Better graphics!

[Coatl]

I think the player models look fantastic, but the enemy models look pretty bad..

[reality_check]

I think the player models look fantastic, but the enemy models look pretty bad..

Yes... just awful.

[Shioban]

A friend of mine was talking about this yesterday I'll say the same thing here as I told him.
I prefer better content over better graphics then better graphics over better content.
More time they take to focus on graphics is time taken away from making content.

Those are pretty much two completely separate departments.

Graphical Improvements are important to the development team and the players, it's considered time well spent to improve the visual dynamics of FFXIV:ARR.
The game is perfectly capable of expanding on what they currently have and improving it, as the hardware requirements for ARR currently are quite (intentionally) low to fit a common demonimator.

The most important factor you need to know is;
NOT EVERYONE IS DOING THE SAME THING.

Hotfix/Bugs TEAM
2.3 TEAM
DirectX11 Client Conversation Adjustments + High Resolution/Uncompressed Texture Adjustments TEAM
2.4 TEAM
Expansion TEAM
(This is just a guesstimate based on what the development team posted a while back, not an exact 'These are the teams')

As content is released, the teams shift, the focus changes, more people are added to teams to smoothly progress the content, this keeps the ball rolling and the work flow smooth.
Hopefully you can see the general idea here, in that one thing can be developed without affecting the speed of other content being produced.

they certainly could fix the horrendous clipping on character models. even the relic weapon is clipping through the af armor like crazy, when at least this one set should somehow work.

From a developers perspective I can guarantee that they'll never fix that, it's as common as muck in MMOs (and games in general), with the large variances in gear sets, weapon sizes/styles ontop of a metric ton of animations, customizing this for each weapon or gear-set would be a tremendous waste of time.

If I'm animating a set of soldiers with varying weapon types, the programming for the position of the actual weapons will be the same for every-gun to save time, some clipping may occur through helmets, back-packs, ass-packs or even the chest on the character model when they're holding the gun. And that's okay. It really doesn't take away from the game that much, and to spend time adjusting it is time better spent elsewhere.


Don't get me wrong, it irritates me to no end, when it happens in my work it drives me nuts but I know that it's not worth the time or effort.

I think the player models look fantastic, but the enemy models look pretty bad..

The current process used to create the character and enemy models for FFXIV:ARR is essentially a process that goes from an extremely detailed 'High Poly' model, which then uses a process called 'Normal Mapping' to apply the detail of the high poly model onto a low poly model as a texture. This way you can have the appearance of high detail at a low rendering cost, allowing more room for other models in the scene.

This is a process that's been used for more than a decade now, and along with a few other texture shading techniques other effects can be achieved to mimic high detail at a low rendering cost.

Here's an example of some of the high-poly models created for FFXIV:ARR;

As you can see below, the object on the left is the sculpted high poly model from which the detail will be referenced, the one on the right is the low-poly model in which the detail will be projected via a set of texture maps.




Here's an example of the 'split' types of maps used to create this detail;




"But how does the normal map work??"

Easy! The 3D detail is saved on an RGB scale (as shown below), based on this information the normal maps will generate detail based on the in-game lightings position and intensity.
It's as simple as that, as the object moves the texture does all the work.




"Why not just use the high poly models??"

Each 'polygon' from a 3D mesh gets converted into triangles for use inside the game engine, each frame the game has to re-render each triangle and update any changes made in the last frame.

Consider all the character models, environmental models, animations and more taking place every-single-frame that the computer is having to process, the less of these the better.



Finding a balance between detail and performance is a key factor in designing an MMO such as this, as you could have up to 100-200 character models on screen at once.

Let's say each charachter model is 2,000 (this is extremely low). That's up to 400,000 polygons already, not including the environment around you.



The process they're using is a professional one and it brings a great deal of detail to the game, they have fantastic artists that put a tremendous amount of work into the game, but there are limitations, but they work for our benefit in the end.

It's not the DX11 client I'm excited about. It's the apparent normal map resolution upgrade that's coming along with/near it.

THIS ^

Times a thousand, blurry nipples BE GONE.