Dawntrail character graphics update - opinions, requests and discussion megathread

[Cheapshot]

So I was toying with glamours and noticed something odd and took off my shirt and.... what....am I looking at? the lighting is so bad it looks like I'm wearing one of those "fake muscles" skinsuits. The textures between the head and the torso are different, the colors feel different, some parts look smeared like it was mildly photoshopped (I didn't). Overall the torso feels of "lower quality" than the head, for lack of a better term.

This is so bad I don't think I'm ever taking Red's shirt off ever again if this is how he looks in dim light. I know Roes are far from the most popular race but sometimes I genuinely wonder if they do quality control on them.

Yo what the heck? You look like a melted chocolate bunny. Thats really bad.

[Hatsuoki]

I just noticed that sometimes the sharp shadows only appear in gpose. The first picture was taken outside of gpose, and the second immediately after entering gpose without changing any lighting settings. It's not the angle of the head because I can watch him idle and the sharp shadow never shows up outside gpose but is always visible in gpose. This harsh lighting is making it really difficult to plan out angles because I can't tell when it's going to be bad unless I go into gpose over and over (and even then, it's hard to avoid).

[Moonfallen]

So I was toying with glamours and noticed something odd and took off my shirt and.... what....am I looking at? the lighting is so bad it looks like I'm wearing one of those "fake muscles" skinsuits. The textures between the head and the torso are different, the colors feel different, some parts look smeared like it was mildly photoshopped (I didn't). Overall the torso feels of "lower quality" than the head, for lack of a better term.

This is so bad I don't think I'm ever taking Red's shirt off ever again if this is how he looks in dim light. I know Roes are far from the most popular race but sometimes I genuinely wonder if they do quality control on them.

What is not talked about enough is that since they remodeled the head, hands, and feet is that there is a noticeable difference that you can see. The body is that of the old model and has not been reworked as far as I know and have read/heard. The colours now are shades different than they were in EW for EVERYONE and overall which is another HUGE issue. My friend ended up fantaing her character because you could see a noticeable difference and seam where the head/neck, hands and feet connect to the body because they are not the same shade in colouring as before nor are they the same quality (new model vs old). My character's face is the same way. Her face is a completely different skin tone than the rest of her body and it looks like I'm either wearing a lot of makeup, or someone else's face as a mask because the face has been smoothed out like your body looks like here. Darker and lighter skin tones look horrendous in the new lighting like we are varying shades of clay or playdough. They definitely half-assed a lot of things and I think they tried to do way too much in way too little amount of time and refuse to admit fault. Not only is the graphics update rushed with bugs and issues, but so was the story and expansion overall. Ultimately they took on way too much in tasks and should have prioritized quality control over huge amounts of varying content.

[Turnintino]

Only the normal (aka "bump") and diffuse maps have been updated on the bodies; the body models themselves (including hands and feet) haven't been touched (and probably won't be any time soon because of how gear works, as much as I'd personally like to see them updated). Regardless, it's those texture maps that are creating seam issues. Theoretically, that should make this an easier fix, but there were absolutely seam issues before (not all as egregious as some I've seen in DT, but nonethless) that they never bothered to fix in any capacity.

For example, on my catboy, I thought the neck seam was more noticeable before the update. Conversely, I think my dark-skinned (I bring that up because I think it may be a factor) male Duskwight's neck seam is much more noticeable now (on my fem Duskwight, it's more on par with my catboy's seams, for whatever reason). In certain lighting, you can see it very clearly.

[Heavenchild]

Can someone explain to me how for example modders can so easily do better body textures and stuff, while SE can't? This is a serious question. Do they really have so many other limits, that the modders don't have? Isn't it just somehow..., a different bitmap wrapped around a 3D model?

I am also honestly meanwhile very tiered of all the spaghetti code excuses, when it's obvious that the problem is how SE is treating the game, when it comes to available resources and investment.

[azaleai]

Can someone explain to me how for example modders can so easily do better body textures and stuff, while SE can't? This is a serious question. Do they really have so many other limits, that the modders don't have? Isn't it just somehow..., a different bitmap wrapped around a 3D model?

TL;DR: Modders don't have to adhere to the same tech limits SE does to keep the game functioning on low-end systems; SE is trying very hard to toe the line between the game looking nice and not hugely bloated file sizes.

The longer explaination is that game companies want their programs to run on as many different machines as possible, and as well as possible. That will give them the biggest possible audience and fewest people unhappy about the game running badly (bad or unstable framerate, long loading times, too big to download, etc etc). The primary component of this that's relevant in this discussion is that they want to avoid bloating file sizes, so their artists are given very strict limits on tri count (how many faces a model has) and texture size. These people are trained to make these models and textures as optimised as possible, to get as much data as they can into the smallest file sizes feasible.

Modders, meanwhile, are usually the particularly tech-literate sort - most people who know enough about how to edit a game's files or code are the type to have much stronger computers, meaning they're far less concerned about file sizes or bad performance - their computers can handle it far better than a PS4 or low end computer can. So they make models and textures that are far larger and far more system intensive. They also have the luxury of only editing the files for a handful of things - specifically their face/race/gear they use and so on, while SE would have to update every single model and texture in the game to the same standard.

DT and the graphics update alone nearly doubled the game's size; if I recall correctly, my game folder in EW was in the 50-60GB range, it's now almost 100GB. And that's just with the hair and face textures doubled in size - gear textures are the same, we just have better shaders to render the materials rather than altering the texture maps themselves, and we all know gear models haven't changed. The facial rig has a lot more bones in it, which also correlates to the animation files needing to contain more data. The new lighting engine would probably take up a bit more space, too. Even if you were to just estimate ~10GB for the new expansion content like the cutscenes, voice lines, new environments and gear (hard to estimate, since the new content would also be at these larger file sizes), that's still ~30GB just coming from the graphics update, from the hair/face/animation/lighting engine data.

If they were to update all of the environments, characters and gear (both textures and models) to more closely resemble the tri count/texture resolution/visual level of, say, FFXVI, the game's file size would be astronomically large - several times larger than it already is. Far too large to fit on a typical person's PS4's internal storage and likely too large for the average PC's hard drive unless they had literally nothing else on it or were avid about upgrading their tech.

That said... enlarging the body textures and making them more detailed like they have the hair would go a long way to making the update look better; the hyperrealistic pores of some of the faces next to the smooth plasticy low-res textures of the skin on the body look incredibly disjointed. Unlike model changes, that would be able to affect all gear in one fell swoop, so it would be a comparitively small amount of disc space compared to visual improvement. I'm not entirely certain why they didn't consider that to be within the scope of the update already.

[sindriiisgaming]

im just going to leave this here, and say. i want this reversed honestly. the old one was indefinitely better. and if anybody disagrees thats frankly astonishing to me.


6.0 vs 7.0

[Larirawiel]

Can someone explain to me how for example modders can so easily do better body textures and stuff, while SE can't? This is a serious question. Do they really have so many other limits, that the modders don't have? Isn't it just somehow..., a different bitmap wrapped around a 3D model?

The clients of the modders crash also very often. So modding has a an own price. But the more likely reason is, delivering good textures is not a big priority @SQEX. Companies spend money on things, which increase the revenue of a product. And i do not think, that they will sell way more copies of the game because the textures are sharper.

I am also honestly meanwhile very tiered of all the spaghetti code excuses, when it's obvious that the problem is how SE is treating the game, when it comes to available resources and investment.

Spaghetti code falls also under the category: will we sell more copies of the game when we fix the spaghetti code? If the answer is "no" then they will not spend money on it. They will fix things only when they will start losing money because of it. This is how companies operate.



Cheers

[Anarnee]

I just... want her back. I've had a really bad week missing my decade-old character and it's awfully likely I'll never get her back.

I hate the black pupils so much. The red-tone warmth of her skin is impossible to match again in the CC. The rounding of features and washing out of the proper nose mark all hurt.

The black pupils are so awful. All of my characters that had light eyes look like they've got snake eyes now. Which you know would be cool for someone going for that but it doesn't look right. It's Uncanny. It's not so bad with darker eyes because the contrast isn't as bad, but if you wanted lighter eyes it just looks completely different now. One of my male roe faces has lighter pupils still, but they've homogenized most of them.

The skin colors changing has been especially bad too. I don't understand how they made the choice to change everything this much without giving us more options... Darker skin looks washed out and ashy, and any skin colors with vibrancy have been dulled.

And yeah the rounded noses on Roe drive me bananas. If we wanted that style of nose all the other races have that. Why make them so bulbous? Roe have sharp features in all the art, but now they want them to have Hyur nose?! They might as well not have a selection for Hellsguard/Sea Wolf since they snatched the marks right off our noses.

They did face 2 so dirty.

[Heavenchild]

im just going to leave this here, and say. i want this reversed honestly. the old one was indefinitely better. and if anybody disagrees thats frankly astonishing to me.


6.0 vs 7.0

What did they do to your mouth? D :
Seems like a similar issue female Aura face 2 has. Sorry for you.
We can just hope that they fix those drastical mouthshape changes.