Update on DirectX 11 client?

[Shioban]

Everyone is complaining about animations and I'm just sitting here blind in a screen full of lighting effects and blue snowglobes.

THE BLIDNING LIGHTS

[Sheer]

I understand what you mean especially if you consider "because we want to" as a reason, honestly, as I've said before while it feels they took steps forward they took many steps backwards.

Assuming that the development team took away good features "because they wanted to" is rather inconsiderate. We don't know how long those little features actually take. We don't know how taxing those little features were on the game's optimization unless they tell us - for example, like Yoshi-P mentioned in his seventh letter from the producer LIVE:

A: The running animations are already different. As for the fighting animations, if we think about the future classes/jobs that we will be adding, there's a chance that we won’t have enough memory to include all the animations. Therefore, we would like to first focus on stuff like adding new classes/jobs and making preparations to increase the level cap.

Instead of fighting animations, we are thinking about showing each race's individuality via emotes and such. Starting from Beta phase 3, facial expressions will be implemented. Unlike the standard emotes, these new emotes will only change the expression of the character's face. Please note that these new emotes can be used in conjunction with the standard emotes.

In other words, we're constantly thinking about ways to update the game in the most efficient manner so we want to pick the best way to show off each race’s individuality.

[See the question at 1:42:30 for source.]

We don't know how assets from FFXI differ from ARR; how these assets affect performance and push hardware limitations. We could assume that FFXI is better optimized than ARR simply because it's been around longer, but even then, I wouldn't be surprised if they used different programming designs. So how would we then judge "optimization"? Simply by better FPS on weaker machines? Or the relativity between the features and the performance on lower-end machines?

My point is, as players, we're incredibly blind and short-sighted as to what happens from a technical standpoint. FFXIV: ARR is the reason the team working on it gets paid; not only are they employed because of ARR, but a number of the staff also play the game. Why wouldn't they want to make a game they play the best they can?

[Shioban]

We don't know how assets from FFXI differ from ARR; how these assets affect performance and push hardware limitations.

The overall gemoetry and texture memory weight of FFXIV is much higher than FFXI.
Sound, Animations, Textures, UI. Everything has a higher impact than FFXI.


This is my job from a technical standpoint, trust me on that which is why I keep mentioning limitations.

[Sheer]

The overall gemoetry and texture memory weight of FFXIV is much higher than FFXI.
Sound, Animations, Textures, UI. Everything has a higher impact than FFXI.


This is my job from a technical standpoint, trust me on that which is why I keep mentioning limitations.

Right. But perhaps my point was misconstrued - what I meant was that we don't know the scale of that affect, thus, we can't properly gauge the difference. If studying CS and DA has taught me anything, it's that different teams will always do things differently (which is exactly why that, unless you're on the development team, we really don't have much a clue except the basics - for example, as you mentioned, higher quality assets lead to a tax on performance and push limitations).

[misterrpg]

Oh god, there is so much wrong stuff here.

Anyone saying that 2.0 looks better than 1.0 you're absolutely wrong. You're just wrong. You can't even argue it. 1.0 in all technicalities has better textures, lighting, water effects, etc. than 2.0. 1.0 used a different graphical engine that favored more powerful machines. 2.0 was built with the PS3's limitations, not PC's.

Also, all of those giving me random dates, nice sources. You forgot to list them.

Ugh, this community...

[MageBlack]

1.0 may have had better textures and more player animations but the world was bland and uninteresting. It was how they justified the copy paste terrain and animation lock. just a personal preference, I'll take 2.0's combat speed, gorgeous world, beautiful lighting, and the ability to jump, over 1.0 any day. then again, some people will never be happy no matter what we have...

[misterrpg]

1.0 may have had better textures and more player animations but the world was bland and uninteresting. It was how they justified the copy paste terrain and animation lock. just a personal preference, I'll take 2.0's combat speed, gorgeous world, beautiful lighting, and the ability to jump, over 1.0 any day. then again, some people will never be happy no matter what we have...

I love how if anyone says 1.0 was better in ANY way, then we are classified as "trolls". Ugh, you're disgusting. Many people firmly believe that 1.0 was a better game, period.

[Mavlok]

I love how if anyone says 1.0 was better in ANY way, then we are classified as "trolls". Ugh, you're disgusting. Many people firmly believe that 1.0 was a better game, period.

Apparently not too many, since it flopped and ARR succeeded.

[KuroNoKaze]

then again, some people will never be happy no matter what we have...

Maybe different people just have different tastes?

I'll take 2.0's combat speed, gorgeous world, beautiful lighting, and the ability to jump, over 1.0 any day. then again, some people will never be happy no matter what we have...

Mh. I'll take the combat system and animations (including animation lock) from 1.23, the zone size and no loading screens from 1.x coupled with the zone design from ARR, the story from 1.x and the UI from ARR. To go, please.

[Alhanelem]

animation lock is bad. Period. It's never, ever, ever, ever a good thing- its unrealistic and illogical- the game froze your character when it makes perfectly logical sense for your character to be able to move in various ways- it even froze you when *other people* did things to you *unless* you were already moving, which felt very glitchy and buggy. ARR story blows 1.0 story out of the water. What we saw of the original 1.0 story was pretty much garbage except for the introductory quest cutscenes. The good parts were the ones Yoshida created for the 7th umbral era (which existed only to lead into ARR)