Thread: What's up with the 7.0 gear textures?

Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Almost anywhere two materials meet is very pixelated.

I'm obviously not a FF14 dev (though I am a software dev) so take it with a grain of salt, but I think this (which I think is the main issue that makes things look terrible, honestly) is just something that's likely an unfortunate side effect of how the FF14 engine handles textures, and isn't something they can totally fix without a rework or massively bumping texture resolutions (and thus game size). (Also: In the OP, that image isn't really showing two images with wildly different resolutions, the new one just has better detail, though I guess it's hard to say 100% with stream compression. The jagged edges on the first one are likely unseen edges on the armor anyway).

From what I remember hearing, the material system in the game identifies materials via a numeric value encoded in one of the textures, interpreted as I believe materials 1-16, rather than say, a texture where RGB define the % influence of 3 specific dyes/materials (which some games do use, but is more costly). The issue there though is that it means the values can't be smoothly interpolated, because if you for example had material 1 and material 3 right next to each other, the blending would be interpreted as meaning there was a thin band of material 2 between them, which would show its own ugly artifacts (materials being where they shouldn't). So they have to go with nearest neighbor (pixelated) interpolation, which yields jagged edges like we have.

A lot of games don't actually have textures much better than XIV, it's just that when you actually allow the engine to interpolate/blur textures, they look measurably better even at the same resolution. It is pretty unfortunate though, and it'd be nice if they could do *something*, but I don't know if I want that to just mean dumping another 10gigs on 4k textures or whatever.

Originally Posted by Akonyl

I'm obviously not a FF14 dev (though I am a software dev) so take it with a grain of salt, but I think this (which I think is the main issue that makes things look terrible, honestly) is just something that's likely an unfortunate side effect of how the FF14 engine handles textures, and isn't something they can totally fix without a rework or massively bumping texture resolutions (and thus game size). (Also: In the OP, that image isn't really showing two images with wildly different resolutions, the new one just has better detail, though I guess it's hard to say 100% with stream compression. The jagged edges on the first one are likely unseen edges on the armor anyway).

From what I remember hearing, the material system in the game identifies materials via a numeric value encoded in one of the textures, interpreted as I believe materials 1-16, rather than say, a texture where RGB define the % influence of 3 specific dyes/materials (which some games do use, but is more costly). The issue there though is that it means the values can't be smoothly interpolated, because if you for example had material 1 and material 3 right next to each other, the blending would be interpreted as meaning there was a thin band of material 2 between them, which would show its own ugly artifacts (materials being where they shouldn't). So they have to go with nearest neighbor (pixelated) interpolation, which yields jagged edges like we have.

A lot of games don't actually have textures much better than XIV, it's just that when you actually allow the engine to interpolate/blur textures, they look measurably better even at the same resolution. It is pretty unfortunate though, and it'd be nice if they could do *something*, but I don't know if I want that to just mean dumping another 10gigs on 4k textures or whatever.

Interesting, that's very informative. So it's not an issue with the resolution, it's an issue with how the engine is smoothing out the textures? Am I understanding that right?

Originally Posted by Siddiax

I'd bet this is not intended at all and likely will be fixed in an upcoming patch. I mean the fact there's no texture filtering at all on a brand new armor set, especially when even games from 2004 have it is just bizarre...

If you look at the official Dawntrail site the sets there look the same as they do in game. It seems intentional.