(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.
(03-09-2015, 02:22 PM)Gaspard Wrote: As for the PS3 version of heavensward. Technically there's no 'bigger' amount of memory processed simply because the expansion is present. Games have hard limits on the amount of what is rendered at a given time, and I suspect this number is kept lower on PS3 to accomodate with the consoles limitations.
They have circumvented PS3 limitations so far by severely limiting the draw distance, using smaller zones, dropping the PC display limit, and gutting all the graphical effects that make the PS4/PC version look so good.
Heavensward is a different story. The areas are huge. It will be alright when you are not moving through the zone quickly as the limits to the draw distance will make it "playable" on the PS3, but when moving quickly through these huge zones with a flying mount like we saw in the Heavensward tour video the PS3's performance is going to suffer greatly with severe FPS loss and worse of all, graphical popup.
