New hrothgar hairstyles are really bad.

[Akimori]

It's been almost two weeks and I've yet to come across any Hroths with the new hairstyles. You would think there'd be more Hroths sporting the 2B hairstyles.

Im personally using the Snow hairstyle with the tamamo band (Because ear physics!)

[reivaxe]

What Reivaxe is saying is that the 4 heads' proportions are not standardized. The most noticeable discrepancy are the ears, Hroth ears' placement/ear size + shape vary between the 4 heads. If you plopped the heads into a 3D program and imposed them on top of each other the point where they meet the head would not line up. Thats what "uniqueness" they are talking about.

I don't have maya on this computer anymore so apologies for less technical examples

Imagine blue lines are standardized features and red are unique features

Every other race has a fixed place where its [non human feature] meets the head, be it horns or animal ears. The heads are uniform, the faces are more like face plates on nendos. If I were modeling a hairstyle for male Miqo'te, I would only need 1 male Miqote model because options 1, 2, 3 and 4 are uniform. It wouldn't matter if a user played the old man face or the Graha face, their heads + ears are standardized so hair will line up the same on their head regardless.

In comparison, Hrothgar are more unique than they are standardized. Some ears have wider bases, some sit higher on their head, etc. Its more difficult to make a one size fits all hairstyle across their 4 faces, which is the how/why we got earless Hroth hair: they went for a simple one size fits all solution...which as we've all seen, doesn't really look good.

Thanks, I also don't have the programs needed to show this, so I've been trying to walk people through this for some time with just words with lil luck.

Hrothgar were only allowed to be made this way because YP told the team to not worry about making them compatible with hats and sharing hair (Again, something I hope they learned not to do with female Hrothgar). It gives them more freedom to make the faces look very different and very animal like, but it makes backtracking pretty damn hard with mixed results, as we can see. They don't put in the amount of time and effort custom making hair for any other race that they would have to put into making Hrothgar hair the way people expected/ wanted, so forcing a 1-size-fits-all solution was the most logical and cost-effective way to address these concerns. That's why YP points out that if they do make Hrothgar only hair, they would be far fewer and take far longer.

TBH, we're already seemingly missing our new X.1 hair for normal races because of them working on the hairs that came out for Viera and Hrothgar this patch, who knows if the amount of hair overall would decrease because of w/e attempt to make a new Hrothgar unique hair.

[Kelev]

The most noticeable discrepancy are the ears, Hroth ears' placement/ear size + shape vary between the 4 heads. If you plopped the heads into a 3D program and imposed them on top of each other the point where they meet the head would not line up. Thats what "uniqueness" they are talking about.

Rokke -

Thank you for a lovely explanation here of what's been going on. I've been asking for someone to help me put together a video for YouTube to kind of explain what's going on, and you hit on a lot of points I've been trying to. (If you want to work with me on putting together said video, please contact me on Twitter @kelevvidui because am dumb and can't video good).

I don't want to sound like I'm defending Square - I'm not. Nor that I'm saying the hairdos don't look awful - they do. Or that YoshiP has done a good job of communicating why working with our race is hard - he hasn't. Nor that there's been any QC, that he has played any Hrothgar, that their "research" has gone anywhere, nor that there's any transparency, etc.

But the problem here isn't "spaghetti code." It's something else that in programming is called a "kludge" - it's German for 'clever' - and it's part of the reason things like our ears don't move.

Characters as we look to each other, are actually balls of data, bones and textures and vertices, and the clients render them as fast as they can, and as a result we look like we do. So, in most races, the ears have their own bones, which is how you get Miqo'te ear wiggles, etc. Hrothgar don't. The reason for that is our jaws, which have those "ear bones" int them & give us our squared off faces and whiskers and such. YoshiP is correct - we are unique, and the problem's complex.

And, also, in addition to, YoshiP is doing an INCREDIBLY poor job of explaining why this sucks to work with. And some of that is probably language barrier, and some of it is that he has to talk simultaneously with people who aren't programmers and people who are, and probably that he knows he did something AWFUL TO A BUNCH OF PEOPLE WHO DESERVED BETTER, which is why I believe he doesn't look at the camera and you can see Toshio Murouchi laughing.

I don't believe that he's laughing at us. He looks nervous. Yoshi looks nervous too. And they should. They did a bad, and they need to say they did a bad. But that goes into the PR portion of the evening's program, and not into the programming part.

The problem with kludges (and you can use the word 'hack' here if you like in the good meaning sort-of-way) is that it will invariably bite you on the ass later from a maintenance programming aspect. At some point you will realize that no matter how many times you said "you're not getting any headgear" there will be a little whoopsie-doodle of promising the community some hairstyles at some point, and you're not going to not have the bones to be able to move around.

[Kelev]

And re-use of assets isn't abnormal, and it isn't bad. It's one of the things that makes their deployment of gear faster and I don't mind it. But there are limits to how far you can re-use before stuff gets weird. The Roe muscle slider, for example, is our tail-length.

The problem here, as I see it lies a lot in the whole "well modders were able to fix this very quickly, and they don't have your resources." This is true. They did, and they don't have your tools, knowledge, or access to QA.

I have bad news for everyone: Modders are not the answer to this problem.

A modder only has to change things for their screen. Not mine, and not for some person playing on a PS4. It's one of the reasons if you go to a mod site, you can get 4k texture packs, and it's one of the reasons Yoshi has said "we're fixing some items, and you're going to notice some glams look better while the striped shepherd slops still look like they did 6 years ago."

To clarify, there are things like "spaghetti code" like the Friends List or the glamour dresser where nobody really knows how it works any more and that programmer is gone. That's the 1.0 excuse.

The 3.0 excuse is that they used to do the kind of work that needs to be done here which is to design unique assets for different races to make things look right. See below:



You'll notice the hairstyle here is different. The problem is that the kludge they did for the Hrothgar - ears in different places across all the head models and tacked on to the head - means they'd have to do an additional 4 hairstyles for each hair they wanted to implement, hunch or no. Or they'd have to turn on different haircuts that work on Face 2, but wouldn't work because of Face 4's horn.

And they simply don't do that kind of work any more. Which is why I said "All you really did with your 'research' is upgrade your excuse from the 1.0 excuse (spaghetti code, no one really knows how your head works) to the 3.0 excuse (we don't want to do one-off head-specific race-specific work any more) that's why.

The Hrothgar need a re-design from the top down. The "trick" they do to put us in hoods or to put the ears back on the head is just making something invisible - not moving an asset from one position to another. That's probably going to need to move some parts around, and it may involve putting bones where they belong, but it will definitely require some work.

My problem is that when you code in a kludge, the eventual re-work is foreseeable. And it's not something they want to do. And that's why I have dug in my heels and said I DO NOT WANT THE EARS PUT BACK ON THESE CRAPPY HAIRCUTS BECAUSE YOU WILL NEVER COME BACK AND FIX THE PROBLEM CORRECTLY.

So, again, if you want to help me out putting this in a video for err'body, please contact me on Twitter.

[Denji]

Im personally using the Snow hairstyle with the tamamo band (Because ear physics!)

i've considered this but the ears are too big for my liking.

[Aeos]

Bumping for visibility but at this point might as well huff the doomium that we're not getting any meaningful update anytime soon.

[Midareyukki]

@Kelev

Wait... from what you're saying, then them going back and redoing the older races, while commendable, is delaying the innevitable even harder. Hrothgar (and I presume Viera, but the problem seem to be more visible on Hrothgar) should have been the first to get that treatment. Insted they're just leaving it for later, which means even more years of dealing with incomplete stuff. Which in turn only makes me question: and when it's time for the Hrothgar glow-up, will Square Enix finally address every single one of these complaints? From hairstyles to headgear? Or will they just leave them as-is and find a new excuse?

But this is interesting. I know that we've had devs disappearing, it's why we no longer have the Carbuncle glamours. They were implemented once, we asked for more, Yoshida kept being cryptic about it until he told us to stop asking. But this? This sounds like a way bigger problem than it should be. All this is given credence by the fact that when Hrothgar were announced, their Shadowbringers website had to update the Hrothgar render they had because they changed the faces. They were a bit more polished, which implies that even back then, so close to release, these races were still under development.

And we know this happens because SE is known for moving people from Business Divisions around. It's even how 1.0 was made, by bringing in people from different departments together, an "A Team" of people with great skills (and capable of making high-polygon flower vases). Meaning not only were they still developing them, they were either understaffed or had to rely on people that weren't comfortable doing new races to begin with. Especially given the weird "ear polygons in the wrong place" thing as you said.

Firstly, if all you said is correct, then it does mean Square Enix has issues with the new races. It doesn't excuse the way they're treating them, by a long shot. But it does at least illustrate the actual problem, rather than pin the blame on the races like many in the community have done. Square needs to fix this, and properly allocate resources to do so. Because if this 3.0 excuse as you call it keeps being followed, and they don't try to resolve it, it will only continue to cause problems further down the line.

And secondly it just shows that Square needs to tidy up the dev team. I don't mean fire them, because they're talented in their own merit. But it's clear that they're not enough for the projects that they want to undertake. And the longer this continues, the worse the situation will get. Staying quiet won't make the problem go away.

This in itself isn't a problem modders can nor should fix. It's up to Square Enix to make up its mind. Honestly? If you can make a video to at least bring up some awareness about the problem, I say go for it. Perhaps it can get Square to understand that they can't just leave an ongoing project with less and less resources and expect it to survive.

[Zhalar]

Maybe SE should start hiring some of the modders out there...

[DeNada]

I think there are just too few hrothgar players that SE probably doesn't deem it worthy to dedicate more resources to fix their hairstyles properly.

The total percentage of hrothgar players is like what, 1-2% of the entire playerbase? Especially if you compare to viera who are getting more hairstyles which don't hide their ears and look good. If you want fixes to hrothgar hairs, more people should fantasia to hrothgar so it becomes a more prominent issue and SE can no longer avoid it and just implement half-hearted fixes.

[SturmChurro]

I think there are just too few hrothgar players that SE probably doesn't deem it worthy to dedicate more resources to fix their hairstyles properly.

The total percentage of hrothgar players is like what, 1-2% of the entire playerbase? Especially if you compare to viera who are getting more hairstyles which don't hide their ears and look good. If you want fixes to hrothgar hairs, more people should fantasia to hrothgar so it becomes a more prominent issue and SE can no longer avoid it and just implement half-hearted fixes.

Considering the popularity of viera, and the fact that it took them 2 and a half years to even add any hairstyles to them, all I see using a fantasia to change to a hrothgar accomplishing would be giving SE more money. I don't really see this having any sort of change. It's also debatable if the hairstyles on viera even look good. They just look better, because of their head shape.