The "Letter from the Producer LIVE Part II" Video & Q&A Summary Released!

[Arkine]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/30508

About time.

[Betelgeuzah]

Good improvements over the previous one. Timestamps for one.

[Soukyuu]

Hmm.

Q: You're displaying concept art in the slideshow behind you. I noticed that the white mage was shown with her hood both up and down. Will players be able to toggle between these looks?

A: We're nearly at the final stage of implementation. Testing continues, but we've been informed that this will be very difficult to implement.

Why? How is it different from /display head [on|off]?
You could even make it an action that only appears if you wear something with a hood.
I thought they would stop with such lame excuses after moving to v2.0

[Teakwood]

All /display head [on|off] does is toggle whether the game renders your helmet.

Hoods that can go up or down require: a) a 'hood up' and 'hood down' set of resources for the entire piece of armour, and b) the ability to assign two seperate sets of resources to the armour and have them be toggled by the player, which is a fairly deep-level change, which explains why they are having trouble with it.

I do hope they have stuff like this for 2.0, it's the sort of thing that makes sense to roll in on a systematic re-design of everything. It's non-trivial, though, so I can see why it's not an immediate priority.

[Delsus]

As was said before /display head on/off just forces the game to render the head (or not in the case of /display head off), for that to work the WHM hood would have to be a seperate piece, which with /display head off would look bad, the only way they could do it by using 1 dat for the gear would be put animations in for each gender of each race and animations take time and resources to make, then they have to add the animations to pull the hood up and down to each gender of each race, this would take time and resources to do, while hard it is possible to do so we could see it after 2.0 when the devs should have a bit less work to do and they can put the resources into it.

[Holland]

Thanks for the translations Community teams!. I'll check the letter later today at work!.

[Soukyuu]

There is a difference between creating one model for a hat piece and then allowing you to display or not display it, and creating a robe that allows you to have it's hood down or up.

Solution: create ONE model, add animation of pulling down the hood, save state.

[Jennestia]

Solution: create ONE model, add animation of pulling down the hood, save state.

Too bad it's not that simple in an MMO environment. It's not just "one" model when it comes to player characters.

[Soukyuu]

Too bad it's not that simple in an MMO environment. It's not just "one" model when it comes to player characters.

How is it different from what we have now? We have models of clothes with hoods and they don't lag your PC more than other equipment.
It would be the same model just "deformed". You don't have to load multiple models, only save a binary flag which will just execute the animation of pulling the hood down if the user has set it to "down" @logon for example. It doesn't affect memory overhead, unless you call one bit "overhead".

[Delsus]

Solution: create ONE model, add animation of pulling down the hood, save state.

So which on the ONE races gets this divine privelige? also which gender get it as well because they need different models for each gender and race so your solution has just increased the dev's workload by 13 times? just a quick count of races and genders (btw highlander hyur =/= midlander, they need different models for each clan as well).

When you look at it this asthetic change with the workload for the devs is not an efficiant use of thier time, they already have too much to do.