Grass

[Shougun]

Dat grass...

Aww dont be that way Vil lol - you have such close attention to language detail dont tell me your eyes see no difference here

[Vilhem]

Lol I've never been bothered by the grass topic as much as others have. Yes I did notice the difference ^^

[Shougun]

I can get its a low priority but when FF graphics are renowned and Yoshida himself said they strive for the best looking MMO, I cant understand such the derision against the grass thread.. because it just burns my eyes to look how old it is.

I guess most people are probably looking at their character or the distance because I'm look around me going.. whew.. this could use some morrowind mods to make it look better (which is kind of makes me feel sad for Yoshida saying "best looking MMORPG").

It obviously wont kill gameplay because it is just grass, but it does add a massive aesthetic value when completed properly across all environments. I mean looking at the third and fifth photo (the fourth is of an earlier closed beta of the same game).. the flora detail adds a massive amount of value - even though really the textures are not so set apart and the character detail is less.

[AlexNiculaie]

It's a video game. Who the hell really cares that much about what the grass looks like grass. I can honestly say i have never heard anyone ever talk about the way grass looks in a game. Ever. Seriously, this is such a waste of forum space.

[Shioban]

I'm gonna post what I did last time: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/...lacement_Grass

Creating the Illusion:
They are most likely using this or some form of displacement grass.
When adding in grass you need to use either sprites or polygonal objects, this creates a problem, grass is dense, so the more grass you add the bigger the performance hit, add in a small area with grass and the difference in the overall rendering performance is phenomenal.

To avoid this we use illusions such as displacement grass, this reduces the rendering cost whilst being able to populate a reasonable amount of grass.


Texture Size

The size of a texture can also create a performance problem. The more individual textures, the more memory that is required. Once we start bumping up the resolution of each texture we start to see a performance hit.



As you can see the jump as we go up another power of two, is huge. An MMO needs to be smooth, you all know this. "God dam I cant tell whats going on, trucking lag"!

Texture sizes for example go:

128*128
256*256
512*512
1024*1024
2048*2048 [Very infrequentley]
4096*4096 [Never]


For an MMO, you have to consider a broad range of hardware, storage requirements, client distributions and downloads.
The ARR team have taken all these typical development norms and applied them to FFXIV:ARR. It's simple mathematics, although "some" or "most" may be capable of a higher quality game its a safer bet to tone-down to the aveage.

[Shougun]

It's a video game. Who the hell really cares that much about what the grass looks like grass. I can honestly say i have never heard anyone ever talk about the way grass looks in a game. Ever. Seriously, this is such a waste of forum space.

Yeah so character models can look like crap too, and the buildings.. No wait.. they cant.

People who post like this have no idea what they are talking about. Every element is important. You dont halfass things.

[Vilhem]

Yeah so character models can look like crap too, and the buildings.. No wait.. they cant.

People who post like this have no idea what they are talking about. Every element is important. You dont halfass things.

I agree, there are people with an eye for everything, including grass.

Though I cannot say much because of NDA, I think you should wait until beta rolls around to see the difference. I'm 100% sure it'll be there

[Gramul]

It's a video game. Who the hell really cares that much about what the grass looks like grass. I can honestly say i have never heard anyone ever talk about the way grass looks in a game. Ever. Seriously, this is such a waste of forum space.

He's entitled to have his own views about the games direction and express them. He clearly feels passionate enough to share his views in depth and try to communicate his viewpoint to the rest of the community so he can reach an understanding, and while I don't agree with the importance he puts on it, I totally see his point. The fauna encompass a pretty large chunk of the game and it's there to add to the aesthetic. If its of substandard quality, you get a substandard aesthetic flair, and why would we want that when so many other MMOs can pull it off.

I certainly wouldn't call it a "waste of forum space".
Especially with the accursed "meme" thread still active.

[Shioban]

Yeah so character models can look like crap too, and the buildings.. No wait.. they cant.

People who post like this have no idea what they are talking about. Every element is important. You dont halfass things.

Its normal for an MMO, even under the brand name of Final Fantasy to make compromises like this. Performance is always a concern over visual fidelity. No matter how much baby rattles his cage, its always the first consideration, "Will this impact gameplay?" In theory it could, yes.

Another problem may be that there 'are' no high resolution textures for the grass, they may have been produced at that resolution (unlikely) therefore making it a task of re-doing all the displacement textures.

Also, grass isn't really high on the "To-Do" list for a 2-year game remake, i'd say.

"Just saying"

[Shougun]

Its normal for an MMO, even under the brand name of Final Fantasy to make compromises like this. Performance is always a concern over visual fidelity.

Sure compromises happens but at what point should they exisit? SE, through Yoshida, has already stated their goal is to make the best looking MMORPG.

If anything I'm helping them achieve their goal by saying hey, you guys, your fuana, your flora, its pretty old looking.

Their compromise is that of a next gen 2005 game. At least the use of transparency and a different model style to begin with would have looked better. The way the flora is now reminds me of WoW's where its all disparate distinct elements that dont flow with the enviroment (of course they have tried to update that over time - I'm talking its original stuff, thats how I feel of ARR's).

@Gramul, thanks for the understanding.