Quote Originally Posted by HyoMinPark View Post
Because they force us all to have perma-sandals - NPCs included. Their reasoning is “We can’t let everyone walk around bare foot because they would float”....meanwhile, I could go to any area and find a spot where I float in my horrible sandals. Hence why I say their reasoning goes out the window. I find the excuse flimsy, personally.
I dont think it's a horrible excuse so much as a poorly explained one...

While Im not 100% sure on this, the base model of all NPCs were designed with sandals. That makes the bottom of the sandals the 'bottom of the model'. So on a ground plane, thats where the model meets the ground. If they remove the sandals geometry, the model would not 'sink' down to meet the ground unless they adjust all the models to do this. This gets complicated because if the model 'sinks' down to meet the ground when naked, they would have to 'elevate' when boots are equipped because they have soles. This may affect animations, camera placements in cutscenes, and etc where currently the player hieght doesnt adjust based on gear. It remains static. I mean they could fix this by making the character model's feet thicker so nothing changes, but youre gonna notice that your character's height wont alter to compensate for soles when you stick on boots. Im not sure how big a deal that is to players.

As for floating in other spots, its noticeable when teh ground plane has texture that goes down, but the character remains on an invisible plane that is level. Susano's arena has this issue, as an example. That's just a design aspect that's never really been fixed generally in games because it can cause a lot of problems with collision.