November 13th DAT Mining

[Fhqwghads]

Ok, I'm not saying that SE is correct in blaming the PS2 for all their woes, but there is a limit to how many textures can be displayed. It's a finite amount on any system. Granted Xbox/PS3 and the PC platforms have a mammoth amount of memory compared to a PS2, but the point is the PS2 is probably close to its limits. Before people start responding with "but look at X game, or Y game, it looks a billion times better than FFXI", you have to keep in mind that the vast majority of those games has a controlled environment where it's more than likely single player. Most multi-player games for the PS2 have little control over the appearance of any in-game avatars. This helps to limit the number of textures loaded into memory.

FFXI is a whole 'nother ball of wax. There can be hundreds and hundreds of player avatars at a time in a zone, on top of NPCs, mobs, and scenery. Keep in mind that the player characters can switch gear on the fly, and the number of permutations of gear that can be equipped, and you have a whole hell of a lot of textures. When you look at it like that, it's really not a big surprise that they're reusing textures as much as possible.

Now, the way they abstracted their engine so that it runs just as crappy on the other platforms as it does on a PS2 (resolution modifications aside) is a different subject altogether.

(And before someone points it out textures can be loaded from the media store on all these systems on the fly as opposed to loading into memory, but given enough of that nonsense performance would be so bad it would render at 1 FPS or less. Imagine being in a crowded zone like Whitegate and having full capacity Besieged-like lag. PS2 players and slow PC users would suffer the most, as they're the ones who would be victims of the most texture swapping.)

[Viena]

Ok, I'm not saying that SE is correct in blaming the PS2 for all their woes, but there is a limit to how many textures can be displayed. It's a finite amount on any system. Granted Xbox/PS3 and the PC platforms have a mammoth amount of memory compared to a PS2, but the point is the PS2 is probably close to its limits. Before people start responding with "but look at X game, or Y game, it looks a billion times better than FFXI", you have to keep in mind that the vast majority of those games has a controlled environment where it's more than likely single player. Most multi-player games for the PS2 have little control over the appearance of any in-game avatars. This helps to limit the number of textures loaded into memory.

The problem is that they make new textures, but on top of old models, over and over again. The same reasoning that you did for textures could be done about models, yes, but given that ffxi stores the modelling and textures in each file, those will be processed on a per-loaded-file basis, even if the skeletons stored in different files are exactly the same.

Regarding textures, however, I've always wished that SE allowed PC/360 users to use higher resolution textures. That would be fairly easy to do, as given a detailed model/texture it's easy to generate a "low fi" version automatically and make those availible on the ps2 version. But re-doing each model/texture currently in-game would be really time consuming.

[Fhqwghads]

The problem is that they make new textures, but on top of old models, over and over again. The same reasoning that you did for textures could be done about models, yes, but given that ffxi stores the modelling and textures in each file, those will be processed on a per-loaded-file basis, even if the skeletons stored in different files are exactly the same.

Wow... what a horrible implementation. What they should have done is keep a look-up table that references textures. That way textures would be independent of their respective models, and reuse wouldn't equate creating a new texture if an identical one was already loaded.

[Caestus]

The reason they don't make entirely new models is because it takes too long time to do. Recoloring is much easier, but yeah, Shadow Coat might have been going a bit too far... or not far enough, depends on how you look at it.

then why do you see so many .dat file websites. JP and NA alike. seriously i have a friend that redid some .dats for me and it took them all of 1 hour.

[Isiolia]

The reason they don't make entirely new models is because it takes too long time to do. Recoloring is much easier, but yeah, Shadow Coat might have been going a bit too far... or not far enough, depends on how you look at it.

then why do you see so many .dat file websites. JP and NA alike. seriously i have a friend that redid some .dats for me and it took them all of 1 hour.

Depends on how much you redo for one. Changing a color on one piece of armor for one race/gender is not that much to do.
It seems to me that there's more than just modeling/texturing a piece to truly implement it well. For example, if I swap in different idle poses for Mithra, some of my armor will not clip correctly. IE, the bottom part of my Warlock's Tabard goes into my leg. Properly implemented, it wouldn't do that, and likely it's part of the armor model that would change it for that animation.

I would guess that a completely new base model for armor has a lot of hidden work to make it mesh properly with stuff already present in the game. If they instead retexture an existing piece, even changing transparency maps and such, it means not having to go mess with all that.

[Rellikard]

Those new specs must've taken them at least a month to design!

[Sassafras]

Couldn't sleep last night & found these items which are not in the list posted here.

Dandy Spectacles
187-58, hume M
187-59, hume F
187-60, Elvaan M
187-61, Elvaan F
187-62, Taru
187-63, Mithra
187-64, Galka

Misc. Headgear
186/107 Glory Crown hume M
186/108 Moogle Cap hume M
186/109 Nomad Cap hume M
186/110 Glory Crown hume F
186/111 Moogle Cap hume F
186/112 Nomad Cap hume F
186/113 Glory Crown Elvaan M
186/114 Moogle Cap Elvaan M
186/115 Nomad Cap Elvaan M
186/116 Glory Crown Elvaan F
186/117 Moogle Cap Elvaan F
186/118 Nomad Cap Elvaan F
186/119 Glory Crown Tarutaru
186/120 Moogle Cap Tarutaru
186/121 Nomad cap Tarutaru
186/122 Glory Crown Mithra
186/123 moogle cap mithra
186/124 nomad cap mithra
186/125 Glory Crown galka
186/126 moogle cap galka
186/127 nomad cap galka

oh, and these were ??? on the Elvaan M list here
165/97 General Rughadjeen helm
165/98 General Rughadjeen body(use with hand none)
165/99 General Rughadjeen legs(use with feet none)

[Judai]

All new BLU spells compilation with pics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTi02bmi_IM

I will laugh when the families associated with your spells are wrong... for instance the 6 hit looks to be a better fit for Pixie and the Bite move looks better for Gnole

i think he's going by what the name of the .dat file is... but i could be wrong =/

Yeah he is but you never know SE could be trying to tricky and change it up on us, I just feel like the animations don't fit with the families

you do realize we've already seen the ladybug use the move he has associated with it, right?

btw, someone posted earlier the Ladybug move looked like Haste, it looks like a debuff according to the video.

and to the above, you know those have been in the game awhile... right? please?

[Weapon Zero]

I'ma go out on a limb and claim that the ladybug move induces slow.

Its got a similar "style" to the slow spell and sprout smack, tho I may just be suffering from lack of sleep and from being a dragoon and puppetmaster.