Final Fantasy XV - General News Thread

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SonOfEtro

Warrior of Light
May 2, 2016
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Hey, I just found out something super-cool. In this image, the player cards from Platinum Demo, a l'Cie mark can be seen on the King face card. But there's something I think everyone's missed. The "4" symbol on the Number 4 card is written in Etro's Script! You can compare between the screenshot and this scan from the XIII Ultimania of the Etro alphabet. Wish there was a better shot somewhere with more of the cards visible. Even if it's just an Easter egg (which I doubt), it's still cool.
 

DrBretto

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Mar 18, 2016
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The HUD off option seens to disable the whole HUD and not specific parts of it.
Yeah, but Tabata's quote said you'll be able to turn things off individually, noting that they hadn't released that info yet. Could be a mistranslation, or misunderstanding on my part, but it could also mean they just didn't have any of those options in any of the demos yet.
 
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Rin

Reformed
Apr 11, 2015
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Yeah, but Tabata's quote said you'll be able to turn things off individually, noting that they hadn't released that info yet. Could be a mistranslation, or misunderstanding on my part, but it could also mean they just didn't have any of those options in any of the demos yet.
I'd double-check Tabata's answer, but for some reason I can't access the presentation (the 7-hour stream turns into a 2:31 video whenever I click on the SEP Day 3 video link), but I recall that none of the answers were mistranslated. If anything, Matsuno left out a few minor things that Tabata said. lol

Edit: Guess that piece of info's from the Kotaku interview. Gavin's done a stellar job this whole time, so I doubt he'd falter now. I'm not inclined to think that anything has been mistranslated. The options to turn off individual parts of the HUD are probably below the "HUD" option in the menu that we see in the Wait Mode video.
 
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LeonBlade

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Oct 25, 2013
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For sure still Luminous or are you guessing?
100% it's still Luminous, they integrated the Luminous team into the FFXV team to speed up the development progress of both projects in tandem with one another. As @Bionicle8563 mentions, they are using Umbra, but it's simply a C++ library that can be integrated into any engine. However, they also mention this...
The main reason why their version of Luminous heavily edited being that they probably won't continue using it so they didn't mind picking it apart and putting it back together.
This is completely false, it's not a "heavily edited" version of the engine by any means. In programming, you keep our code bases separated by many means. They exist in separate repositories and separate branches as well for development when testing new features or creating stable builds etc. The engine is no exception, there was a modified branch of the Luminous engine that contained some of its features that was actually integrated into FFXIV.

FFXV's codebase relies on the Luminous engine, yes, but it's not a "heavily edited" version of Luminous that can no longer be used in the future, that's simply not how you would structure a project, that would lead to horrible spaghetti code that would become completely unmanageable. Considering they have pumped out a few demos already, this is proof that they are using revisioning software (either SVN or GIT) and are able to create separate branches of the game and the engine for these one off demos.

The reason KHIII wasn't going to use Luminous anymore was because Versus became XV and was going to use Luminous, and it required a lot more time and work than they likely anticipated. Plus, with KHIII needing to go into full production ASAP, they couldn't wait for the team to finish working on the engine. Plus, the engine team is now working along side the XV team to speed up the development of both the engine and the game allowing everyone to easily talk to one another and request things in the engine etc.

As much as many people like to make fun of Luminous engine, the team are very proud of it (as they should be), it's by far one of the most impressive engines to date, and in terms of real time lighting and other effects, it's by far the most impressive most notably on consoles. The reason that they keep showing up at all these events for lighting and graphics like SIGGRAPH is because they are extremely proud of what they've accomplished and want to show off their technology. Famitsu (I think?) has run several articles of their engine developers going into great detail on many elements of the engine, unfortunately it's all in Japanese, but I believe @Rin or someone else has translated a few of them, but I don't remember who/what/where honestly.

See, that's sort of what I was thinking, that GI misunderstood the Umbra thing and thought it was using a different engine entirely. I just haven't seen much discussion about it since that GI thing. Generally that'd mean there was nothing real to talk about, but I figured if anyone would know, it'd be someone here.
Yes, this is correct. Umbra isn't an engine, it's a C++ SDK, commonly categorized as "middleware" much like YEBIS which is currently being used for FFXV as well for postfx. Umbra is a bit like a tool in the toolbox, it's not the entire toolbox itself I suppose if that analogy makes sense.
 

DrBretto

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Mar 18, 2016
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Just for the record (hopefully this doesn't come off as defensive, lol), I totally understand what Umbra is. It's made an appearance in other games I've followed/played. I just wasn't sure if that's what they GI guys were talking about. Though, I do appreciate some additional info on it and it's still good in case anyone else didn't know.

It's one of those things a lot of people hear about and gets misunderstood a lot, so I get it. I just have a little bit of an issue with GameInformers who, in one brief conversation exposed both their ignorance of something they absolutely should know, and a not-too-favorable way to BS out of the conversation when they don't know something. It's low-hanging fruit trying to expose the quality of the media, particularly gaming "media", but these are, IMO, one of the good guys. I don't expect infallibility but I do like to imagine these people are in the positions they're in because they have an above average understanding of the field they report on.

ESPN sucks, right? I don't expect to agree with anyone's opinions on there or anything, but I *do* expect them to know when the Infield Fly rule takes effect. If that analogy makes sense.
 
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LeonBlade

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Oct 25, 2013
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Just for the record (hopefully this doesn't come off as defensive, lol), I totally understand what Umbra is. It's made an appearance in other games I've followed/played. I just wasn't sure if that's what they GI guys were talking about. Though, I do appreciate some additional info on it and it's still good in case anyone else didn't know.

It's one of those things a lot of people hear about and gets misunderstood a lot, so I get it. I just have a little bit of an issue with GameInformers who, in one brief conversation exposed both their ignorance of something they absolutely should know, and a not-too-favorable way to BS out of the conversation when they don't know something. It's low-hanging fruit trying to expose the quality of the media, particularly gaming "media", but these are, IMO, one of the good guys. I don't expect infallibility but I do like to imagine these people are in the positions they're in because they have an above average understanding of the field they report on.

ESPN sucks, right? I don't expect to agree with anyone's opinions on there or anything, but I *do* expect them to know when the Infield Fly rule takes effect. If that analogy makes sense.
Yeah, I was speaking more in general to everyone not to you, which is why when I replied to you I said "yeah you're right". I was under the assumption you knew what you were talking about. It didn't come off defensive at all, no, you're just clarifying things.

And yeah, your analogy makes sense, honestly a lot of video game journalism and this type of media is done by people who really don't understand it.
 

Bionicle8563

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May 25, 2016
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@LeonBlade whoops, sorry T^T. I guess I just heard wrong/ misunderstood what they meant. I didn't mean to spread the wrong information. I understand that they are really proud of the engine and in fact I would love if they continue using the engine cause FFXV looks great, and further improving the engine I bet would easily challenge Unreal 4. I didn't mean to make fun of it or anything.
 
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