How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Liam_Harper]

To be fair the last time I took a small FF break to play WoW it was sort of like looking at your old drawings from 10 years ago. You know, the ones you were proud of then and thought looked really cool. Then you look at them now and cringe a little. Coming back to FF felt like coming home.

[TheVigilant]

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 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 that 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.

Now I can agree with you that it comes down to either the genre or the engine, and not the art style.
Why is it hard to add a new face option to each race?
Is there any official word about this?

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

Now I can agree with you that it comes down to either the genre or the engine, and not the art style.
Why is it hard to add a new face option to each race?
Is there any official word about this?

I am not a game designer or engineer so I don't have the specifics but I do know it has something to do with how many different details can be displayed at once. I am probably not going to explain this well but...

Imagine Limsa has 30 players gathered around the Aetheryte. There's currently 5 races each with 2 variants so thats 10 possible different racial types. Even though some have only minor differences like skin color or eye irises, others like the Hyur have a more notable difference in body. Then there's like 4 or so different faces for each race. Then there's 2 genders for each. Then there's other details like make up/tattoos/tails. Then each of those players is wearing different gear. Each of those 30 players can look very different from the other both in model and gear and the more differences there and/or the more players there are the bigger the load on the server.

All those differences eat up resources and the more players you have, especially if gathered in one area, the more effort the engine has to put out to keep up. A game where there is only one player character or only a few player characters that are pre-rendered and don't change or have limited options to change their appearance eats up MUCH less resources. This is one reason why single player games can look so much better than MMO's. So I imagine that more face options means more differences which means more work for the engine to do and more data eating up bandwidth.

It's a sad truth that despite the advances in technology we are still hamstrung by the tech of our time. Can you imagine if/when a new type of wireless internet is developed so people across the globe have equal ping no matter how remote they might be located from the main server? Or how much more graphically realistic MMO's could look without bandwidth limitations? Gaming 100 years from now will probably be amazing.

[KisaiTenshi]

Though it would be hard for most players to know this well, I'm wondering how good is the supposed "sibling" engine of Luminous that was chosen for FFXIV in 2.0 and how much innovation and upgrade can be done to it and how it would do in the long run? Seeing as how WoW's engine successfully managed all the improvements being added to the game for more than a decade, I'm hoping the FFXIV dev team chose the engine that will keep FFXIV aging well and still competent in the long run in gameplay-wise, graphics-wise, so on.

The problem with V1.0 is that they were aiming for PS3 using a game engine that was already designed for the PS3. The problem is that the 1.0 PC engine was broken on day 1, using techniques that may have made sense on the PS3, on PC hardware that can range from being PS2 level to present-day hardware.

In fact you can run the V1.0 benchmark on todays hardware.

Much of what was better in 1.0 is nostalgia-tainted. Yes the models were far more detailed, and would have been appropriate in a single-player game. However bring multiplayer into it, and guess what, that engine falls apart pretty darn quick.

It's actually somewhat of a miracle that ARR was pushed out in such a short time as it was. How they did this, was grinding down the detail of the V1.0 models, or abandoning parts of the 1.0 inventory.

As for "butt slider"-meme, it's just pointing out where one piece of detail was sacrificed to reduce the complexity. Most people don't care about the size of the butt, it's the fact that the the Miqo'te tails are always clipped, and the Au Ra tails are clippped, shows us why this change was a bad change. Would I have preferred a larger butt on my character? Nah, not really, but the clipping on the tail annoys me a lot and it means I pick gear that the clipping is less obvious. If every piece of gear had a proper tail cut-out I think people wouldn't even notice.

FFXV (15) uses the same game engine as XIV. But you have to realize that the XIV game came out before XV did. And you'll notice where this code base is in common because if you play FFXV PC maxed out... it's so much more buggy than FFXIV... and why is that? Because it literately outstrips the capacity of the highest end hardware. Sound familiar? That's what happened with XIV 1.0 PC using the FFXIII engine.

However you can scale back hardware requirements on XV, where XIV 1.0 you pretty much couldn't. Not unless you wanted to run it at a illegible resolution.

[Shurrikhan]

I am not a game designer or engineer so I don't have the specifics but I do know it has something to do with how many different details can be displayed at once. I am probably not going to explain this well but...

Imagine Limsa has 30 players gathered around the Aetheryte. There's currently 5 races each with 2 variants so thats 10 possible different racial types. Even though some have only minor differences like skin color or eye irises, others like the Hyur have a more notable difference in body. Then there's like 4 or so different faces for each race. Then there's 2 genders for each. Then there's other details like make up/tattoos/tails. Then each of those players is wearing different gear. Each of those 30 players can look very different from the other both in model and gear and the more differences there and/or the more players there are the bigger the load on the server.

All those differences eat up resources and the more players you have, especially if gathered in one area, the more effort the engine has to put out to keep up. A game where there is only one player character or only a few player characters that are pre-rendered and don't change or have limited options to change their appearance eats up MUCH less resources. This is one reason why single player games can look so much better than MMO's. So I imagine that more face options means more differences which means more work for the engine to do and more data eating up bandwidth.

It's a sad truth that despite the advances in technology we are still hamstrung by the tech of our time. Can you imagine if/when a new type of wireless internet is developed so people across the globe have equal ping no matter how remote they might be located from the main server? Or how much more graphically realistic MMO's could look without bandwidth limitations? Gaming 100 years from now will probably be amazing.

How is it that another MMO with 41 sliders worth of 100 points of precision each manage to render 80+ players at a time, then? I'll admit it bogs in those times, but those fps drops are scarcely more than those of XIV despite the orders of magnitude fewer options in the latter.

[Astarotha]

because thats not a problem of server traffic, where youre receiving character data with lines like 42,45,51,91,24,05,15,15,15,25,25,25 all telling your client what to render, the problems come when you either run out of BUS speed (bottleneck) or you run out of ram allocation, or you overtax your graphics card (usually its the other 2 that run out first)

also when the devs say they cant increase something due to server stability concerns, those packets constantly hitting and leaving the server is what theyre talking about, now other than keeping track of the position of all those values at once and making sure they are consistent the server has no need to render anything at all, but any time they add more data to track its actually an exponential increase if it involves data others can see and a doubling of traffic if youre the only one that can view it

[Berethos]

How is it that another MMO with 41 sliders worth of 100 points of precision each manage to render 80+ players at a time, then?

Name an MMO that does, and you've got an MMO that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work, or one that runs poorly.

[Alien_Gamer]

Why is it hard to add a new face option to each race?
Is there any official word about this?

The official word is that the game engine can't support it and it would require a massive overhaul to make happen and currently its not seen as a priority.

snip

You're not wrong in that more polys equals more resources but thats not where the limitation is. The limitation is in how they build character data and reference it.

Basically each race has X (I haven't counted them but lets assume 40) number of customization slots available to it. Most races have the same number of slots for faces, height, tattoos, color, etc, all of these options take up 35-40 of those slots leaving only a handful for other unique attributes like tails or muscle sliders. How character models are built defines how a lot of other parts of the game engine behaves such as physics, gear, animations etc; essentially this is one of the foundation stones of everything else. For them to change it means changing everything its connected to.

As an analogy this is like saying you want to make a basement wall in your house 2 feet taller. It sounds simple until you realize everything thats built on that wall that will be affected by it.

As to why they did it this way? Restrictions left over from 1.0 possibly or a lack of foresight to see people might want more options or a bit of both. When 2.0 was in development MMOs didn't really have a lot of customization options for races so it may not have been seen as an important thing to develop and when 1.0 had a perfectly servicable framework already...why make the effort?

Textures are a bit different though. PS3 and lower power PCs were definitely the restrictioin that made them go with textures that were much lower resolution. And thats not really a bad thing in my opinion, however what I do have a problem with is that they made the original texture files in that lower resolution instead of making a high res version and downsampling it to what they could effectively use. Thats also why a high res texture pack isn't being offered now; the files don't exist. They would have to effectively recreate every piece of artwork in the game at a high resolution and thats something that could take a year with several artists working on it. Thats a huge expense for something that not many people want. I think most players would appreciate better textures but few are saying it should be a priority so for SE, this isn't a priority to develop.

[Alien_Gamer]

Name an MMO that does, and you've got an MMO that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work, or one that runs poorly.

Black Desert Online has a character creation menu thats almost beyond belief and the game is popular enough that it will have that many players together. For all its faults it is a very visually impressive game.

[kikix12]

Can you imagine if/when a new type of wireless internet is developed so people across the globe have equal ping no matter how remote they might be located from the main server? Or how much more graphically realistic MMO's could look without bandwidth limitations? Gaming 100 years from now will probably be amazing.

It's not wireless, but there actually is the technology that allows much lower PING all around the globe. And it's also the same technology that have significant bandwidth potential, so much that used enough it would make even DDoS attacks irrelevant. It's called fiber optics. You're not going to get anything faster than light, after all.

It's just that the old technology is all around the world already, so it's "free" at this point. New technology costs. And a lot to boot. No one wants to invest billions of whatever currency only to be expected to "rent" their network to others for pennies, either (because that's the law), making the investment potentially impossible to return itself. That's part of the reason why you have ISP companies illegally coming to agreements on the regions they work in. So that they know their investments will pay for themselves with time.

The problem is that the countries leave technological advancement of that sort to individual, private-owned companies, while they should lay down the foundations for a new network with these companies only making the hubs and connections between these hubs and the overarching network. But, of course...it's more important to invest money in religions (which are among the richest companies in the world), election campaigns, new "business" cars for the politics to replace their last-years models etc.