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Gaspard · **03-09-2015, 05:06 PM**

(03-09-2015, 04:14 PM)allgivenover Wrote:
(03-09-2015, 02:22 PM)Gaspard Wrote: New races shouldn't be very memory taxing. View it this way. your game limits the amount of visible models each given moment. a new race doesn't raise this number...

The reason why we don't have 10-20 individual races isn't as much a memory efficiency issue as it is a HD space issue...

Unless you do what Star Wars the Old Republic did and what I suspect FFXIV is doing with the Au Ra (that is reusing bodies and switching out heads) this is absolutely wrong, a race with 100% truly unique assets will be very demanding on working memory. But if you reuse assets from existing races (in this case the body) it won't be that much more demanding.

You're not entirely off though, it's for both reasons; HDD space and memory, with the latter being a much larger factor. The PS3 has 256mb of memory for the GPU that's ridiculously low for modern architecture. It is the sole reason that racial customization choices are so limited to begin with. Although the Au Ra heads are unique I strongly suspect that the body pieces are just re-textured Elezen male and Miqo'te female models.

However I do understand that this is just a theory and I might be wrong, we can't possibly know for sure until the data-mining settles things, but my idea about it being a technical consideration as well do in fact hold water and a few screenshots showing unique head models do not disprove it.

What I don't see is how the inclusion of a new meshes for a race, (As in player models) raises the tax on memory in the fashion you mentioned. pretty much for the following reasons;

A: Usually, player models are 'very' slim in size. as in, the 3d meshes.Â

B: If adding new models would add such 'load' onto the memory, they would've technically hit said threshold a long time ago with the constant addition of new armors / weapons. A model is a model after all. Polygons and textures in play all over.

C: I don't see how the load is bigger through an additional race with unique body mesh. Whether they add a new mesh or not, the amount of polygons/textures loaded remains roughly the same. The only difference is how these meshes/polygons/textures are alligned. Your memory will be simply drawing from different files for this then from your other files.

View it this way;

If player A is Roe, B is Hyur and C is Elezen, there's 3 different model/texture sets being loaded (Therein, same memory load)

If player A is Roe, B is Hyur, and C is Au Ra, there's also just 3 different model/texture sets being loaded (Therein, same memory load).

I'm not saying that a fourth unique mesh wouldn't add to the overall load, but i personall think (Looking at the screenshots, the way that they exactly differentiate from the Elezen etc) that they're actually unique enough to be Â called a new model/mesh of their own.

Aso for that last point about Heavenswards area size and so on;

I'm quite sure they will rather cut down drawing distance and such rather then risk FPS loss. A game that can't run at least 30 FPS more or less steady ( I'm gonna make an exception here for such scenarios as Odin etc), is more or less broken.
Side note ; SWTOR's engine sucked incredibly, especially under load. Some truly well built machines 'still' struggle to run that game at a decent FPS number in a 16 man Ops

New Lore Drops! - Au Ra edition

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