#unmodded ffxiv

[thebeauregardbros]

needed to take some new photos for alus' rp profile :3 (he/him) [check out the vanilla gposers community!]

[lysehext]

ugh shes so cute

[hopskipandarump]

goro got da bdsm gear

[discountdps]

The eternal bonding ceremony with @pumkinbones was so lovely and beautiful. I really wasn't expecting this many people to come. And thanks to @bnuycula, we even got a local Brynhildr celebrity to show up! It was so nice having all of our friends there to celebrate with us. One of our friends even resubbed just to attend!

We both also wrote a speech to deliver. Without even planning it, they ended up being pretty similar, which is exactly what Varian thought would happen lmao. I'm including mine under the cut just to save it because I did work pretty hard on it.

I'm normally a pretty private person, so making a big public speech about how much you mean to me feels way scarier than it probably is, especially since we're surrounded by friends. But I also know how judgemental our friends are, so maybe being a little scared is understandable.

From the first time we met, I knew you were someone special. I never really get into a voice call with people I don't know, but we sat for hours and just talked. I was happy to make a friend that I shared so much in common with. I can't remember everything we talked about while we were hanging out, but I know you sat down and sketched me a picture. It was the sweetest thing someone had done for me and I still treasure that sketch to this day.

You were always pretty busy so I didn't always get to hang out with you, but when I did, I found myself having a lot of fun. I'd look forward to putting on FC events because it generally meant more time hanging out with everyone, but especially you. There was a long stretch of time, though, that you just weren't around. I was pretty bummed when events would come and go and there'd be no sign of you. I just kind of shrugged and chalked it up to you moving on like people have done before and tried not to be TOO upset about it.

But then you came back and things just felt different. Not in a bad way, but I definitely felt like I wanted to spend more time with you because I didn't know if you'd disappear again. Whenever I'd see you hanging out in Discord, I'd do my best to find some free time to join in and hang out with you. You'd listen to me fuss about things while you were drawing or Gposing and it was just really nice to vibe again.

I don't know when those platonic feelings turned into something more. I tried to deny it to myself for a lot longer than I realized, but even if I didn't, I wouldn't have acted on it out of fear of ruining our friendship. I wasn't sure if you felt the same way, so I just kept going on the assumption that we were just friends. Even with the extremely-obvious-in-hindsight clues you were dropping.

And then you invited me out on an adventure and it was all over for me. I knew from that moment on that I had to tell you how I felt. I tried to play it cool and kind of joke about it, but then you asked if you could call me your boyfriend and all pretense at being calm was lost. I had never been anyone's boyfriend before, since all my other relationships were pre-transition. But I especially loved the idea of being YOUR boyfriend.

So I jumped in feet first and I haven't regretted it. I don't have any other way to really describe how I feel about you other than you feel like home. You fill in the parts of me that have felt incomplete. You're my paramour, my partner, my person. And I promise to be a partner that you can rely on, through the good and the bad.

[kovir]

hrani                                                        the smoother hrani

[shibaleeart]

*renews sub* *goes to do current msq*

*gets distracted and puts my warrior of light in Shizuo and Izaya cosplay instead*

[mnemosyne-xiv]

"Not all knowledge is meant for the world to hear. To feel the impact of. Or to be tirelessly thought over until it's lost all truth.

Some knowledge is best left secret."

[sebille]

The ffxiv Fandom has the weirdest drama ive ever seen in general but I think seeing someone try to make it an issue that some people mod their characters bc it means that they don't appreciate their unmodded appearance kills me

Its is an insanely shitty take lmao

[little-light-bulb]

since i've got a bunch of ffxiv eyes on my blog i figure maybe i should post my Boy

my friends & i that max all our jobs out have a tradition of taking a screenshot in the artifact gear whenever we cap out a job, and it's especially easy to do neat screenshots now that explore mode with LB3 exists. my rule for myself is no posing tools (though i did have to use a posing tool for the viper shot because there was no way to make it not look fucked up) and i try to keep the AF gear unmodded (except for the dnc set but it's just because i already had my peets on the shoes and liked it too much)

[dustedbooksandreadingnooks]

Hrothgirl Keathan Screen Dump !

Of course I had to use the free fantasia! It also helped my desire to play the game to have Keathan just look Different as opposed to unmodded while I played through the end of EW and into DT. A great deal of my enjoyment of FFXIV is being able to make my characters look like themselves, and plugins being down for so long is always difficult ^^

[thebeauregardbros]

IM SO NORMAL IM SO NORMAL IM SO NORMAL ABT THE NEW MOGSTATION HAIR ON ALUS IM SO NORMAL IM SO FUCKING N

[canmom]

so there's a widely used tool called ReShade which intercepts the DirectX API calls of a game to add additional post-processing effects using the game's frame and depth buffers. basically gives you access to various deferred techniques, with certain technical caveats. common effects include bloom, depth of field, tonemapping, and screen space ambient occlusion.

one of the more ambitious effects is Screen Space Realtime Global Illumination (SSRTGI, or just RTGI), implemented in Marty's Mods. this attempts to simulate diffuse-diffuse interreflection, i.e. how the light from a brightly lit object will spill onto surrounding objects. it's a very important part of rendering bright, colourful scenes.

Global Illumination is usually handled in offline rendering by raytracing, and there's been a lot of excitement in the last few years about the new realtime raytracing acceleration hardware in graphics cards. SSRTGI doesn't use this at all: it knows nothing about the scene geometry beyond the depth buffer. instead it uses raymarching, which steps a ray forward a fixed distance at a time until it discovers an intersection with the depth buffer. Since we're using the depth buffer, the algorithm only knows about the near sides of objects.

This video is a bit rambling but it shows some of the limitations of SSRTGI:

So this has been a fun new toy to play with now my computer can handle it. For example, here's a scene with a bright dancefloor in FFXIV's default renderer, which by default has a strong green tint and desaturated colours.

The Alive preset's colour grade improves matters a lot (this scene doesn't necessarily show the best of it, but removing the green tint and desaturation is a night and day difference throughout the game)...

...but my character's legs should be affected by the bright floor. Enter SSRTGI. I can actually isolate the exact RTGI contribution:

I've turned up the ray length a fair bit compared to the Alive preset's default, since it was a bit too subtle to be worth the performance hit otherwise.

You can see that the SSRTGI models both ambient occlusion and indirect light from bright surfaces. Essentially, each pixel traces a ray in a random direction until it hits a surface visible to the camera. Then, it samples the brightness of that pixel and calculates a light contribution and AO amount. I assume it does some kind of average over neighbouring pixels to smooth out the noise.

The effect is a little subtle, but it makes the scene look more integrated...

...at the cost of a hefty framerate hit (using a 4070Ti; unmodded FFXIV runs at an 1440p ultrawide on an easy 144fps (the monitor refresh rate), without RTGI I can get into the mid 90s, with RTGI it's pretty resolutely locked at 72), and heating my graphics card up to 70-80°C (well within tolerances but it's rare to see a game push it that hard).

The effect may be a little subtle in this scene, which has a lot of high frequency detail and darker materials. It really pops in the Fall Guys crossover, which is a very bright scene.

Note the bright green reflected light on the green cube as a particularly obvious RTGI effect (although the shadow it casts is kinda janky ngl). I should really get a screenshot of the exact RTGI contribution in this area, and create a suite of comparisons like the above.

The RTGI also stands out on bright days in Ul'dah, it does a lot for the Gold Saucer, and generally it makes certain environmental light sources a bit prettier. If you turn it up too much it starts to look a bit silly, since brightly lit floors turn into brilliant torches lighting up nearby walls. But there's a comfy middle ground where it's noticeable without being too extreme. I'm looking forward to seeing how it fares in the colourful areas of the expansions, but this character isn't out of ARR yet.

So, that's cool and all, but toying around with SSRTGI, you really start to feel its limits compared to true raytracing. For example, objects will cast shadows in the indirect lighting, but the specular light contributions are not properly affected by the base game's shadowmaps, so you see speculars in places that you shouldn't. A decent number of surfaces in FFXIV have planar reflections (using the usual technique of rendering the scene inverted through the mirror to a rendertexture), which is nice, but there's no middle ground between 'perfect mirror' and 'rough specular that still reflects the scene'. And of course the other usual limitations of SSRTGI, e.g. a brightly lit surface must be visible to the camera to contribute light.

No, this is nice and all, but the people want real raytracing. Which leads me to wonder is there a way to intercept all the draw calls issued by an application, extract the geometry from them, reformat it for raytracing and feed it into the raytracing hardware - basically replace the game's entire render pipeline with raytracing?

This is going to take some research. It very likely isn't possible, or performant if it was possible, because a lot of smart tech artists have already been working hard to push the limits of ENBSeries, Reshade, etc. (Acerola has a solid video on implementing various effects in Reshade.) But the imp of the perverse in me wants to figure out if it can be done. After all, RenderDoc is capable of intercepting and analysing all the draw calls issued by an application. The question is, how severe is the overhead of on-the-fly translating rasterisation calls into raytracing calls? Most likely absolutely hideous! That's not how you're supposed to use a graphics card!

Since the hardware I develop for very definitely does not support raytracing, I have relatively little idea how you actually write a shader with raytracing. But now I kind of want to find out. If I ever get anywhere beyond idle thoughts, I'll let you know what I find out.

[soothingmind]

~ Pinned Post ~

Helloo to my FFXIV side account!

Here I will post silly pictures of my WoL and occassionally reblog things I like. I also sometimes write about my WoL's story.

This entire story is one big Kingdom Hearts - FFXIV thing so you may find references about KH here and there.

OCs:

WoL: Nimda

Azem: Luxu

Tags:

- WoL be small

- Azem be small

- Unending Journey - Writing tag!

- wolquestion

- (the lv90 journey) (the lv100 journey)

- the unsynched adventures (high tier content clears but make it unsynched with lower party comp)

- Lore Post for this story

If you have any questions just feel free to send any!

(This blog entirely mobile run. I play on console. Pictures I post are unmodded ingame screenshots and at most cropped on my phone.)

[eti-mun]

Sad I won't be able to join a fun fashion show being hosted in game but they're letting me enter the glamshots to be judged at least

And I think I did pretty good with them!

[hopskipandarump]

sometimes a person in df posts a macro when you load in and you just know theres a story behind it

[ceresclouds]

elf elf elf elf elf