Is most of FFXIV's failings due to their choice of engine?

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Which is why the game has been delayed on PS3. To solve the memory constraints *without* incluencing the PC version. People wrongly assume that since they used tiling for *some* areas of the game they did so due to memory constraints (and not simply due to time/dev resources management loke logic would dictate). Memory is so constrained that, unlike most other games, there's no zoning between cities and outside areas, and between outside areas and dungeons.

This is a load of crap.

I've been reading your posts where you so smugly "educate" everyone else about how game engines work, etc... asserting your own opinions as 'facts'. It was only a matter of time before you inevitably talked yourself in over your own head.

All the wilderness environments are 100% tiled. Every single one of them, from one corner to the other. It's only a handful of those tiles with large, recognizable structures that stand out more than the other, especially when they're placed close together. If you look closely in-game or, even better, at the overhead maps, the entire regions are built out of large terrain tiles.

The only areas that aren't clearly tiled are the cities and some of the unique locations, like the small outposts, etc.

Even Tanaka commented in an interview that they had to go with tiled environments due to memory constraints they have to deal with. The interviewer wisely asked him why it was a problem for SE on newer hardware when other developers had been avoiding that "trap" for years now, on inferior hardware. Tanaka kinda dodged that question.

As for your argument about how there's no streaming between cities and wilderness or dungeons and wilderness... It hasn't gone unnoticed that you conveniently ignore the most obvious case where isn't streamed... between wilderness regions.

The cities, just like the dungeons and each region within a given zone are streamed in while you're going through the narrow corridors between them. For Ul'dah, it's the curving corridor between the main entrance and where you enter the city proper. In Gridania it's the long pathway along those bridges separating Black Shroud from the city. In LL it's that really long bridge between the wilderness zone and the city itself. Out in the wilderness, it's those long and very conspicuous valleyways separating one region from the next.

A tell-tale sign that there's background loading and unloading going on there is when you're running along with another player. Who ever is in the rear will tend to notice the person in front of them temporarily disappear when crossing the borderline, and then reappear again a moment or two later.

So, even in the case of its wilderness areas, FFXIV does not have true, large scale world-streaming. It's actually rather limited. And this limitation - why each region is broken up into smaller "zones" separated by long loading corridors is due to, you guessed it, memory constraints on the PS3 and possibly on the 360. There's no aesthetic or immersive value to how they handle it. It's purely them working around technical limitations.

Look at an older MMO, like Lineage 2, built on 6+ year old technology (Unreal Engine 2)... That game has true 100% complete world streaming, in and out of dungeons, in and out of cities and towns, and between every area of the world map. No long, conspicuous corridors are required to "mask" that there's loading going on, because the entire world map is streamed, in real-time, as you're playing.

Incidentally, FFXI's regions were built out of 3D tiles as well, only SE's designers did a far superior job of masking it in that game.

It's funny to see people throw wild theories about memory cpnstraints infliencing the engine when they didn't see a line of code of said engine.

Says the person who's been doing exactly that regularly in this thread so far.

Are you trying to be ironic?