Just got a cape. Results: underwhelming.

[Edson Drake]

After much, much trouble, I managed enough TP to get a Team Cape accessory.

What a disappointment. As well as with the other costumes/acessories, it has clipping problems everywhere, including the most obvious part, the hair.

What a lazy job, Sega. I was told before that it was bad, but I didn't expect no clipping with the hair. The cape is a worst case scenario of something good done wrong, but the clipping with equipment, weapons, costumes and Cast parts is really ugly.

I think this game is beautiful, I really enjoy the art style, so colourful, but this clipping problem, makes some costume combinations simply impossible.

Is there anything planned to fix these clipping problems anytime soon? I see almost no players using capes EVER and now I know why. I don't speak japanese at all, so anyone knows if there are at least plans to fix this?

[Friyn]

clipeti clip clip

[Terrence]

You took that awful shower curtain ? I was disappointed too the first time I wore that pezzo di merda. Well, I don't think it will ever be fixed. =/

[Edson Drake]

Yeah... I needed for a character costume(I like cosplaying in-game). The results were... underwhelming. What a shame, this absolutely needs to be fixed, not only the cape, the clipping problems. The cape is just the worse of them all.

[TaigaUC]

Capes and berets don't show up on bots or clones either.

[Rien]

Erm, sometimes your own hair clips into your body. This is especially noticeable if you're a female CAST and hover backwards.

[gigawuts]

If you want a game without clipping then I'm sorry to tell you this: There isn't one.

[TaigaUC]

Just played PSO2. Results: underwhelming.

[Gardios]

I love both capes and the beret, I'm so mad that they're team accessories only. D:

Capes are terrible to animate because they either look rigid or clip immensely. SEGA did a fairly good job imo.

[TaigaUC]

Depends on how it's done.
For game context in general, you don't want to rely too heavily on physics because they tend to implode when the system can't handle too many calculations at once.
Some games lock frame rate to 30 because the engine can't handle physics calculations at 60.

Notice that most of the physics in PSO2 are relatively tame - skirts are often bound to the leg bones and only have physics as secondary animation.
It's like that in Vindictus too.

[Sp-24]

I love both capes and the beret, I'm so mad that they're team accessories only. D:

Capes are terrible to animate because they either look rigid or clip immensely. SEGA did a fairly good job imo.
No, no, no. Sega did not do a good job. It would be one thing if this cape was just one occasion of something clipping, but everything clips through everything else in this game. Want to wear a hat with your crazy hair? Your hair gel is so hard that you'll cut right through that hat. Want to try that weird ranger headband thing? Chances are, even Skin Head hairstyle will clip through it. All those flowery bracelets that get partly submerged into dresses, the scarves that go right through both clothes and hair - and this is in a space dressup simulator!

And weapons and units, my god. All of my weapons could clip through the back Chiffon unit, but the red spellstone hammer has managed to clip through ALL THREE of them, leg included. It's not just clipping, either. Have you seen that Kagutachi sword? Every time its model unloads and loads again, that purple rope thing loads upright and immediately falls. How could this even be allowed, not just to happen, but also to stay for so long?

As it is now, the cape is just an example of how lazy Sega is at just about everything, not some exception to the long standing tradition.

[Edson Drake]

^nailed it.

The clipping isn't game-breaking, but remember: this is game that's all about dressing and being pretty. For a game that has this type of focus, while it isn't state-of-art graphically, this clipping degrades the graphical experience.
People spend money over and over just to get those trendy costumes, so all this clipping has no excuse.

[gigawuts]

But that is its excuse. Do you have any idea how much work would be required to make sure all of the outfits we have now wouldn't clip? What about accessories that penetrate to the character's skin? Go ahead and try to equip a rappy backpack with a cape and haze sorcerer. That would be such a freaking disaster to code. You think the cape is a mess now? Jesus.

It is way, way, way easier to just let things clip. The man hours required to design a physics engine capable of handling that kind of disaster with all of the different accessories on all of the characters in the lobby would be obscene. You can forget about running this on anything short of a supercomputer.

Allowing clipping isn't laziness; it's future-proofing. They know damn well items will be added that will not be possible to equip without clipping parts of outfits. This is the reality of a game like this where items are added as the game goes on.

You can say they should just block those items under circumstances where they'd clip, but why? What if a player doesn't care? What if they really want to equip it anyway because the clipping is marginal? Should they compare every single item combination for a million lines of black/whitelisting of allowable item combinations?

Look at TF2's handling of this. They created item slot categories, where if sunglasses are in both eye categories you can't equip anything else in either eye categories. Result? You couldn't equip a moustache&beard combo because it had a tiny freaking monocle in the left eye that went behind the classes - there was no clipping. You couldn't equip a cosmetic eye replacement because, yep, it counted for an eye slot. That meant waiting until they got around to fixing it, and it was a damn low priority. This beard & stache combo occupied the face slot. That meant you couldn't put on a mask, a mask that didn't clip at all. Why do all this when if a player doesn't like clipping they can just avoid combinations that clip all by themselves?

Out of everything you could possibly find wrong with this game this is seriously the silliest possible thing.

[Edson Drake]

Out of everything you could possibly find wrong with this game this is seriously the silliest possible thing.

Indeed it's silly, that's why I said it isn't game-breaking, but it is serious because this game is so narcissistic(I am guilty of it as well).

I am a programmer as well(nowhere as good as able to do 3D modeling though, vectors and matrixes scare the hell out of me), so I know how hard it is, but it isn't an excuse for the reasons above.

Sega knew what they were doing when they allowed all that char customisation, that's why this isn't an excuse. And hell, it's SEGA! They are able to do a better job than this, it's not like they're struggling that they couldn't hire decent programmers to do a better clipping job.

[TaigaUC]

Some clipping can't be helped. Some of it CAN be helped.
Stuff like thighs clipping through the skirt of the Navigator's Suit is just plain lazy and shit.
It's a miniskirt akin to wearing shorts. That kind of stuff is easy to weight.
Another example is how medium to large breasts just clip straight through the chest side armor of the Crazy Kitten, and it looks really terrible.

Something like capes is always difficult unless you have full cloth simulation going.
Even in the case of clipping that can't be helped, there's a certain level of what's acceptable.
I haven't really seen the capes in PSO2 so I don't know how terribad they look in action.

[gigawuts]

Indeed it's silly, that's why I said it isn't game-breaking, but it is serious because this game is so narcissistic(I am guilty of it as well).

I am a programmer as well(nowhere as good as able to do 3D modeling though, vectors and matrixes scare the hell out of me), so I know how hard it is, but it isn't an excuse for the reasons above.

Sega knew what they were doing when they allowed all that char customisation, that's why this isn't an excuse. And hell, it's SEGA! They are able to do a better job than this, it's not like they're struggling that they couldn't hire decent programmers to do a better clipping job.

It's not a matter of excuses - combating clipping in a game with this many items, and so many more yet-unknown items to come (from both promos and ordinary content additions) is an obscenely insurmountable task.

A rendering engine capable of handling something like this would just not be something low end computers can handle, which all on its own means they won't be doing it.

[TaigaUC]

Well, Nexon goes out of their way to fix some fairly minor clipping issues with the outfits in Vindictus.
That game isn't really designed for low end spec though.

If enough people complain about ugliness, SEGA usually does something about it.
The ugly rib texture on the first bikini, for example. That was AC though. Capes aren't.

There also used to be an issue with one of the default Caseal torsos having a stray vert on the neck that imploded when you moved.
Pretty sure that's fixed now.

[gigawuts]

Well, wait.

Are we talking about things like capes not being draped over rappy backpacks or casts with large proportions having legs clip when they sit?

Because the latter is completely unavoidable if you want to actually finish a game like this with constantly expanding content and send it out. The former requires a fair amount of processing power that many paying players simply can't have, being that they can barely manage to run the game as-is.

[Edson Drake]

I haven't really seen the capes in PSO2 so I don't know how terribad they look in action.

I can show you right now. I am idle at B11 in front of item shop, Arshes Nei the character's name, full white clothing.

And yeah guys, no big deal really, but I was really disappointed, because I didn't think in the cape's case, it was this bad. It isn't a paid item, so i'm sure it's really low priority for Sega, but since the clipping problem happens with almost everything it deserves Sega's attention.

[Arkanoid]

Is there really a single MMO out there that offers a decent amount of clothing options and has no clipping issues? The cape sucks, I think they could have possibly done at least a little something different with it to not have it clip horribly with pretty much every single item in the game, but yeah I find it funny to read the same garbage on here all the time with people bashing Sega specifically for every little thing in existence. Show me this magical game without clipping issues, it sure as hell isn't Guild Wars 2 or anything else I know of that runs on higher-end machines.

But yeah, Sega is the worst company evarrr heheeeee, it is solely their fault that clipping exists, in fact Sega invented clipping! (continues to play their game nearly every day anyway)

[Zorua]

Didn't you have to look at the preview in the team room before getting it? My team was going to get the cape too, but we saw that it clipped through some characters' weapons and costumes and that it looks terrible, so we decided to go with the beret instead.

[Edson Drake]

^Yeah, but I had a very specific costume already in mind, so I had to get it and then, mess around in the Beauty Salon.

It doesn't show up in the Salon, which I learned the hard way...

[TaigaUC]

Are we talking about things like capes not being draped over rappy backpacks or casts with large proportions having legs clip when they sit?


Sorry if I got it wrong. Barely slept in the past two days.

I remember seeing some MMOs that broke clothing down into separate meshes, and some even had alternative meshes when combined with certain other equipment.
Can't recall what it was now though, but I remember thinking it must have been a huge pain to do.

It's also what I thought SEGA meant by Item Customization, but maybe I'm being too optimistic.
As in, I thought they might cut the existing outfits into top, bottom, gloves, boots, and separate socks into new inner armors. It'd explain the delay.
Then again, it's still SEGA we're talking about here, so...


I can show you right now. I am idle at B11 in front of item shop, Arshes Nei the character's name, full white clothing.


Sorry, didn't see your reply.
Logged out a long time ago and going to bed soon.

When people talk about capes, I think of stuff like the cloak mod for Skyrim, which I think used existing bones to fake cloth movement.
I've tried to do that kind of thing before in the past (ie. weighting appended/modified clothing or hair meshes to existing bones because new bones couldn't be added).
That can look pretty strange, but it's still better than it looking completely static.

[ChiffonFairchild]

Honestly, I like the berets for the most part....Cast parts clipping through? Nah, they were made with holes in the outfits and accessories ;)

[TaigaUC]

Wish we had more berets. And more colors for them.
Could use more neat features like scaling and repositioning accessories, too.