Drawing Distance, Can we have it?

[DoctorMog]

+50

Your Like button is now broken.

Do Want.

[Coldfire]

Coldfire, I don't think Mipmapping is the issue.

Do you know how mipmapping works and what it does? <.<

[Konachibi]

I was taking a look at this texture wibbling earlier when running around Limsa. I don't think it's mipmapping, it's sort of a 'level of detail' distance. Basically, your 'background drawing quality' option in config works on a scale, as it goes up, it draws the detailed textures for a longer or shorter distance, depending on what you have it set to.

But not just in a 'up to 500m is detail, then out of 500m is less detail' way, it sort of happens in multiple jumps. So say you have it set to standard. For 500 yards you'll have +3 detail, then from 500-1000 yards you'll have +2 detail, then 1000-maximum view distance is +1, which is really pixelated. This gives the illusion of having some giant invisible bubbles around your character, and when things enter those bubble their textures improve untill eventually they get close enough to be drawn in optimal quality.

I think if you could set the detail higher than what the config offers you'd probably be hit with some pretty serious graphical lag, so untill the games engine is tweaked for optimal performance, this is what you'll have to live with.

If it's really that bad turn on 'depth of field', that fuzzes everything out of focus from certain distances and stops the 'texture bubbles' being so noticable. It also chews up a bit of processer so don't be surprised if the games frame-rate nosedives when you turn it on

[Coldfire]

You really should research mipmapping. It's exactly the problem here. Proper mipmapping or mipmapping based anisotropic filtering provides a stepless-looking level of detail into the depth. Without it you have aliasing in the background. With only two levels of mipmapping you have a border between highres and lowres textures. SE implemented their own technique it seems. They only have background and foreground. That's okay for objects if you can't use tesselation, but for textures it looks really bad.

[Konachibi]

I thought anti-aliasing was that thing that smoothed out the edges on 3D objects? How would that effect things in the background?

Also whenever a game offers mipmapping or antistropic filtering graphical options I always turn it off as I've never noticed a difference with it on apart from decreased frame-rates.

Also I thought the 'multi-sampling' option in the games config was for anti-aliasing, since it gives options for 'MSAA' etc.? Wouldn't that make distanced textures look better? (I'm still pretty sure anti-aliasing is all about smoothing 3D edges though.)

[Coldfire]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_anti-aliasing
If you disable mipmapping and texture filtering your game will look reaaaaaally bad. It would have massive aliasing. Besides mipmapping increases the performance at the cost of memory (which modern gpus have more than enough of).
FSAA fixes edge aliasing. Mipmapping fixes texture aliasing.

[Konachibi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_anti-aliasing
If you disable mipmapping and texture filtering your game will look reaaaaaally bad. It would have massive aliasing. Besides mipmapping increases the performance at the cost of memory (which modern gpus have more than enough of).
FSAA fixes edge aliasing. Mipmapping fixes texture aliasing.

Aha... informative. I have learned something new *salutes* So MMAA is makes edges and lines in textures clearer, FSAA makes edges and lines on 3D objects clearer.

I have texture filtering on high at the moment, makes icons and things like much clearer, they looked all fuzzy on standard.

So is there an option in multi-sampling that I could turn on to make the game prettier without it eating my Geforce 210 or frame-rate? At the moment the settings seem to be at their limit in areas like Black Shroud and La Noscea, but if I could beef up the eye-candy without making that worse, I'll go for it (b'.')b

[Coldfire]

You will have to try around to find the right settings. Stuff like texture filtering and anti aliasing mostly depends on the GPU and driver. Sadly SE screwed around with the D3D code and it's almost impossible to override their settings with the nvidia control panel. Same for ATI though. Edge detect AA only seems to work in fullscreen mode for me
Let's just hope they work on the engine some more instead of adding tiny content bits every month that entertain us for a few hours :P

[Konachibi]

Oh I turn off all the settings in the nvidia control panel, usually they just make things worse.

What I wouldn't give for a geforce 460gt :3

[Delsus]

The engine is fine at rendering the 3d images, look at ffxiii which also used crystal tools, the problem is the options the client supports, and also how the client is programmed to render 3d images in the background.

Yes the engine needs work (off topic a lil) but it is not the cause of this problem, the cause is how the client is designed.