EU Graphical Update Feedback - Hands and Feet

[Ath192]

Our characters in-game are separated into several segments. When we put on say, a pair of boots, it replaces the foot model with those boots, and depending on the size of the boots, may also replace parts of the leg model. Because of this, the game never has to render anything "underneath" the clothing, the model is just outright replaced and Square never has to worry about our characters clipping through our clothes or calculating model data underneath. Some gear does have priority over others if they're fighting for the same character segment, so bulky gloves and bulky sleeves that make use of the same wrist segment on our character are determined mostly by whether or not the chest piece "allows" the glove to overwrite the sleeve.

As for the topic at hand (heh), it takes very little now to render a few extra polygons on hands and feet, so while it may've been a concern in the PS3 and 32 bit days, we're long past that and I think we can handle having toes and rounded fingers, I'm sure a dedicated 3D artist or 2 can handle the necessary glove/shoe models over the next 8 or so months.

I am more than convinced the game can handle this just fine, it’s just they develop a standard and stick to it for sure, so if now is the time when that standard is called into question I want the devs to know this is important to the players and most if not all us are in agreement faces aren’t the only part of the body that need a lot of improvements on detail.

The more we can make them understand this the more chances we get that it doesn’t get overlooked by a company trying to cut a corner somewhere.

[Lusarae]

They just need to drop PS4 support, it is holding us back.

[Larirawiel]

They just need to drop PS4 support, it is holding us back.

I guess, the FF14 assets are still made for the PS3. The PS4-GPU is roughly equivalent to a RTX 1060 or Radeon RX 590. And those GPUs have no problems with highres textures.


Cheers

[Sebazy]

I guess, the FF14 assets are still made for the PS3.

This is the key thing.

For people saying that the PS4 needs to be dropped, remember that these assets come from a time when the game was on a platform that was so extremely resource constrained that they had to remove UI elements just to be able to fit blank unlabelled TP bars into memory.

Moving beyond what the PS4 (Which is mainly expensive shader/effect/post processing workloads that stretch it's memory bandwidth) can offer is a bad long term decision IMO as it rules out the potential for an eventual Switch/Switch 2 port (The current Switch is likely too bandwidth constrained to ever be a viable platform, but the Switch 2 should hopefully address that).

[Aco505]

The entire body of our characters should be upgraded. It would be very strange for them to work so hard on the environment and then keep character bodies the way they are now. If there has to be some kind of priority, it should always start with the latter.

[Tysilio]

While I hope it's not the case, I have a feeling that they won't touch body/gear meshes so that there's less discrepancy between upgraded and non-upgraded gear. There's also much less work to do on existing models as well. After all, there's a full hand mesh for each glove gear (same goes for every gear part except head gear).

A Hyur Midlander's body mesh (torso, hands, legs, feet, without the head or hair) is about 2000 triangles, which is quite low complexity compared to other games (please don't ask how I know this, just assume I'm a magician or something ok?)

A good chunk of this polygon budget goes into the hands and torso as it should, but it's still not enough for big closeups, especially for hands. The feet however... Saying PS2 level graphics is appropriate. It's a good thing that we don't get to see them really often.

More recent gearsets have clearly increased polygon budgets, though. For example, the Far Northern Felted Gloves (obtainable from the Mog Station since Endwalker) has a nicer-looking polycount of 1096 triangles. A Hyur's bare hands is 600 triangles. That's a 80% increase in polycount for the hands since ARR.

[MsMisato]

what you all don't like having sausages for fingers and blocks for feet?

[Tysilio]

what you all don't like having sausages for fingers and blocks for feet?

For some reason, I'm fine with sausage fingers on Lalafells lol. I find that it fits them.

[Ath192]

what you all don't like having sausages for fingers and blocks for feet?

xD no, and the graphics for XI is what ultimately led me to hang up the game. You know things get to a point where they're just too retro to play as a main game, maybe revisit from time to time as a novelty of a bygone era. I love XI but it just felt like everything was too outdated at some point and I stopped playing it. It also made sense with XIV coming out. Hopefully by taking a holistic approach to XIV it can always be relevant. Even if a new FF MMO launches.

[Ath192]

Bumping this.

Mr. Yoshida, PLEASE this is the perfect opportunity, let us dye our finger and toe nails without an item. This is the first picture I've seen and at least the feet look better. I still want some more detail on both the hands and feet here, but they do look better. If you could add a few more polygons to make them rounder that would be great but, the biggest thing, please.... please let us dye the nails in the aesthetician. If you do this I will stay subbed all of Dawntrail. I will happily fund this feature. Onegai Shimasu. For all races that is, clearly we can actually see the nails in the female hrothgar, but I think players would definitely use this feature A LOT across all races.

Also, please showcase your support by keeping these threads relevant and liking for a few days so they can see them. I don't know we'll get another chance so this is it. Let them know we care about this.