the foliage in it, is just ridiculous... it isn't THAT big of a stretch, especially if s/he was under the gun to make it real quick like. Especially considering this wasn't a "tiny" flower pot. I mean unless you are cool with polygonal rounds... Anything round automatically jacks up the count especially if you are shooting for higher quality than a World of Warcraft Barrel.

anyway on topic, this game looks good.

Except that's unneeded resources on an object people will never really look at more than once or up close. Add up several more of those flowerpot shenanigans and you got one big unoptimized mess. No one is blaming the flowerpots only. Said pot is just a leading example.

It really depends on how they handle instancing of objects and LODs since most of them are reused, also it assumes every single asset was bloated, which I doubt. Also 1.0 didn't have that many assets in general. Anyway I guess what I'm saying is Optimization isn't purely on the geometry, there are tons of other aspects of optimization, yet everyone brings up the "poly cost" of said pot, not the numerous other poor optimizations that needed to be done... all because Yoshi(or team) decided that pot was the thing worth mentioning lol. From a modeling/asset creation point of view it seems dumb. Especially considering right next to it, it shows a clearly bloated shader in the same line of text.

Plus I'm pretty sure a few of the chairs ect... in the game still have around 1k costs. The pumpkin chair for example, this has to be pushing the 1k range, you don't get close to that either. Yes it is in a specific area specifically dedicated to decorating, however I'm sure I could roam around the game even in 2.0 and find tons of examples of things that have 1k or close to without getting close to it.

1.0 (These are 3d screenshots if you can support .jps) The asset number doesn't seem to have changed a whole lot, and the triangle counts just at glance with no wire frame to look at look roughly the same. (Obviously the dudes could have cross sections that add nothing to the look that I can't see.)








In the end of all this, I am not defending the barrel as it was indeed overpriced on tris, but I can easily see how it got there, and this thing wasn't spammed everywhere it was like in a few spots around the adventurer guild. (14 of them roughly around the adventurers guild in 2.0)

If they really are referring to "Quads" then ya the barrel was WAY over priced. Even so I have a hard time believing that their Player Character models were only 1K, maybe an NPC could get away with this but I can't see a Player character being only this... and if they did, then hats off to their character team, damned magicians.

[MetatronPrime]

Graphics are what caught my eye but it goes beyond that as you've listed. Consoles are hindering this game in other ways.

[Kotemon]

1.0 (These are 3d screenshots if you can support .jps) The asset number doesn't seem to have changed a whole lot, and the triangle counts just at glance with no wire frame to look at look roughly the same. (Obviously the dudes could have cross sections that add nothing to the look that I can't see.)

I've only just started playing with Blender and I'm seeing a lot of tri used in a lot of game models. I currently have no idea what the difference between Tri and Quad are other than pulling when a lot of corners meet in one spot. Otherwise from what I can tell, is that those are some nice screen grabs. I just wish they could be bigger.

I wanted to get into 1.0 when the PS3 version was released but then 1.0 happened during and after the open beta. Like they assumed an unaltered visually enhanced Skyrim would work if it were modded into a open world mmo. I thought of going with a PC but even talk of top end rigs were struggling from graphical-data overload. It makes sense why they began copy-pasting textures everywhere and why it could never run on a console and barely on the average pc. While I never saw any difference in player and npc models in clips and scenes between 1.0 and 2.0. I cant help but noticing some kind of difference between the way outdoor environments looked or rendered. Like in the first and third x3d jpegs, that's nice scenery. I just wish I could recognize the area that skeleton is in..

[Gilraen]

I wanted to get into 1.0 when the PS3 version was released but then 1.0 happened during and after the open beta.

What?... 1.0 never had a PS3 release. They said there would be but it never happened, not that it was going to be possible given how high end PCs struggled with it. As for the skeleton, that's in Thanalan. Where in Thanalan I couldn't say, it all looked alike.

[Imoen]

I've only just started playing with Blender and I'm seeing a lot of tri used in a lot of game models. I currently have no idea what the difference between Tri and Quad are other than pulling when a lot of corners meet in one spot. Otherwise from what I can tell, is that those are some nice screen grabs. I just wish they could be bigger.

I wanted to get into 1.0 when the PS3 version was released but then 1.0 happened during and after the open beta. Like they assumed an unaltered visually enhanced Skyrim would work if it were modded into a open world mmo. I thought of going with a PC but even talk of top end rigs were struggling from graphical-data overload. It makes sense why they began copy-pasting textures everywhere and why it could never run on a console and barely on the average pc. While I never saw any difference in player and npc models in clips and scenes between 1.0 and 2.0. I cant help but noticing some kind of difference between the way outdoor environments looked or rendered. Like in the first and third x3d jpegs, that's nice scenery. I just wish I could recognize the area that skeleton is in..

Some of it is because of the depth of field, which we don't get except for CS's now and the shaders are different, they switched to deferred shading I believe is what it is for 2.0

1 quad = 2 tri = 4 verts.

Verts can be shared so the number can vary , example : if you have 4 quads arranged in a square shape, 4 quads= 8 tris = 9 verts. Where as if the 4 quads were in a strip/row it would be 4 quads = 8 tris = 10 verts.

Also depending on the engine sometimes it will split edges/verts at UV seams . So the 4 in the shape of a square becomes 4 quads = 8 triangles = 16 verts (Assuming a UV seam and the engine is splitting the verts at every connecting edge.)

Which is why usually I refer to Triangles or Verts when talking optimization. a 'poly' can be multiple triangles or 1 but in the example showed at GDC I assume they mean 'triangle' since in my pot example was 470 quads, which would mean 940 Tris and that is without the caps on the cylinder and just a stupid rough estimate of the foliage by bloating the roundness a bit. So 1k doesn't seem too bad to me for an asset like that, sure you could take it a little lower, but at a certain point it becomes very Jagged since it is a cylinder.

Example of why I hate the term poly. By simply connecting the verts with edges it changes the statistic count of "Poly" so again I assume they are referencing "triangles" since as you can see between the three images - the triangle count doesn't change.







Also in regards to the 1.0 screens. You can right click >view image , to get a better look at them. , it is smaller though because I played a tad lower res for better 3d performance.

[Gamer3427]

I always enjoy these threads where the OP has no clue what they're talking about and simply skips to blaming the easiest target......

[RocheKat]

If you think consoles are holding the graphics back of PC then you don't know how games work and you need to go learn about it first.

Graphics are what caught my eye but it goes beyond that as you've listed. Consoles are hindering this game in other ways.

Please list them... oh no need I can do it for you. PS3 UI limitations... and thats it. Game hindering by console done.

[Kotemon]

What?... 1.0 never had a PS3 release. They said there would be but it never happened, not that it was going to be possible given how high end PCs struggled with it. As for the skeleton, that's in Thanalan. Where in Thanalan I couldn't say, it all looked alike.

Yeah.. Before the open beta they had confirmed it would also be on the PS3, at some point after the PC is released. I thought it would be so they can make patchs and hotfix's for the PS3 when it was ready. However I saw and read all the issues people were having during the open beta, and after it went to market. It wasn't that long after they then postponed/canceled the port for the PS3. It wasn't long after that SE pulled the software from stores, reduced the monthly and eventually went F2P during that whole ordeal. I thought of going on the PC about that time after the PS3 was unknown, but even a couple of people I knew in FXI that had the recommended hardware had performance issues. Needless to say I never did get a PS3 for any reason. But in the sense of story, I picked salad (2.0) but now and then I wonder about the soup (1.0).

Some of it is because of the depth of field, which we don't get except for CS's now and the shaders are different, they switched to deferred shading I believe is what it is for 2.0

Ah.. So that's what I'm seeing in the open environment between old 1.0 images and 2.0. That's why I keep wondering about the soup. ^ (upper reply)

[DragonSlayer45]

Except that's unneeded resources on an object people will never really look at more than once or up close. Add up several more of those flowerpot shenanigans and you got one big unoptimized mess. No one is blaming the flowerpots only. Said pot is just a leading example.

To add to this, 1.0 had an engine that wasn't optimized at all to handle an MMO. They used Crystal Tools, the same engine used to handle the FFXIII games, and was primarily designed as a cutscene engine. In other words, someone at SE goofed up. No wonder PCs couldn't handle it.

[NolLacnala]

Textures and lighting and networking are all nice but we're ignoring the core issue. No one in Eorzea has a butt anymore, the fairies and Shiva and Garuda stole them all. Give us back our butts!