Portraits in 7.0 and Beyond

[CinaedhVik]

Forget the healerstrike, let's talk portraits. Why is this feature still basically in beta?

When I change gear, my portrait should update to my current gear while retaining the lighting, pose, and other accoutrements I've set. It should do this automatically without my having to go in and re-save everything.

OR

It should allow the other option to select "just leave it as I set it" and no matter what gear changes I make, my portrait remains unchanged from how I made it.

Why isn't this a thing? Why can't it be a thing? Are you as annoyed as I am, and what can we do about it?

[DemiBajamut]

Actually it was better in it's actual "beta" state because while it was being tested in Crystalline Conflict you could just set whatever and forget it. Now the system breaks for every little thing like adjusting your visor or materia. They really need to revert it to just set it and forget it, no one cares if your in-game outfit matches your portrait outfit 100%, people just wanna see a funny or cool portrait of your character. Also another criticism I have is why not show the portraits while we have to sit there waiting for someone to watch a minute long cutscene before the fight starts? It'd give us something fun to look at while waiting, usually people can't see portraits because the boss gets pulled in 5-10 seconds anyways.

[Somnolence]

Given that Yoshi-P explained how we are "carrying" all glamour plate items with our character, its probably something stupid like portrait having list of items we have equipped and then game trying to find exactly same items in our inventory and equip them on our portrait model. So even changes like materia melds break it.

Pretty weird solution they have created. Not sure why item information even has to be associated with portrait, since posing our existing character should be enough, just because adventurer plate can be of another job? So why not link portraits to glamour plates then.

[Limecat]

Pretty weird solution they have created. Not sure why item information even has to be associated with portrait, since posing our existing character should be enough, just because adventurer plate can be of another job? So why not link portraits to glamour plates then.

Extremely weird, because all they'd have to have done is add two or four bytes to each item for a reference ID to the thing you've glammed to. And if they're worried about expanding item data, well, there are certainly fields that could be removed to no ill effect(crafter name) to recover some space.

[LilimoLimomo]

Yeah, it's pretty bad. My good faith guess is that the equipment and glamour system has a significant amount of technical debt due to the rushed development of 2.0, and that due to whatever sub-optimal structure that has, the most effective solution to linking portraits with glamour and gear sets was what we have now. I honestly can't imagine what must be going on in the code for this to have been the best solution they could develop, but it suggests to me that the foundation of the game code is in rough shape.

[HappyTrees]

What I don't understand is how they managed to take something that was good in its original iteration and turn it into what we have now. The current version is convoluted and messy, not to mention I've had it randomly break on me even after resaving and getting rid of the warning symbol. It's one of those things that's great when it works while other times I'm spending way too long trying to figure out what item is preventing me from saving.

If they can't fix it, maybe they could let the portrait default to our adventurer plate image instead of the generic DMV photo we get now. I know the devs might be hesitant because they probably don't want you to have your portrait set as a Weaver if you're playing a tank, but at the end of the day it's just a portrait and I'd rather see something fun over eight people standing emotionless in front of a blue background.

[Arzalis]

Yeah, it's pretty bad. My good faith guess is that the equipment and glamour system has a significant amount of technical debt due to the rushed development of 2.0, and that due to whatever sub-optimal structure that has, the most effective solution to linking portraits with glamour and gear sets was what we have now. I honestly can't imagine what must be going on in the code for this to have been the best solution they could develop, but it suggests to me that the foundation of the game code is in rough shape.

Not entirely sure this is true. Glamour didn't exist until 2.2 and they did a major overhaul during Stormblood. At this point, any technical debt is simply because they don't care to resolve it; not some leftover from rushed development of 2.0 (which was a decade ago, by the way.) Frankly, any 2.0 related arguments fall flat for me after the game has been out for as long as it has, but especially for features that weren't even in 2.0.


That said, yes. The portrait system is a mess and I still can't believe they released it in the state they did and then haven't really addressed it since. I'm also not that surprised because that's really typical SE in a lot of ways. I suspect in like 2-3 years they'll "fix" it by just doubling down on how it currently works. That's the way to complete the cycle.

[LilimoLimomo]

Not entirely sure this is true. Glamour didn't exist until 2.2 and they did a major overhaul during Stormblood. At this point, any technical debt is simply because they don't care to resolve it; not some leftover from rushed development of 2.0 (which was a decade ago, by the way.) Frankly, any 2.0 related arguments fall flat for me after the game has been out for as long as it has, but especially for features that weren't even in 2.0.

To be clear, I am not defending CBU3 when I talk about technical debt. The choice to not address that technical debt is of course theirs; they need own that just as much as they own any of the game's successes.

But it's clear the game has plenty of it. There are just so many places in the game where a developer sees the way something is implemented and has to scratch their head and wonder why it was done in such an unintuitive or overly complicated way. And operating in good faith, I have to assume the reason is "technical debt" rather than "incompetence". Especially because often these systems are so needlessly complex that it would be more work to implement them in this sub-par way than it would be to implement them in a more ideal way; Occam's Razor suggests that technical debt is the reason.

[CinaedhVik]

Yeah, the beta was better! What are they doing? Even the adventurer plate works fine no matter what job you switch to. Why are portraits so broken?

[Khryseis_Astra]

+1 to both options! I really love the portraits and adventure plates, but these would definitely be an improvement.

Anything that makes you have to hit the “register to gearset” button will break the portrait, and some weird things seem to affect that. Not just materia melding, but materia extraction (spiritbond)… why? Not sure if the problem is with the gearset code, or how the portrait system reads gearsets, but either way it would be a nice QoL fix.