[Dawntrail Benchmark] Character bodies are the same as before

[Minali]

I get they'd like to put the focus on parts visible the most time, but come on, we're still talking about the main character of the game here. On top of this, we're about to go on summer vacation with our characters, you bet a lot of people will show their bodies quite freely with their glams. Work on that, devs, please!

[Aco505]

On another note, tails for miqo'te (not sure about the other races) seem to be mostly the same.

[Aco505]

I hope they update the bodies a little bit more. Maybe they aren't quite ready to focus on those yet?

I just wish we got more information on the matter. Surely we won't stay with the low res bodies after the update is done?

[Stechun]

It is most certainly a matter of time and budget, they’ve focused almost all the efforts on updating the models for character faces so far, because that’s what you look at the most, and because pieces of gear on your head don’t have to conform to the shape for your face.

The only other things they’ve seemingly updated model-wise is the hands and feet, because both were in the most dire need of updates, and updating existing models for them will be relatively easy, if they were to fully update bodies on the other hand, it would create an unimaginable amount of work.

To put things into perspective, in the character creator we have I believe 68 face models that have to be updated, that’s not including any npc-exclusive faces, now on top of that we now can expect every piece of gear for the hand slot will be updated at launch or more likely across the course of Dawntrail’s post-launch patches, same goes for any foot gear that shows the feet too, all sandals or toeless boots have to be manually updated.

For the case of the hands and feet, those are pretty straight-forward and safe things to update, time consuming and tedious but not impossible at all, bodies would be much more complicated and costly to update though, I feel like we should expect if they committed to that though, that every piece of armor that shows your character’s body to be updated with higher detail body models on them at minimum, and at most people could be expecting all clothing to be of a higher poly count.

If you consider that every piece of gear needs a unique and fitting model for male humanoids, female humanoids, Lalalfells, and Male Roes/Male Hroths, it might seem more within reason that this seems to be where they drew the line, they could compromise and make perhaps the armorless bodies more detailed, along with updating the more revealing outfits that show a lot of skin like swimsuits and such, but where does that start and end, what would be worth and updating and what wouldn’t be?

I’d guess those are the questions the devs had to ask themselves and likely came to the conclusion that it would be too costly and too large of an effort to complete with their quality standards, so they chose to compromise and only update the faces, hands, and feet since they are what we notice the most to have a lower poly-count.

[Gokki]

Meanwhile, in 1.0 the bodies were quite well detailed. Not FF16-level of detail, of course, but still. I do hope that, after the faces, they work on the bodies and hair more.

[Valence]

I don't see what the cpu should have to do with computing and displaying triangles, textures and shaders tbh.

[Larirawiel]

I don't see what the cpu should have to do with computing and displaying triangles, textures and shaders tbh.

It is so: every polygon consists of three or more points in space. Those points have coordinates. The CPU generates those polygon coordinates and sends them to the GPU. The GPU reads those coordinates and draws them on the screen. More polygons means more coordinates have to be generated and this is what creates pressure on the CPU. And yes, there are many optimizations for it. Things like static geometry can be optimized away to a great extent. And with methods like tesselation or displacement mapping you can use the GPU for creating additional polygons inside of a low-polygon-model etc. Character models however are not static because they move. If you apply things like tesselation on them then it can have very weird looking effects like wrong collision effects, huge clipping errors etc.

You can try it be yourself. Just visit a nightclub in FF14. It can easily halve your FPS when many players are inside the building.


Cheers

[Ancalagon_Blacktalon]

Meanwhile, in 1.0 the bodies were quite well detailed. Not FF16-level of detail, of course, but still. I do hope that, after the faces, they work on the bodies and hair more.

I must confess that every time someone points out how good 1.0 looked, I am seized with the compulsion to mention that 1.0 also ran absolutely terribly which was why they severely downgraded the graphics and detail for ARR. ^^;; Screenshots are nice and all but at the end of the day what matters is the game in motion...

[Valence]

It is so: every polygon consists of three or more points in space. Those points have coordinates. The CPU generates those polygon coordinates and sends them to the GPU. The GPU reads those coordinates and draws them on the screen. More polygons means more coordinates have to be generated and this is what creates pressure on the CPU. And yes, there are many optimizations for it. Things like static geometry can be optimized away to a great extent. And with methods like tesselation or displacement mapping you can use the GPU for creating additional polygons inside of a low-polygon-model etc. Character models however are not static because they move. If you apply things like tesselation on them then it can have very weird looking effects like wrong collision effects, huge clipping errors etc.

You can try it be yourself. Just visit a nightclub in FF14. It can easily halve your FPS when many players are inside the building.


Cheers

It's not about trying it oneself. I can see how the game handles it badly. I can see how my FPS has skyrocketed everywhere but stayed the same in crowded places after upgrading my GPU, proving that the CPU is a bottleneck in those places.

If you're generating triangle coordinates instead of character coordinates with your CPU, you're doing it wrong.

Cheers.

[PercibelTheren]

I must confess that every time someone points out how good 1.0 looked, I am seized with the compulsion to mention that 1.0 also ran absolutely terribly which was why they severely downgraded the graphics and detail for ARR. ^^;; Screenshots are nice and all but at the end of the day what matters is the game in motion...

Yeah but 1.0 was also over 10 years ago and most people have upgraded their hardware since then, so that level of detail would be a lot less of an issue now.