How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Jollyy5]

The best we can hope for in the unforeseen future is texture improvements, but I doubt we'll be getting more polygons anytime soon.

As for the animations, they have the technology to give cut-scenes various and complex animations, but that would require more money and effort which would result in them having less resources for other aspects of the game.

[TheVigilant]

Well to be honest, those mods are snake oil (been playing RDR2 alot). The "HD" photos are just shade tricks to make it look better. All it did was darker the lines to make it look more pronounce, not a actually polygon improvement. Here is good example of what I mean, FFXIV PS3 vs PS4. You can actually see the detail changes because the console is rendering more polygons faster giving it a cleaner, clearer look.

Whether it is snake oil or cooking oil, I'd prefer to have those options in settings if the dev don't mind just because I'd like the options to be easily accessible to all even if I get what I want through mods I discover elsewhere. The game currently really needs lighting, shade, texture and polygon improvement regardless of whatever, considering how all the new and upcoming MMOs are beginning to look, I'm hoping FFXIV will have competent graphics vs games like Ascent: Infinite Realm which is also a game that is interesting to me due to the steampunk art, story and environment. There are many people who play games for how they look, I am one of them.

but that would require more money and effort which would result in them having less resources for other aspects of the game.

...Unless SE starts taking care of FFXIV more and stop spending their money elsewhere. In Warlords of Draenor, Blizz said the WoW dev team was doubled and they were training the new staff, and we saw how much the development had increased for the game starting by Legion. Maybe FFXIV deserves the same?

[Jollyy5]

But if they start funding FFXIV better, how will they condemn more big titles to a ten year development hell and release underwhelming gaming experiences?

[TheVigilant]

Anyone can explain this part of the interview?



What did he mean by graphical trends?
What did he mean by their research being quite deep?
What's the difference between technology base and specs?

[Astarotha]

graphical trends theyre talking about things like ray tracing and better shadows, super hd textures, which you cant really do in an mmo because the more assets your computer has to keep up with the bigger your bus bottleneck gets and the less ram you have to work with (for instance the 1gb limit on 32bit os as opposed to ps4s 4gb)
i dont know how deep they mean but any mmo is gonna have some people looking to see if theres any new graphical tricks they can incorporate like how horizon was able to push a shit ton of detail into its world through VERY aggressive culling methods (basically if you cant see it on the screen its not rendered)
your tech base is what people are running the game on, the big problem 1.0 had is while everything was technically within the specs of computers they used a lot of higher definition (ie bigger) textures than they needed to and had far too many items with too many shaders and polygons that it would bog peoples computers down to nothing due to running them out of ram very quickly or getting caught on a bus bottleneck (for instance, flowerpots had the same amount of shaders and polygons as a player character, which adds up quickly in a game where you could have 10 flowerpots and 20 characters all runing around in the same room)

i hate to compare to this but look at wow or ff14 and look at fo76, 76 is able to get that amount of 'detail' and physics and object density because one its a single player game originally but it also limits the number of players on a server to 24 (and even then it still has massive issues sometimes pulling that off), the more max potential players you can have in a server or single area takes resources like ram away from graphics and allocates it toward keeping track of things, and they have to balance that very carefully

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

Keep in mind that art style DOES matter. WoW's art style is more cartoony, lower polygon, and less realistic which is easier to render than the FFXIV's more realistic and higher polygon graphics. FFXIV's graphics blow WoW's out of the water in my opinion but that's not to say that WoW's graphics are bad because they aren't, just that their art styles are different and that difference affects how much rendering power is needed for them.

[Berethos]

There was no butt slider. Ever. The butt difference is a meme, its not even accurate. There was a difference in sizes between the races to a greater extent than now, which the standardized to make gear scaling easier, that is all.

It may have also been a function of lighting and the gear equipped - I'm pretty sure that certain gear right now makes the tush look better/more shapely (Bridesmaids Tights, the shorts from the Lyse set in the store, etc) than in other gear, and as far as I can tell without measuring pixels it's an illusion.

Then again, even now it could be like how some gear augments the chest area or flattens it beyond what was chosen on the character creation screen.

[Berethos]

Thanks for sharing, though a spoiler, I'm glad to see it
But why can't the in-game dialogue scenes be with similar movement versatility? the characters struggle to move, it seems they're struggling to focus their resources only on the most major and biggest scenes while in most of the scenes there is only movements in the neck, the lips and eyes

And I hope you're not dodging my question regarding the jaggedness of the hairs of characters and lack of texture in the majority of scenes, it's like the characters are only designed to be seen from far but then we have to see them from up-close most of the time due to the scenes

Scenes in FFXIV overwhelmingly use scripts to have the characters act out physical emotes that are possible in the game (WoW doesn't have nearly the amount nor the detail of animated emotes we have access to in-game), largely because it actually uses our characters in those scenes. Whatever we are wearing, etc., it's our character being controlled as part of that scene. They've gotten better at this, and you can see recent (like 4.0 and onward, and there's a couple in 4.4 that really stand out) scenes where custom, scene only animations are used (a character move to start jogging, and instead of just starting to run they lean into it and transition into a jogging motion much more naturally).

The nice looking scenes in WoW are not done this way (you'll notice you'll never see a WoW player character appear in these) as they are done ahead of time. It's using the game engine, true, but it's dressed up in the way a video maker might do so in a machinima video. It's all custom animation, custom lighting, carefully synced, the works...using the game engine itself as a base, but not rendered in real time. These both take time and can't show the player character. For a game like WoW, wherein you play a champion that is involved in the story but where NPCs are the main characters, that works. For FFXIV, where you are the main character, that obviously wouldn't work...unless everyone looked the same, and that definitely isn't going to work either.

Here's an example of their attempt at in-game scenes, using what tools are available to render a scene in real time: https://youtu.be/MJlHr-nPxtI?t=433

It's a significant drop in quality, using limited non-combat emotes as animations with some limited custom arm placement, and some thought-out camera placement to improve the overall effect. Also, not a facial expression outside of the default in sight, heh.

And that link even comes with an example of their pre-rendered stuff using the game engine, so you can easily compare the difference.

we saw how much the development had increased for the game starting by Legion. Maybe FFXIV deserves the same?

What Legion got reminded me of the amount of stuff that game would get during the typical patch cycle during Wrath, Cata, and MoP...just with a shorter gap at the end between the last major content patch and the next expansion (7 months instead of what had grown to be anywhere from 10-14 months). Considering we already get patches on a tighter schedule, I'm not sure we have enough additional info to make any real comparison of what they got versus we could theoretically get by doubling the staff.

[TheVigilant]

Keep in mind that art style DOES matter. WoW's art style is more cartoony, lower polygon, and less realistic which is easier to render than the FFXIV's more realistic and higher polygon graphics. FFXIV's graphics blow WoW's out of the water in my opinion but that's not to say that WoW's graphics are bad because they aren't, just that their art styles are different and that difference affects how much rendering power is needed for them.

Once again, I'm not convinced with the excuse being the art style when Kingdom Hearts uses the same art style but gives us the same hair but much better rendered and clearer from up-close and this goes for rest of the body as well.
Before judging please open both images in their full sizes to see what it looks like on my 4K+ resolution 28" UHD monitor:

KINGDOM HEARTS:



FINAL FANTASY XIV: STORMBLOOD:



Now have a look at how players are able to fix the hair issue with a mod:



Remember to right click and view the images in their REAL SIZE (not the minimized forum version here) to see what I mean, open the SB screenshot and click on it to zoom in, I play in 4K resolution on a 28" UHD monitor, that's why I can see it.
The KH character looks like something that can be found in FFXIV and viewed zoomed in for a cutscene yet is almost CRYSTAL CLEAR when in the FFXIV cutscenes, all characters look as if they were made to be viewed in lower resolution than mine or to be viewed from far, when I see them in the game from far they look great but when the cutscenes happen I have to notice them over and over again and while I just live with it anyway, I have to notice and be distracted by it over and over again, keeping in mind that FFXIV is a very story oriented game filled with cut-scenes and dialogue scenes every now and then.
This issue I can also see with the fonts on the loading screens when entering zones, they look like they were logos done in a lower resolution than mine and then expanded to fit the screen size.

It's even more apparent on some characters armor in situations in cutscenes such as this:



The issue remains in my opinion, possibly either that it is in the modeling or textures, and for the animations it may be that the models require more bones in general, as I saw some of the characters can express things through their faces and bodies harder than other characters, and that hopefully there can be much more tweaking done to the game's engine, for the sake of the game in the long-term, which is what this thread is about in the first place.

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

Kingdom Hearts is not an MMO.

It doesn't have to contend with potentially hundreds if not not thousands of players at a time. Art Style has less impact on performance for a single player game or small number of players than for a massive multiplayer game. But even moreso you're dealing with characters that can be customized vs characters that have set models or a set selection of variants.

But perhaps art style isn't the right phrase because I consider that to cover things like textures and models and animations. WoW's player models are simpler (models, textures, animations, etc) and less realistic looking than FFXIV's and because of that they have less impact on the game's performance. I'm not saying FFXIV can't be optimized more, in fact I would really like it to be. I find it frustrating that adding something as simple as some new face options to each race is problematic for SE.