One to Fifty, One Zone - Long OP

[Petori]

Everyone wants loading screens back? What is this insanity?

In case you haven't realized, there are "loading corridors" all over Eorzea, I rather wait & get zones with more variety than run these corridors and get same terrain everywhere.

[charliesheen]

In case you haven't realized, there are "loading corridors" all over Eorzea, I rather wait & get zones with more variety than run these corridors and get same terrain everywhere.

Indeed, I am aware! And it is through these loading corridors that they would be able to provide the more distinct landscapes within 'zones' that we crave.

[kurokawa]

Loading screens, no loading screens, meh. No one will care if the game has variation and a progressive way of adventuring as you rise through the ranks.

This thread calls for an environmental design change. How that change happens isn't the point.

Are they going to change the copy paste landscapes and introduce real character to the land of Eorzea, or are they limited to adding a few camps and dungeons?
If they can't change it, why are they limited? Is it cost, manpower, Memory or the actual engine?
Will the starter area landscapes stay the same?
Whats the deal with everything being copy paste?
Will new areas be better thought through?
Will every camp look similar in future??
Do they agree that leveling from 1-50 in a barren canyon is most people's idea of hell?
Are they going to shoot the person who thought it was a good idea?
When?

[charliesheen]

Minions, let me be clear. I understand that you all want distinctive areas to adventure in. I also seek this ultimate goal. However the reason they don't have these in place yet is down to lazy designing and nothing more. Split zones with lots of loading screens are not required. Just less copy-pasta terrain that was done in a rushed release.

[kurokawa]

Minions, let me be clear. I understand that you all want distinctive areas to adventure in. I also seek this ultimate goal. However the reason they don't have these in place yet is down to lazy designing and nothing more. Split zones with lots of loading screens are not required. Just less copy-pasta terrain that was done in a rushed release.

I wish you were really Charlie Sheen. Bit sad really isn't it.

[charliesheen]

I wish you were really Charlie Sheen. Bit sad really isn't it.

Everyone needs some Sheenius in their life! #winning

@Chrees: You have my gratitude Sir. Clearly SE have a special way with programming, and by special I mean not very good. So they are incapable of doing it without loading screens... Pitiful. Alas, I will continue playing even if the dreaded loading screens do return. My soul is already possessed by the satanic corporation.

[kurokawa]

My soul is already possessed by the satanic corporation.

LOL, agreed.

They had me at hello. Well, they had me at 'FFXIV will be a seamless world full of adventure'. I believed 'em and all.

I'll be distraught to think that I'm going to be leveling to 75 in the Desert, but I'll do it, like a behest ridden zombie lover.

[Chrees]

@Chrees: You have my gratitude Sir. Clearly SE have a special way with programming, and by special I mean not very good. So they are incapable of doing it without loading screens... Pitiful. Alas, I will continue playing even if the dreaded loading screens do return. My soul is already possessed by the satanic corporation.

Haha, no problem! And I do agree wholeheartedly. People have been complaining about this since alpha/beta, and the answer we got in that interview is probably the only reasoning we'll ever get, regardless of how sucky and/or potentially untrue it might be. All we can do now is hope they find some way around that.

[weeble]

lol u'r right it not snow, had to look at it again. looks like snow to me without enlarging to full screen. still one of my favorite looking areas that i've seen. has a little flavor to it.

[charliesheen]

Haha, no problem! And I do agree wholeheartedly. People have been complaining about this since alpha/beta, and the answer we got in that interview is probably the only reasoning we'll ever get, regardless of how sucky and/or potentially untrue it might be. All we can do now is hope they find some way around that.

Something crossed my mind. I had been discussing another issue with the game last week and now I connected the dots after the information you provided me sunk in.

There is a major issue with how this game uses memory. I discovered it while monitoring my frames per second. In Gridania my fps goes above 90, and in other areas such as near camps, it averages at 60fps with no spikes. However, if I travel to Ul'dah which is always most busy, I had noticed that I consistently get low spikes, sometimes going as low as 30fps which is the bare minimum for smooth play in this day & age.

Now we have all heard the complaints about how demanding this game supposedly is for hardware, while the truth is I can run it on a nvidia 9600GSO with 348MB VRAM at the office. It is the same situation on that inferior PC. outside of busy places the frame rate is more than acceptable yet when I travel to a city, it gets very consistent with spike drops in fps.

Now I bet you are all wondering how I concluded that it is an issue with how the game uses memory. I had almost came to this same conclusion last week, but after reading direct from the mouth of SE that they have issues with the 'cost' of memory, I was able to finally see what the issue is.

Any of you can try this for yourself. In general FFXIV will sit with aprroximately 1GB of RAM usage total (physical + virtual) when you are in a quiet/not-so-busy place, as well as using from your VRAM. If you go somewhere busy such as Ul'dah, you will notice that RAM usage begins to rise. This is to be expected as there are other players around. However, at around 1.7GB total, it stops rising. I've checked this on two systems now and it is always the same behaviour, it caps off at around 1.7GB of RAM usage. Regardless of how much RAM is in your system and whether or not you are using a 64-bit OS, this is where it caps.

Why is that an issue? It's an issue because the game actually needs more memory than this. As it is not taking more, the game is throttling itself. It is creating it's very own bottleneck that ignores the power of your hardware completely. That is why when you are in a very crowded place, the spike drops in fps happen. I can only assume that they put the limit in so that the game would be less 'demanding' on older hardware or where people have less RAM. But taking that into account and their supposed reasons for having to copypaste terrain, it seems that FFXIV is completely retarded when it comes to memory management.

Before anyone says it, of course I'm aware that most games only use 2GB ram max and it's almost like the limit at this current point in time. I'm a warlock, my mind is more knowledgeable than you could imagine. For the record my main PC is i5 running at 4Ghz with 6GB RAM and a 560Ti GPU. The spike lags in the city are absolutely nothing to do with hardware, I don't think we need to investigate any further. This game needs to be completely redesigned from the bottom up if they want to get anywhere with it on the coding side...

Or we can continue waiting months at a time for big updates too.