Porter Book - A place to put all your slips.

[Dieth]

In the ever growing fight to recover our inventory space, this is my idea.

Porter Book: Holds all pages and data contained within your slips.

Trade a porter book and up to 7 slips to the Porter Moogle, and he will insert the pages into the book and bind them correctly so all of your inventory records remain intact.

Use the porter book and it will pop open before you, similar to the magian spectacles, allowing you to take out any slips that had been stored within.

[Mayoyama]

I'd rather if it worked like a menu that you could the retrieve stuff from... IE Trade porter book->get menu to select slip->normal menu to get gear

EDIT: Likewise, to store gear, trade the book and gear.. the moogle then asks what slip to add gear to and then it does its current thing... this way it wouldnt require much reworking of the current system

[Byrth]

So, here's how slips very likely work:

> Items exist in the .dat files that we download every update. Additionally, some of them have "metadata" associated with them (like augments and stuff). This metadata is information provided by the server, rather than your own install of FFXI, and two items can be identical as far as the .dats are concerned but have unique metadata (like two items with different augments).

> This metadata, like all other computer information, is just a series of 1s and 0s. Imagine that there are several different ways to interpret this "metadata." One way is to interpret it as a list of augments and their strengths. Another way is to interpret it as a "used" or "unused" flag for BCNM orbs. Maybe they could use the metadata to store how many enchantment charges remain on an armor. Or, perchance, they could interpret this metadata would be as a list of equipment that you either have or do not have (aka a Porter Moogle slip).

> This is what SE has done. They worked within their existing metadata size limits to make "slips" that can tell whether or not you have a given piece of equipment stored. Every time you trade the moogle. The server updates your item's metadata.

> So why did they make 14 slips instead of 1? Well, there are two reasons:
1) The interface they use would make it very difficult to find a given armor if they combined 14 slips in to one.
2) If I'm not mistaken, they haven't gone over 128 armors per slip yet (120 on #06). I would be that is their metadata size limit. Each armor is probably coded by a single bit. 128 bits is 16 bytes.


> Is what you're suggesting possible?
Yeah, it is. They'd have to increase the traffic between server and client and rewrite how metadata is handled by all of its applications to expand its size. They'd also have to come up with a more intuitive interface (which could really be as easy as picking a sub-section of slips from within a "book" as described.) However, particularly because it is so much work and deals with so much legacy code while offering fairly minor benefits, it isn't very likely to get done. Now you're aware of what it requires, though!