How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Shurrikhan]

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.

BDO, B&S, Moonlight Blade. Within the year, you'll probably see a couple more. Only the first bogs noticeably in its cities -- far more packed than XIV's -- and no more on my comp than XIV does. Each has certain areas of poor optimization, but the characters are not it.

So unless you're saying that spending time on an in-depth character creator specifically sapped resources from optimization polish for waterfalls or the like, and that saving a few more frames in viewing the latter is worth so much more...

[Pluvia]

BDO, B&S, Moonlight Blade. Within the year, you'll probably see a couple more. Only the first bogs noticeably in its cities -- far more packed than XIV's -- and no more on my comp than XIV does. Each has certain areas of poor optimization, but the characters are not it.

So unless you're saying that spending time on an in-depth character creator specifically sapped resources from optimization polish for waterfalls or the like, and that saving a few more frames in viewing the latter is worth so much more...

There are many things you can say about B&S but well optimized isn't one of them that game runs like trash complete and utter trash its optimization is a meme and a well deserved one. This is coming from someone who still plays the game doing the latest raids it runs horribly.

[Dyvid]

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

Wish more people understood like you. If I remember from my FFXI days, every avatar option has to have armor specifically mapped to it in the gaming files. So when a new race comes out, every piece of armor in the game has to be mapped to the new bodies; so when Viera comes out, every head armor needs to be mapped to the head and customized for the new design.

As for super custom avatar, I'm willing to bet most MMORPG use a trick in which the custom avatar you create is localized onto your PC and the actually model transmitted to other gamers isn't as in depth as what you are seeing. I other words, the game would have to upload your custom avatar and download that specific design file to every player you meet and vice versa. All the upload and download would really start slowing up everything and would be almost impossible for console gamers.

P.S. Korean MMORPG has a general stereotype; pretty but shallow. Meaning the focus heavily on graphics and making the game look great that they forgot it's a game and is a hallow experience. There are excepts to the rule of course.

[kikix12]

There are many things you can say about B&S but well optimized isn't one of them that game runs like trash(...)

Its optimization actually is not worse than FFXIV. It is far more PING-reliant, but that's got nothing to do with optimization. If the cooldowns in that game were the same as in Final Fantasy, I'd still be playing it instead of Final Fantasy XIV because it had less issues otherwise being enjoyable enough...while being free. Really, its PING dependency is the only real issue with it.

Unless you want to tell me that my laptop somehow plays a less optimized and more demanding game better than a more optimized and less demanding game...Yeah...no.


The reason why Final Fantasy XIV is so restricted is not to save bandwidth, to ease up calculation costs or to get optimized. It is so restricted because doing it like that provided the developers with tools to make a lot of content at lower money and time expense. However, that comes at the cost of any single change requiring a massive undertaking. In most different games adding a new race that is not just another human is a matter of just going through a rendering of every armor on that race and making corrections only to the parts that look poorly due to the game operating on 3D models. In Final Fantasy XIV every armor needs to be redone from scratch because it operates on textures. Every change requires hundredths of hours making sure that the game will know how to react to it in every single situation. Every emote, every movement, every animation. EVERYTHING. That's why this design sucks. Changing something retroactively is massive undertaking that can require changing several percent of the game.

As for super custom avatar, I'm willing to bet most MMORPG use a trick in which the custom avatar you create is localized onto your PC and the actually model transmitted to other gamers isn't as in depth as what you are seeing. I other words, the game would have to upload your custom avatar and download that specific design file to every player you meet and vice versa. All the upload and download would really start slowing up everything and would be almost impossible for console gamers.

The "model" of a character is actually several hundred bytes at most. It's just a few dozens of numbers that the games engine renders accordingly to a formula that it already has. Every player that have the game have the tools to render such a file.

It really is no different than this game. Except that in this game the numbers are from 1 to 4 or some other small number while in those other games they are from 1 to let's say 100. And instead of a set of maybe 8 numbers, you have a set of 16-20 or so.

[Pluvia]

Its optimization actually is not worse than FFXIV. It is far more PING-reliant, but that's got nothing to do with optimization. If the cooldowns in that game were the same as in Final Fantasy, I'd still be playing it instead of Final Fantasy XIV because it had less issues otherwise being enjoyable enough...while being free. Really, its PING dependency is the only real issue with it.

Unless you want to tell me that my laptop somehow plays a less optimized and more demanding game better than a more optimized and less demanding game...Yeah...no.


The reason why Final Fantasy XIV is so restricted is not to save bandwidth, to ease up calculation costs or to get optimized. It is so restricted because doing it like that provided the developers with tools to make a lot of content at lower money and time expense. However, that comes at the cost of any single change requiring a massive undertaking. In most different games adding a new race that is not just another human is a matter of just going through a rendering of every armor on that race and making corrections only to the parts that look poorly due to the game operating on 3D models. In Final Fantasy XIV every armor needs to be redone from scratch because it operates on textures. Every change requires hundredths of hours making sure that the game will know how to react to it in every single situation. Every emote, every movement, every animation. EVERYTHING. That's why this design sucks. Changing something retroactively is massive undertaking that can require changing several percent of the game.

The "model" of a character is actually several hundred bytes at most. It's just a few dozens of numbers that the games engine renders accordingly to a formula that it already has. Every player that have the game have the tools to render such a file.

It really is no different than this game. Except that in this game the numbers are from 1 to 4 or some other small number while in those other games they are from 1 to let's say 100. And instead of a set of maybe 8 numbers, you have a set of 16-20 or so.

I would not call 30-40fps in a raid optimized the fact you have to turn off all character models to get good fps let alone the fact that on some fights in TT you have to have characters on which in turn drops your fps even more means that the game has really poor optimization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyjfVfo2TRk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se_IHjSF3yo wow such optimization. and these people don't have trash computers.

[Berethos]

BDO, B&S

BDO has aggressive character LoD. Go out more than like 40-50 feet and characters/nps are just black silhouettes. They also reuse a lot of the same models for generic NPCs across the game world.

B&S routinely uses lower/blurry textures for environment art, and most of the early game those zones make FFXIV's look huge in comparison.

so unless you're saying that spending time on an in-depth character creator specifically sapped resources from optimization polish

I said it either runs poorly (which was more of a thing when they first started doing a lot of sliders, like with Aion) OR, and more importantly, that they've made sacrifices elsewhere in the game so that the character creator can allow for sliders while still running well. I'm not sure why you're so focused on just the running poorly part of my comment in your reply.

that made sacrifices elsewhere to get that part to work

Highlighting the important part of my previous comment, since apparently it was overlooked.

As for super custom avatar, I'm willing to bet most MMORPG use a trick in which the custom avatar you create is localized onto your PC and the actually model transmitted to other gamers isn't as in depth as what you are seeing.

This practice caused quite a stir when SWTOR launched, as it did pretty much exactly that...coupled with also downgrading the character avatars when not in a cutscene.

[TheVigilant]

Wasn't their decision to choose an engine they have made for the sake of long-term tweaking and improvements?

[Shurrikhan]

There are many things you can say about B&S but well optimized isn't one of them that game runs like trash complete and utter trash its optimization is a meme and a well deserved one. This is coming from someone who still plays the game doing the latest raids it runs horribly.

I never said it was well optimized. But as the numerous things which noticeably bog its FPS do not include looking many a player in the face, be it in towns out leveling, or 5v5 PvP, or the dungeon loading areas, character customization is not the reason for its poor optimization. Character creation depth and frames per second aren't mutually exclusive except perhaps in this game's particular engine

It's like directly blaming a man's diet for his present condition after he's been knifed several times. It's not a significant factor. That you are dying does not mean you ate poorly. That a game bogs does not mean it's being weighed down by character customization.

[Riardon]

Wasn't their decision to choose an engine they have made for the sake of long-term tweaking and improvements?

Yes but they also don't want t work on improving anything right now.
They most probably waiting for the PS5 release to update the graphics and that would be when 6.0 releases.
If they ever do any substantial graphic improvement.

[TheVigilant]

Yes but they also don't want t work on improving anything right now.
They most probably waiting for the PS5 release to update the graphics and that would be when 6.0 releases.
If they ever do any substantial graphic improvement.

That's also what I could understand from the interview, at least in some way, but they could maybe work on improving small parts especially when creating new assets?