Curious on new Graphical Engine

[AngryNixon]

Nayt's post at #38 and the longer quote posted earlier seem to end the discussion surrounding this topic and specifically this thread as it is a definitive/informative answer.

It bet it won't though.

[Vaer]

As stated before, in for instance Gamerescape's interview, the luminous isn't intended for MMO's. Though FFXIV uses a rebuilt version of it. They mentioned they want it to be able to display up towards 400 characters simultaneously, which would be quite impressive, I have to say.

That would be ridiculous. Last game I played with no character on screen cap by default was RIFT, and when there were 50+ people fighting the same bazillion HP boss it was a slideshow with all the butt humping and skill/spell effects.

I will have a doubletake if SE manages to bring out an engine that scales well and isn't horribly optimized. Coming from XI, I'm used to their coding. XIV has similar "issues" that XI had.

[Andrien]

Luminos Engine is also being used in Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

[Fear]

Luminos Engine is also being used in Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

only for lighting effects

[Wolfie]

That would be ridiculous. Last game I played with no character on screen cap by default was RIFT, and when there were 50+ people fighting the same bazillion HP boss it was a slideshow with all the butt humping and skill/spell effects.

I will have a doubletake if SE manages to bring out an engine that scales well and isn't horribly optimized. Coming from XI, I'm used to their coding. XIV has similar "issues" that XI had.

RIFT's engine was pretty poorly optimized. WOW and Aion used to have the same problems with displaying lots of characters on screen (WOW raids in early BC were awful, and Aion fortress raids were impossible), but they're at the point where you CAN have 200-300 characters on screen and still have an acceptable experience.

But it took the Aion and WOW devs ~2-3 years to get that kind of optimization. I hope Yoshi's team is good enough to give us optimization on day one.

[Llewelyn]

I suspect that they may decrease the quality of player models when the number of models on screen starst slowing down the game. If each player normally has X triangles to render, so 400 players have 400X triangles, it might reduce it to 200X at the cost of lower quality graphics.

They've also siad, though, that they wanted the number of models to scale with the performance of the machine, so they'll probably just set it to display as many as it can without slowing down the game too much, and the converse is true: when hardware becomes faster, 400 is a possibility

[Teth]

A game engine is not a closed box product. You don't take engine X stick your models and and behaviour routines into it and send a disc to the player.

Crystal tools was a very ambitious project to create and all purpose engine so that multiple Dev teams working for SE wouldn't all be reinventing the wheel all the time.

With FFXIV I think what probably happened was that they used the base crystal tools engine that is used in FFXIII etc in it's entirity rather than examining what it did well and what it didn't do well with regard to an mmo and rewriting those parts. As mentioned before specifically the engine appears to have no level of detail culling and instead has a very dirty solution just having a hard cap on the number of models it will display and for an mmo that's especially silly as it makes towns look empty etc. If PCs with their massive amounts of RAM have this problem the PS3 version would have just been a joke.

It states that they plan to rewrite the render probably to include level of detail scaling so that is uses lower poly models and lower resolution textures for objects and characters in the distance. At the moment it only scales back world textures in the distance. Scaling back shadows is also pretty likely.

From the stuff about model conversion and the fact they are letting us remake our characters we can assume that the models are going to be converted or remade for this new engine. My concern is that the FFXIV models which are some of the most detailed in any game will butchered by this process in the name of making the game console compatible.

Otherwise it all sounds good. A new renderer with LOD support and taking advantage of newer better engineering efforts from the luminious project is great news. The lighting from Luminous looks amazing so hopefully we get some of that.

What I was getting at tho is that what we commonly call an engine is a huge collection of blocks of codes that are heavily interrellated but have destinct functions. They can and will be swapping out and optimizing these blocks rather than starting from scratch.

The Render will include Shadows, lighting, texturing and shader portions that could be replaced or optimized.
Core logic
Animation
NPC behavior
Positioning
Loading and streaming of assets from disc to memory are also major Engine blocks many of which will stay crystal tools based because they are working as intended.

[ellohwell]

Did you not read the part thats been posted? Why the hell would the Dev team alter and reuse the game engine thats holding this game back?....

They've already said they're working with the people who designed the Luminous engine to customize their own version of Luminous for FFXIV

They said they are working with technologists from luminous, not that they are using luminous. They are just going to probably step back and customise what they've already got rather than remake. People want to hear "remake" so that is what SE will have a propensity to say.

Unless they can still preserve all their models and textures with a new engine, and have staff that are familiar with the new thing they build, they will likely just try modify CT.

[ellohwell]

My suggestion if they are indeed making a new engine would be to try eradicate zone lines.

[Raythe]

All I want is better graphics options to help my system performance.. it takes me ages to load and im about 90% sure it's my PC to blame... but I have no money to replace my current one .. Maybe I'll convince the lady to by me a PS3 this spring with taxes and play there next year lol.