(04-09-2014, 02:43 PM)Ildur Wrote: So the problem isn't character customization per se but the focus on photorealistic graphics and engines. We can agree on that. We don't need any more shinny graphics.
I still want to repat myself: No matter how many variables you put on a nose (or character's face), it's still not the same complexity as casting shadows and rendering reflections in real time (which often means rendering the whole objects two times), textures of any size, any model or any animation. The sliders only modify the polygons already in the face, so the game had to load them anyway to draw them. Placing a face-showing helmet is probably more resource intensive because then you are giving the computer a new set of polygons to draw and textures to place on top of the model.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Â If it was all contained within our local software, that'd be the case. Â It isn't, though. Â Every time a player character walks into your render zone, you have to receive information on their character to tell your GPU what it is rendering and then raytracing. Â In World of Warcraft (as an example of a very simple character designer) hair, color, face, skin color, everything is determined by a list. Â You might have hair 1, hair color 6, face 2, and that is saved locally to your hard drive.
Let's go the extreme route. Â You've got sliders to everything. Â Every single character doesn't use a set of presets, it's all parametric in this example. Â That means that receiving character data from another player means that the central server has to send that information to the computer and then those dimensions need to be saved to your local memory. Â For five characters at a time, it's not terribly taxing. Â For a hundred? Â That's a ferocious tax on resources.
FFXIV kind of runs in the middle, where sliders tend to be somewhat general information that isn't as difficult to store (e.g. height). Â But it is why EVE Online hasn't had station walking put in yet. Â They put in so much as far as character customization goes that it would max the RAM in anyone's computer to have more than 30 players in the same place.
The worst of it, though, is how taxing it is to the server communication with the players. Â Not everyone has a 100 mbs connection, and rendering that way takes time. Â A full on raytrace in a program like Revit, which doesn't use any lists, can take a half hour to run a frame at 1680.
It's more hardcore than you'd think. Â The more you can drop into a list on the local drive, the faster your computer can process it all simply because it's all on your local storage, rather than having to load it from the central server for each individual instance.