Grass

[Shioban]

I'm gonna post what I did last time: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/...lacement_Grass

Creating the Illusion:
They are most likely using this or some form of displacement grass.
When adding in grass you need to use either sprites or polygonal objects, this creates a problem, grass is dense, so the more grass you add the bigger the performance hit, add in a small area with grass and the difference in the overall rendering performance is phenomenal.

To avoid this we use illusions such as displacement grass, this reduces the rendering cost whilst being able to populate a reasonable amount of grass.


Texture Size

The size of a texture can also create a performance problem. The more individual textures, the more memory that is required. Once we start bumping up the resolution of each texture we start to see a performance hit.



As you can see the jump as we go up another power of two, is huge. An MMO needs to be smooth, you all know this. "God dam I cant tell whats going on, trucking lag"!

Texture sizes for example go:

128*128
256*256
512*512
1024*1024
2048*2048 [Very infrequentley]
4096*4096 [Never]


For an MMO, you have to consider a broad range of hardware, storage requirements, client distributions and downloads.
The ARR team have taken all these typical development norms and applied them to FFXIV:ARR. It's simple mathematics, although "some" or "most" may be capable of a higher quality game its a safer bet to tone-down to the aveage.