Capes & Mantles

[Cloud Tiamat]

Why aren't equipped capes & mantles shown on character model? Some of them I really wish I could see on my player model (esp. mage capes)............

[Melkor]

It would be nice to see some of them, but Id hate to walk around with the Rabbit Mantle or the ones that share the same graphic, its just.. ugly :D

Also, they would have to have a way to show capes AND 2H Weapons.

[Thark601]

umm think about it... pala in full white AF wearing a purple hump of fur on his back known as a Behomoth Mantle? lol

[pagodaman02]

I think being able to see stuff in the neck or earring or ring spots would be much nicer.

[Teknoman]

Id like capes. Because if you look at Cornelia, an NPC in the hearts of mithril bastok quest, she has a fluidly moving yellow cape. I think they should at least have basic color capes, or capes with the nations color/emblem on em.

[Rakhir]

Originally posted by Thark601
umm think about it... pala in full white AF wearing a purple hump of fur on his back known as a Behomoth Mantle? lol

I'd be proud as hell to walk around with a piece of behemoth on me. I mean, come on man, its a freaking behemoth here.
I got two pieces of my RSE last night and the brightish red looks pretty cool I think...I also bought a wolf mantle. I'd really like to see a ragad (sp?) hide of one of those crazy eyed dog-things move in the wind behind me when I run or something.

[Faluzure]

Re: Capes & Mantles

Originally posted by Cloud Tiamat
Why aren't equipped capes & mantles shown on character model? Some of them I really wish I could see on my player model (esp. mage capes)............

To understand why they're not shown requires an understanding of 3D models.

Sure, cloaks/mantles would be cool to look at on your character, but a model consists of polygons. If you look at your character, all it is is a 3D model and each item you equip is just a texture overlaid on that model.

If they were to make cloaks, they have 2 options. Make them a low poly-count cloak or make it a fluid, high poly-count cloak.

The 1st option would look like complete crap. It would look almost like someone taped a long piece of cardboard on the back of their character. Movement would be stiff.

The 2nd option would eat up more FPS. Sure that would be awesome to see your character standing their with the cape flowing like Superman's, but you're killing performance. Especially in zones like Qufim and auction houses, this would kill the average users's PC. If everyone had great powerful gaming machines, then Square-Enix could do this. Now remember, not everyone has that kickass computer system... so you have to take into consideration to make the game playable, even on the crappiest machine.

[Cloud Tiamat]

Re: Re: Capes & Mantles

Originally posted by Faluzure


To understand why they're not shown requires an understanding of 3D models.

Sure, cloaks/mantles would be cool to look at on your character, but a model consists of polygons. If you look at your character, all it is is a 3D model and each item you equip is just a texture overlaid on that model.

If they were to make cloaks, they have 2 options. Make them a low poly-count cloak or make it a fluid, high poly-count cloak.

The 1st option would look like complete crap. It would look almost like someone taped a long piece of cardboard on the back of their character. Movement would be stiff.

The 2nd option would eat up more FPS. Sure that would be awesome to see your character standing their with the cape flowing like Superman's, but you're killing performance. Especially in zones like Qufim and auction houses, this would kill the average users's PC. If everyone had great powerful gaming machines, then Square-Enix could do this. Now remember, not everyone has that kickass computer system... so you have to take into consideration to make the game playable, even on the crappiest machine.

Then couldn't it be toggled?

[efDisk]

It's a design vs. Time decision. The PS2 probably couldn't handle everyone having capes, and it'd take time to design models for each.

Programmers out there probably know what I mean. Sometimes a feature that sounds great, but doesn't work into the plan. I'm sure Square would love to have it. But not having it doesn't hurt the game, and further the game looks impressive enough. Something has to give.

[Faluzure]

Re: Re: Re: Capes & Mantles

Originally posted by Cloud Tiamat


Then couldn't it be toggled?

The base character model in FFXI will always reflect body, legs, arms, weapon, head, and feet equipment. Regardless of if you have any equipment at all, your model reflects a texture.

The cape would be a part of the character model and you can't just remove some polygons on the fly. You would have to reload another character model. If you allowed toggling of the feature, then every player/NPC in the game would *have* to utilize 2 different character models. One with a cape & one without. If you based it on one character model, you would have to make the texture on the cape/mantle transparent. However, this would still eat up performance because the cape's polygons is still there, you would just wouldn't see it.

I assume Square-Enix wanted to make FFXI to be able to run on a wide-range of machines, but still be as detailed as it could on the low-end computers. Thus they never added the cape/mantle in with the character models. Character models don't take up that much disk space, but you'd have to have one for every body size (remember there's 3 sizes per body) & race-type.

As a final note, I think they also didn't add the cape/mantle in the character model because they've never looked very good in games. You'd have clipping problems if it moved too freely (the cape would go into your character). They could solve this by making the cape stiff, but then again, that would look like crap compared to the rest of the beauty of FFXI.

[Arctyc]

The base character model in FFXI will always reflect body, legs, arms, weapon, head, and feet equipment. Regardless of if you have any equipment at all, your model reflects a texture.

The cape would be a part of the character model and you can't just remove some polygons on the fly. You would have to reload another character model. If you allowed toggling of the feature, then every player/NPC in the game would *have* to utilize 2 different character models. One with a cape & one without. If you based it on one character model, you would have to make the texture on the cape/mantle transparent. However, this would still eat up performance because the cape's polygons is still there, you would just wouldn't see it.

I assume Square-Enix wanted to make FFXI to be able to run on a wide-range of machines, but still be as detailed as it could on the low-end computers. Thus they never added the cape/mantle in with the character models. Character models don't take up that much disk space, but you'd have to have one for every body size (remember there's 3 sizes per body) & race-type.

As a final note, I think they also didn't add the cape/mantle in the character model because they've never looked very good in games. You'd have clipping problems if it moved too freely (the cape would go into your character). They could solve this by making the cape stiff, but then again, that would look like crap compared to the rest of the beauty of FFXI.

Not correct. FFXI uses a piecewise loading model for its character constructions, allowing it to load on the fly any combination of visual appearance equipment at each visible slot. A toggle would simply set a flag that would redirect the loading function to a capeless model when it encounters an instance.

[ However, you are absolutely correct on the issue of performance. Even a single party of 6, if all wearing capes, would be a moderate/major performance hit on anything but a top-of-the-line system with the detail level S-E implemented. It simply chews up too many CPU cycles. ]

[Shinoro]

yeah probably not the best idea with as complex a graphic engine as FFXI uses. Cloaks kinda hinder DAOC a bit, you should see how much the lag changes when everyone with an emblemed cloak removes theirs in your area. It also caused problems with stealthed players as well, but thats another story, and DAOC's graphic engine is horrible.

[Dark Aphalite]

I have mixed opinions about this.
It could be good but also hideous.
Imagine a huge Galka wearing a little pixy cape and pink little earrings.
Not very "masculin and powerful" now is it?

Lol, the only way is if they remodelled all of them so that there are male and female only items.