Quote Originally Posted by XiRon View Post
Inb4 "modders don\\'t have restrictions"

What ARE these restrictions
Hello there!

First off, XiRon, thanks for your post. It’s only through people saying “I don’t really it” that things improve. Whatever issues Square has fixing things, there’s an transparency problem, road map’s not clear, haven’t heard anything in months - that’s just poor customer service.

I’m going to attempt to explain things here, but I’m not defending anyone, only saying why something is difficult. In addition, I am in my 40s and I’ve been laid up with heart problems, so if you need more information, I recommend reading the longer explanation I put in the thread “Hrothgar Haircuts are Really Bad.” I’ve been meaning to put up a video on the subject, but I’m bad at videos, and if you or someone you know isn’t and would like to help me out, please contact me at HelloIAmJood#1809 on Discord. Bottom line, it’s good to understand the problem, but please be gentle. I’m still sick and this is hard.

All FFXIV characters are balls of data. We have colors, vertices, inventories, and bones. Even our clothes have bones in them, which is why your legs don’t punch through your pants while running.

Hrothgar are descended from Roes. We re-use a lot of structures from them for different things. For example the muscle slider for them actually controls the length of our tails. We have a bestial jaw and “whisker” bones as well as 5 bones in our tails. All of this stuff’s gotta come from somewhere, and we can’t just “have more” or we’d become difficult for lower-end video cards and PS4s to render. There are some “kludges” that are done here and there to make us possible. One of which is that our ears are part of our ‘masks’ - this is part of why we can’t have hats, and part of why we don’t have ear wiggles like Miqos, and 100% of why ears are not a selectable item on character creation. Viera do not have this problem, you can see that partially because they have have selectable ears.

Adding more bones and details would also make characters more difficult to transport which is already hard. You can see this in that we get chocobo saddlebags rather than additional inventory slots.

So I will go ahead and say it - modders aren’t the answer. They can only do a few things:

1) They can replace a model with something else (and others cannot see it)
2) They can make the model more complex, see problems above.
3) They can take the time to do race-specific work which Square used to do in HW, but I believe will not because it’s in a design document somewhere. This involves a change to how the game makes some decisions, and I’d rather Square fixed it right than have a modder change my client.

I encourage you to take a look at the “Bad Haircut” thread where I go into this in more detail, or contact me at the Discord above or on my Twitter @kelevvidui - happy to discuss more.