How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

Kingdom Hearts is not an MMO.

It doesn't have to contend with potentially hundreds if not not thousands of players at a time. Art Style has less impact on performance for a single player game or small number of players than for a massive multiplayer game. But even moreso you're dealing with characters that can be customized vs characters that have set models or a set selection of variants.

But perhaps art style isn't the right phrase because I consider that to cover things like textures and models and animations. WoW's player models are simpler (models, textures, animations, etc) and less realistic looking than FFXIV's and because of that they have less impact on the game's performance. I'm not saying FFXIV can't be optimized more, in fact I would really like it to be. I find it frustrating that adding something as simple as some new face options to each race is problematic for SE.

[TheVigilant]

Kingdom Hearts is not an MMO.

It doesn't have to contend with potentially hundreds if not not thousands of players at a time. Art Style has less impact on performance for for a single player game or small number of players than for a massive multiplayer game. But even moreso you're dealing with characters that can be customized vs characters that have set models or a set selection of variants.

But perhaps art style isn't the right phrase because I consider that to cover things like textures and models and animations. WoW's player models are simpler (models, textures, animations, etc) and less realistic looking that FFXIV's and because of that they have less impact on the game's performance. I'm not saying FFXIV can't be optimized more, in fact I would really like it to be. I find it frustrating that adding something as simple as some new face options to each race is problematic for SE.

Now I can agree with you that it comes down to either the genre or the engine, and not the art style.
Why is it hard to add a new face option to each race?
Is there any official word about this?

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

Now I can agree with you that it comes down to either the genre or the engine, and not the art style.
Why is it hard to add a new face option to each race?
Is there any official word about this?

I am not a game designer or engineer so I don't have the specifics but I do know it has something to do with how many different details can be displayed at once. I am probably not going to explain this well but...

Imagine Limsa has 30 players gathered around the Aetheryte. There's currently 5 races each with 2 variants so thats 10 possible different racial types. Even though some have only minor differences like skin color or eye irises, others like the Hyur have a more notable difference in body. Then there's like 4 or so different faces for each race. Then there's 2 genders for each. Then there's other details like make up/tattoos/tails. Then each of those players is wearing different gear. Each of those 30 players can look very different from the other both in model and gear and the more differences there and/or the more players there are the bigger the load on the server.

All those differences eat up resources and the more players you have, especially if gathered in one area, the more effort the engine has to put out to keep up. A game where there is only one player character or only a few player characters that are pre-rendered and don't change or have limited options to change their appearance eats up MUCH less resources. This is one reason why single player games can look so much better than MMO's. So I imagine that more face options means more differences which means more work for the engine to do and more data eating up bandwidth.

It's a sad truth that despite the advances in technology we are still hamstrung by the tech of our time. Can you imagine if/when a new type of wireless internet is developed so people across the globe have equal ping no matter how remote they might be located from the main server? Or how much more graphically realistic MMO's could look without bandwidth limitations? Gaming 100 years from now will probably be amazing.

[Shurrikhan]

I am not a game designer or engineer so I don't have the specifics but I do know it has something to do with how many different details can be displayed at once. I am probably not going to explain this well but...

Imagine Limsa has 30 players gathered around the Aetheryte. There's currently 5 races each with 2 variants so thats 10 possible different racial types. Even though some have only minor differences like skin color or eye irises, others like the Hyur have a more notable difference in body. Then there's like 4 or so different faces for each race. Then there's 2 genders for each. Then there's other details like make up/tattoos/tails. Then each of those players is wearing different gear. Each of those 30 players can look very different from the other both in model and gear and the more differences there and/or the more players there are the bigger the load on the server.

All those differences eat up resources and the more players you have, especially if gathered in one area, the more effort the engine has to put out to keep up. A game where there is only one player character or only a few player characters that are pre-rendered and don't change or have limited options to change their appearance eats up MUCH less resources. This is one reason why single player games can look so much better than MMO's. So I imagine that more face options means more differences which means more work for the engine to do and more data eating up bandwidth.

It's a sad truth that despite the advances in technology we are still hamstrung by the tech of our time. Can you imagine if/when a new type of wireless internet is developed so people across the globe have equal ping no matter how remote they might be located from the main server? Or how much more graphically realistic MMO's could look without bandwidth limitations? Gaming 100 years from now will probably be amazing.

How is it that another MMO with 41 sliders worth of 100 points of precision each manage to render 80+ players at a time, then? I'll admit it bogs in those times, but those fps drops are scarcely more than those of XIV despite the orders of magnitude fewer options in the latter.

[Astarotha]

because thats not a problem of server traffic, where youre receiving character data with lines like 42,45,51,91,24,05,15,15,15,25,25,25 all telling your client what to render, the problems come when you either run out of BUS speed (bottleneck) or you run out of ram allocation, or you overtax your graphics card (usually its the other 2 that run out first)

also when the devs say they cant increase something due to server stability concerns, those packets constantly hitting and leaving the server is what theyre talking about, now other than keeping track of the position of all those values at once and making sure they are consistent the server has no need to render anything at all, but any time they add more data to track its actually an exponential increase if it involves data others can see and a doubling of traffic if youre the only one that can view it

[Berethos]

How is it that another MMO with 41 sliders worth of 100 points of precision each manage to render 80+ players at a time, then?

Name an MMO that does, and you've got an MMO that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work, or one that runs poorly.

[Alien_Gamer]

Name an MMO that does, and you've got an MMO that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work, or one that runs poorly.

Black Desert Online has a character creation menu thats almost beyond belief and the game is popular enough that it will have that many players together. For all its faults it is a very visually impressive game.

[MistakeNot]

Black Desert Online has a character creation menu thats almost beyond belief and the game is popular enough that it will have that many players together. For all its faults it is a very visually impressive game.

It's funny. I hear lots of people talking about how great the character creation in Black Desert Online is. I hear very few people talk about how great the gameplay in BDO is.

[Shurrikhan]

Name an MMO that does, and you've got an MMO that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work, or one that runs poorly.

BDO, B&S, Moonlight Blade. Within the year, you'll probably see a couple more. Only the first bogs noticeably in its cities -- far more packed than XIV's -- and no more on my comp than XIV does. Each has certain areas of poor optimization, but the characters are not it.

So unless you're saying that spending time on an in-depth character creator specifically sapped resources from optimization polish for waterfalls or the like, and that saving a few more frames in viewing the latter is worth so much more...

[Pluvia]

BDO, B&S, Moonlight Blade. Within the year, you'll probably see a couple more. Only the first bogs noticeably in its cities -- far more packed than XIV's -- and no more on my comp than XIV does. Each has certain areas of poor optimization, but the characters are not it.

So unless you're saying that spending time on an in-depth character creator specifically sapped resources from optimization polish for waterfalls or the like, and that saving a few more frames in viewing the latter is worth so much more...

There are many things you can say about B&S but well optimized isn't one of them that game runs like trash complete and utter trash its optimization is a meme and a well deserved one. This is coming from someone who still plays the game doing the latest raids it runs horribly.