Inventory 80 Limitations aren't real, heres why.

[Sarick]

First off let me explain something. The developers made the statement that the maximum display inventory is 80 items or 2 stacked list. They also stated they could create more sacks etc. but they'd be limited to 80 items each.

With those two limitations listed above how can there be a limit on inventory?

The 80 limit sacks are because the menus can't display or load more then 160 items on the screen at the same time.

Well, The logical fix his is to limit the items loaded per display page. If you have a limit of 80 items it doesn't mean you can't make a sack that can hold 320 items!

All you need to do is split them into separate blocks/pages. When you get to the end of the first 80 items it loads the next 80 items and so on. The limit becomes transparent because you can load multiple 80 item pages.

Who needs all 80 items displayed on the screen at the same time anyway. The screen only shows 10 items per scroll page but it's loading 80 at a time. This is the misconception about inventory limitations.

It's the same thing one of the representatives recently announced. They said the PS2 wasn't limiting new area expansion.

I hope people reading this figure it out.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

They stated they were in the process of looking to increase past 80 spaces.

There is several ways to do this, another way it simply to allow moving via the menus.

So for example:

Up the space to 160

On inventory when you click the item add a Move to... command that opens a menu with the options: Sack, Satchel, Storage, etc.... (also add a keyboard command to do it such as:
/move "Fire Crystal" "12" "inventory" "sack")

When you click Mog Sack, Satchel etc the same rules apply.

By removing the dual display you open up additional space.

[Cabalabob]

They should do inventory more like What they did with macro books. Give us 20 pages of 30(up to 80 with the gobbiebag quests) then on that little sort menu they should add "pages" and under sort add "move to". When you press "pages" it could open up a page similar to the 20 macro books labelled inv01, inv02, inv03 etc. which you could rename so you could keep your stuff organised into those categories and when you press "move to" it would go to selection similar to manual sorting, when you select something it would open up the inv pages and you'd pick one to drop it into.

It would all still be one inventory(for the sake of macros, equipment and the items quick menu) but just split into pages with a lot more space to work with.

[Kaisha]

Who needs all 80 items displayed on the screen at the same time anyway. The screen only shows 10 items per scroll page but it's loading 80 at a time. This is the misconception about inventory limitations.

Sorting would be buggered to all hell for one since you'd only be sorting the current 'block' in the space. Macros wouldn't work for gear in the other block of your inventory since that information wouldn't be fetched into memory from the server.

The compromise we got is having multiple storage bags (Satchel/Sack) years ago.

[Vold]

Who needs all 80 items displayed on the screen at the same time anyway. . It has always been a massive headache trying to weed through 80 slots per to find that LAST item you need before you head out that always seemingly vanished until you look through your inventory AGAIN for the 3rd time to finally find it. Something like 40 per would be great and I see no reason it couldn't lead to an increase in inventory slots. We simply don't need all items to load at the same time for this game. What we need is either all 160 items loading in the same bag(somewhat ok with that) or have "pages."

There isn't really a massive need to have more than 80 slots in your inventory. Sure you could carry two, three, or ten sets of gear but whatever, on my best days I can just barely fit enough gear with 80 slots for any one job to use. I don't need 160 slots for my THF, and I shudder at the thought of transferring 160 items rather than 80 to my bags. 80 is bad enough. So, what I want is things to remain as they are BUT "pages" exist so that I can turn to the next page and have another 80 slots for my dirty work thereby increasing our slots by bypassing the limitations, and I wouldn't be against shrinking the display to 40 rather than 80. That is infinitely more attractive to me than 160 items loading at once and blindly sending them between my inventory and storage bags.

[Mirage]

There could be tabs/categories added for the items in a 160-slot (or more) active inventory. "Armor", "weapons", "expendables", "other". That way, we'd be able to quickly find our gear even if there is a lot in the same "bag".

Additionally, we could be allowed to sort the gear on each tab by type and level requirement. That way, you could for example make the game order them first by which equipment slot it goes in, and secondly by which level you need to use it.

This sorting could be done client-side, and could be omitted in clients that cannot handle it (such as perhaps PS2, who knows).

[Sarick]

Sorting would be buggered to all hell for one since you'd only be sorting the current 'block' in the space. Macros wouldn't work for gear in the other block of your inventory since that information wouldn't be fetched into memory from the server.

The compromise we got is having multiple storage bags (Satchel/Sack) years ago.

I don't deny this is true. However, this sorting might be done sever side anyway. If that's the case the client wouldn't be restricted.

The sort option shouldn't stop the pages from being contiguous if they are sorted separately.

[Reiterpallasch]

I've never seen so much inventory space in an MMO in my life, yet it's so quickly diminished by the insane amounts of situational gear that you can magically change while in the middle of combat.

[Mifaco]

Without the source code, this really is just pointless speculation.

[Mirage]

I've never seen so much inventory space in an MMO in my life, yet it's so quickly diminished by the insane amounts of situational gear that you can magically change while in the middle of combat.
You're wrong. Most MMOs have more inventory space than FF11. As in, active inventory that you can freely use and equip gear from. For combat purposes, the satchel and sacks are very very inconvenient, and safe, storage and porter moogles completely useless.

And it is not just the ability to change gear mid-combat that makes FF11 a different scenario than other games. Most other MMOs have one job/class per character, FF11 lets you have 20 jobs per character, with 2019 different subjobs for each, further increasing the amount of possibly relevant gear for each job.

With 400 slots, that's actually just 20 item slots per job. Of course, some gear can be used on multiple jobs, but a very large amount of gear can not, such as relic, af, empy, and then there's also not all gear that is relevant for multiple jobs. Even if 10 items you have can be used both on whm and blm, that doesn't help a lot if they are all MAB/int pieces.

Even if you didn't gearswap mid-battle, you'd still want several gear sets for various possible roles you could have in a party. This is especially true with for example scholar or red mage, whose roles could change greatly from one fight to another. One fight, you're buffing and healing, the next fight you're nuking and enfeebling. If you only change gears in between fights, that would still probably require ~30 inventory slots for just one of the jobs.

Personally, i'd rather have just 300 inventory slots in total, than 400 storage slots where i could only have 80 active at a time.

[Arcon]

Without the source code, this really is just pointless speculation.

It's not, it's based on what SE said themselves. Although I don't see the difference, or even benefit of a satchel with 320 spaces and four satchels with 80 spaces each.

[CapriciousOne]

I don't deny this is true. However, this sorting might be done sever side anyway. If that's the case the client wouldn't be restricted.

The sort option shouldn't stop the pages from being contiguous if they are sorted separately.

Well personally I would think it would be best to sort the entire inventory prior to loading it anyway. So if the mog sack was say 240 items in capacity then loaded like 10 items at a time like a buffer anyway. I also felt that part of the problem with storage was the fact that items all stackable items werent made stackable to 99 to start with in the first place. Seriously why would i want to waste 8 storage slots for wind crystals when 1x99 slot would get the job done, just so inefficient.

[FrankReynolds]

Well personally I would think it would be best to sort the entire inventory prior to loading it anyway. So if the mog sack was say 240 items in capacity then loaded like 10 items at a time like a buffer anyway. I also felt that part of the problem with storage was the fact that items all stackable items werent made stackable to 99 to start with in the first place. Seriously why would i want to waste 8 storage slots for wind crystals when 1x99 slot would get the job done, just so inefficient.

SE says that the reason is that it would take forever to farm 99 of some items so that you could list on the AH. Which imo is a great reason to start just allowing people to list items in whatever quantity they want and allowing buyers to purchase in whatever quantity they want. However, that would probably require them to make a lot of changes to the algorithm that determines which sellers item gets purchased. All in all worth it if you ask me.

[Mirage]

Alternatively, they could let you pick various stack sizes. Auto-sorting items in your inventory will stack things to 99, but if you go to the AH, you'll get the option of selling it as singles, a stack of 12, or a stack of 99. That would requires just one more "item" listing in the AH per stackable item.

I think this solution sounds easier to implement into the currently existing AH system than reworking the entire system to let you freely sell items in any possible quantity, and therefore this might be a reasonable compromise between user friendliness and difficulty of implementation.

With this, you'll have stacks to 99 for storing your own items, and stacks of 12 to sell on the AH if you don't want to wait till you get 99 of them.

[svengalis]

It might have something to do with temporary items because we can also hold 50 temporary items to with the 80 regular items.

[Sarick]

It might have something to do with temporary items because we can also hold 50 temporary items to with the 80 regular items.

If you look at the list with temps when you move items into the mog sack/sach it doesn't display them in the main inventory. The only time you see temp items is when your just looking at main inventory. If you go to put items into a mog bag the temp items aren't shown. This gives enough evidence that the system is capable of one contiguous inventory.

The downside is the open pages can't exceed 160 items loaded at the same time. If they are split up when viewing them it will load 80 at a time. The problem is SE made all of them load at once and didn't block/separate them out into a single list. They instead made different versions of 80 limit bags that you look at separately.

[Sarick]

Without the source code, this really is just pointless speculation.

You don't even realize how wrong you are on so many levels. Let me explain something. You obviously have no understanding of how computers work. Hate to break it to you but, unless the software is overlayed with encryption anyone with skills can directly translate it from machine code.

Source code is just easily understandable data that is used to compile into machine code by a compiler. If the software is overlayed with internal encryption it can still be translated but that is another story. Also, none of this is legal but people still do it. Keep in mind I'm not one of those players on this game.

Now lets assume, If a software has been out as long as this game people have looked at it as pure machine code. There are obviously players out there who know more about how this games memory locations addresses and function calls then the programmers do. This is because they look at the machine code directly not the source code. If it's not clear to you yet source code isn't nearly as reliable as machine code is. Its just easier to understand if looked at.

On a final note:

This post is just a simple explanation of how wrong you are in general and explains why. If you want explanations on how the above is done don't ask me I'm an idiot. So, to put it simple you don't know WTF you are talking about and I'm not 100% sure I do either. I'm just not oblivious to why you are totally wrong. :rolleyes:

[Behemothx]

You don't even realize how wrong you are on so many levels. Let me explain something. You obviously have no understanding of how computers work. Hate to break it to you but, unless the software is overlayed with encryption anyone with skills can directly translate it from machine code.

Source code is just easily understandable data that is used to compile into machine code by a compiler. If the software is overlayed with internal encryption it can still be translated but that is another story. Also, none of this is legal but people still do it. Keep in mind I'm not one of those players on this game.

Now lets assume, If a software has been out as long as this game people have looked at it as pure machine code. There are obviously players out there who know more about how this games memory locations addresses and function calls then the programmers do. This is because they look at the machine code directly not the source code. If it's not clear to you yet source code isn't nearly as reliable as machine code is. Its just easier to understand if looked at.

On a final note:

This post is just a simple explanation of how wrong you are in general and explains why. If you want explanations on how the above is done don't ask me I'm an idiot. So, to put it simple you don't know WTF you are talking about and I'm not 100% sure I do either. I'm just not oblivious to why you are totally wrong. :rolleyes:

lol, what the heck are you talking about?

[Demon6324236]

I don't think we players know more about the games coding and inner workings than SE does, we know more about the game balance it seems, but not coding.

[Sarick]

I don't think we players know more about the games coding and inner workings than SE does, we know more about the game balance it seems, but not coding.

Server side stuff probably not as much. Client side stuff yes, you shouldn't need proof just look at the following exploits that people used in the past

Just a few. Super speed, wall exploits (clipping), warping, fishing up beds, nysul dat editing, death walking, spell recast, Job ability waits, enemy & player clipping. I've even seen even fake servers out there watching a popular video site u something. Also, for the record dat mining and ID mining are also stuff players don't do. ;)

You all don't really think all those tools people talk about just magically work do you? :rolleyes:

Anyway, The whole point here is the way inventory is being done and the misconception behind it. The rest just confirms what some players don't know.


lol, what the heck are you talking about?

This is why most people who are told it's a not possible tend to assume it's true.

[Demon6324236]

Well I agree inventory could probably be done differently, and better as myself I hate it as it is currently. However I wouldn't say the fact we can mod the game would mean we know more, I'm sure SE could do the same thing, however its not so simple to stop players from doing it themselves.

[Arcon]

Just a few. Super speed, wall exploits (clipping), warping, fishing up beds, nysul dat editing, death walking, spell recast, Job ability waits, enemy & player clipping. There are even even fake servers out there. For the record dat mining and ID mining are also stuff players don't do. ;)

No fake server has ever worked and that will probably never be the case. And exactly zero of the things you mentioned requires knowledge of code but only knowledge of memory locations and content. And that works independently of the game at hand, you never once even need to look at the machine code to figure that out. Not that anyone's actually able to find out anything from machine code, because it's near impossible to reconstruct any sophisticated program from that.

All we can know about how the code works is from in-game behavior. And we do know some of it, but not that much. Some things don't require knowledge of the underlying code, such as what you mentioned. However, it's not contrary to what SE said. It's still impossible to have more than 80 items in the inventory, which is pretty much all they said. Increasing satchel/sack size the way you proposed wouldn't help anyone and it wouldn't solve any problems at all, it would make matters worse for some people (compared to getting a third storage location), because it's slow, would constantly have to be reloaded, take longer to scroll through and would be impossible to sort.

[Sarick]

Well I agree inventory could probably be done differently, and better as myself I hate it as it is currently. However I wouldn't say the fact we can mod the game would mean we know more, I'm sure SE could do the same thing, however its not so simple to stop players from doing it themselves.

Heck no. I don't think anyone could fix that mess outside SE. They would need to rewrite a few things. I'm fairly sure they won't touch at contagious inventory even if it just flips through multiple 80 inventory sacks and fills them as they get full. Having multiple sacks/bags was the simple way out but since we can only call/equip/use items directly from main inventory it doesn't really help much having all of them.

[Sarick]

No fake server has ever worked and that will probably never be the case. And exactly zero of the things you mentioned requires knowledge of code but only knowledge of memory locations and content.

Shush Arcon, you're about as informed as a tribe chief in the amazon is about computers. Do yourself a favor and do some research before you spout that garbage. (http://youtu.be/Vq93QnmH4_4)

Really sick of you talking like you know things when you don't even know the basic game updates. Link above proves just that it as took me about 3 seconds to search it.:rolleyes:

[Arcon]

Shush Arcon, you're about as informed as a tribe chief in the amazon is about computers. Do yourself a favor and do some research before you spout that garbage. (http://youtu.be/Vq93QnmH4_4)

That's a prime example of a private server not working. Thanks for looking it up, I guess.

[Sarick]

That's a prime example of a private server not working. Thanks for looking it up, I guess.

A prime example of a fraud full of hot air. That looked like it was working to me. The people who wrote that obviously know a lot about the client and server relationship. Since it was WORKING in the video I can assume the people who wrote it know more then you do. Refusing to admit it doesn't make it any less a reality.

[Kaisha]

It might have something to do with temporary items because we can also hold 50 temporary items to with the 80 regular items.
I'm under the assumption temps are just binary flags (do you have/do you not have) dictated by the zone you're in. It's why you can't get more than one of them unless it's explicitly coded in, like the double temps in VW if you have the appropriate key items.

Basically, they're handled differently than the main 80 items that can be holding anything in those slots.

[saevel]

What the .....

First and foremost, the "inventory limit" is due to the 32MB memory limitation on the PS2 and has nothing to do with PC or 360. 32MB is not a lot of memory and SE has to fit all client data inside it, this includes the two inventory lists. Now a single entry into your inventory isn't very much, a few bytes at most, but memory is so tight that their down to counting those bytes. As it stands they cannibalized the auto-translation system to be able to fit 160 items to begin with.

Temps aren't even part of your inventory, their similar to key items and are only read when their is a need to. Eight temps is a single byte of memory.

Yeah PS2 needs to die already, only way we're moving past this.

[Mirage]

Or just letting PC/360 users get the option to combine sack/satchel/inventory to a single inventory while at the same time making their account incompatible with PS2 clients from that point on.

[Llana_Virren]

FF11 lets you have 20 jobs per character, with 20 different subjobs for each...

Only, and I mean only because I'm a smartass. But that's 19 different subjobs.... You can't count the main job twice :P

[Mirage]

You can if you're pro like me. :cool:

[Arcon]

That looked like it was working to me.

Then you were watching something else or have never played the game before. A private server tries to emulate the game. It's not just a server that responds with some packets here and there that the client can somehow interpret. To make a working private server, you need to know the server code, which you don't. We don't know many of the calculations done server side and how they're applied. Drop rate distribution, monster spawn rate/distribution, damage formulas, etc. Like this video, dancing Edge did 9000 damage and the mob gave 1500 EXP, so we know that damage formula and EXP formula didn't work. It showed that search wasn't working, as it showed 16 results when only one was found. It showed WS list wasn't working as it displayed Mercy Stroke without him having a Mandau equipped.

And that's just the bugs in one video. How does it handle missions/quests? How does it handle NPC interactions? How does it handle key item management? How does it handle mob behavior? I'm willing to bet the answer to all of those is "not at all". But I haven't tried it, so if you can correct me in that statement, go ahead.

How many bugs do you tolerate? How do you define working? A script that responds with a few select packets? Because that's pretty much all it is. If that's what you call a working server, then good for you, why don't you go play there for free instead of paying to play the real FFXI?


The people who wrote that obviously know a lot about the client and server relationship.

Only the client/server relationship has nothing to do with code. The people who wrote it analyzed packets and saw what the client was sending and what the server was responding with, and they emulated that. They don't need to look at neither the client nor the server code, ever. Most of what we know about the FFXI code is not from looking at the code, but from figuring out how things work in-game. Finding memory locations and sniffing packets is not code, it's looking up values and interpreting them. That's entirely unrelated. I can change my HP value in any game without ever looking at the (source or machine) code, just by finding the current value in memory and editing it.

[oliveira]

In defense of what Sarick said, you absolutely don't need to have the source code of anything to be able to understand how it works.

Look what happened with the XBOX360. It's encrypted with RSA2048 and it's hacked. Microsoft never gave anyone the source code for their kernel and hypervisor. Yet people dumped and did reverse engineer it, they found bugs and now the bugs are being exploited for hacking the systems.

Look what happened with the PlayStation3... Sony never gave anyone their signing private keys for PlayStation3 contents. Also they never gave anyone the symmetric signing keys for the PlayStation Portable "Tachyon" security chip nor gave anyone the PlayStation2 Magic Gate private signing keys... They're all out on the wild now because they all were into the PS3 System Software and people did reverse engineer it ... (Yeah, reverse engineering is how it's called and it's a science now. It's how anti virus companies discover how viruses work, too so it's not a bad thing, you see...)

Of course also punishable by the current law. The ToS for this service in particular has a lot to say about this reverse engineering thing ...

[Sarick]

What the .....

First and foremost, the "inventory limit" is due to the 32MB memory limitation on the PS2 and has nothing to do with PC or 360. 32MB is not a lot of memory and SE has to fit all client data inside it, this includes the two inventory lists. Now a single entry into your inventory isn't very much, a few bytes at most, but memory is so tight that their down to counting those bytes. As it stands they cannibalized the auto-translation system to be able to fit 160 items to begin with.

Yeah PS2 needs to die already, only way we're moving past this.

Well, answer this then. Why can we access each sack separately without issue ON PS2/PS3 hmm? All the mog safe, sack, sach, locker and storage can be viewed individually without long load times.

We already have access to inventory separately so they can also be loaded into inventory like a book changing pages. Don't give me this bullchat that the PS2 doesn't access all items in storage and sachs etc. Just because you have the main inventory open doesn't hide the other inventories from being accessed. Why?, If you own an EXCLUSIVE item it doesn't matter where you have it in those 80 slot inventories. If you already have it it won't let you get another.

This Indicates that the 32MB limit is there because it wasn't programmed optimally. Go look at the AH list tell me it has a max number of 80 items you can scroll down. Keep in mind I Have two working PS2s so I know exactly how those load.

Just another person who is blindly repeating what they've heard in the past.



Temps aren't even part of your inventory, their similar to key items and are only read when their is a need to. Eight temps is a single byte of memory.

So expert. How is it possible to have multiples of the same item in temp pool? If it's the way you say it is then some same items have different ID's for each of them. THEY STILL need to load the item data. You know the little thing that says yada yadda yadda this item is this, it does this and looks like this. That's a lot for 1 byte of memory.

The limitation is how many they load at once in the visible scroll box. It doesn't matter if they are one bit,byte or whatever its how they're loaded into those 80 item pages. Since we have no problem switching from inventory to inventory then we could stack them on top of each other like macro books. They wouldn't be totally contiguous but they could still be stacked into multiple pages this isn't a rocket science we already do it manually.

Your logic is also irrelevant because it's using the same old 32 MB it's always been using. Your logic is based like an obese person who is used to eating 2 pizzas per meal seeing a skinny dude eat one piece and saying "that's not enough." Computers have advanced with more memory. People who are used to having gigabytes of ram with no inkling of how much real information can fit in 1 megabyte. They're used to having all these big ram numbers and think because they have gigabytes everything needs to use of megabytes just to show a few low res pixels.

You do realize back in 1980's they showed people a single chip could hold the entire records of the library of congress right? (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2007-02-02-life-memory_x.htm)

You can boot up an old DOS 5.0 system with 4 megabytes of ram and play games like flight sims, Doom, online multi-player even load windows. People have just gotten used to large portions. They no longer really care about how much space they use if they got the ram sitting unused they'll be sloppy with programming and optimization.

TY Oliveira Voice of reason. BTW. Was that you the other day on SMN when I was in that burn party? I think I recognize your name.

[Sarick]

Arcon as usual grasping at straws as a defense for your short comings. So this is your defense "over analyzing" what you saw in the video? You're totally missing the point by trying to lose focus on the original intent of my arguments. It still doesn't validate your argument because they have nothing to do with the original points I was trying to convey.

My first point was people figured things out without source code that allowed them to use/understand the game client. The second point was a client was functional on a private server.

The video clearly disproves your jaded outlook on what people know and don't know. The link provided enough evidence to counter the "without source code everything is speculation" arguments. It also invalidated that "There are no working private servers." I don't have to argue about the points you mentioned in the last post you made because they aren't relevant to those arguments.

Post insignificant arguments outside the point all you want. It doesn't make you any more an expert when you try to flip the subject material, It just makes you look desperate to change the subject to something irrelevant you can argue against. It's already been proven you don't not know what you're talking about and you can't concede to any form of evidence. Why do I need to beat a dead horse?

Suck it up, I'm going to move on about inventory limitations because there is no sense arguing with you about what has already been proven.

[Arcon]

Arcon as usual grasping at straws as a defense for your short comings. So this is your defense "over analyzing" what you saw in the video? You're totally missing the point by trying to lose focus on the original intent of my argument. It still doesn't make your argument valid because it has nothing to do with the original point.

What is my argument?


My point was people figured things out without source code that allowed them to use/understand the game client.

If that was your point you neglected to mention it anywhere. You went on for several paragraphs about how you can get game details from machine code, which is bullshit. All I did was debunk that one statement.


The second point was a client was functional on a private server.

Yes, you know why the client was functional? Because it was the regular client. They didn't build a new client for this, they use POL to connect to their server instead of the real one. So of course the client is functional, unless they fucked it up in the process. They didn't make anything, they just used what SE made for their purposes. The server was functional if you consider being able to send certain specific packets functional. It wasn't if you consider functional "being able to emulate FFXI".


The video disproves your jaded outlook on what people know and don't know. The link provided enough evidence to counter the "without source code everything is speculation" arguments.

I don't have a jaded outlook in that regard. I know very well what people know and what they don't. I fully disagree with what Mifaco said (which I said before), but your explanation was incorrect. You went on to counter his statement with saying that you don't need source code if you have machine code. Which is bullshit, because machine code is of no use for any sophisticated program such as this. Pretty much all we know about the code is from in-game behavior (which I also said before).

[Sarick]

What is my argument?

http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll25/ArwingAce21/beating-a-dead-horse.gif

I hope you understand this. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C_oNMH0GTk)


In defense of what Sarick said, you absolutely don't need to have the source code of anything to be able to understand how it works.

She figured it out.

[saevel]

Good lord ... does this guy got an issue or something ....

Sarick you need to stop your making yourself look VERY stupid right now.

Inventory is stored on the server not on your PC. When you go to open a new inventory device that list is then downloaded. This is know to anyone who's used a latent checker before.

Temp items are just bit flags as someone else has already said. That means 1 bit per item, for 50 items your looking at 7 bytes of memory give or take, and that's for ALL temp items as their unique to each zone.

Now you may continue with your evil SquareEnix tin foil hat theory, but the reasoning has been known for a long time.

[oliveira]

Inventory is stored on the server not on your PC. When you go to open a new inventory device that list is then downloaded. This is know to anyone who's used a latent checker before.


Hm ... It's being said:
Limitations are related to how stuff is presented, not how stuff is stored.

One obvious reasoning for Square Enix design choices and shortcomings is that they are trying to run the network communications conservatively with their server so the networking costs and server loads are manageable.

They've stated it multiple times on several different occasions that the major roadblock on changing behaviors on this game and it's system is server load. And why you think you're blocked from spamming auction house searches or spamming viewing your moogle mail inbox ? It's annoying, but all these limitations boil down to what exactly you said. Everything is sever sided and changing stuff without method would either cause massive LAG or crash the server.

Still if the lists are limited to, say 128 items (I don't think it's 80 items as Sarick said but I've never tried to disassemble this game. Having the list be 128 slots at maximum and reducing a bit to make room for eventually raising it to the maximum value of 128 sounds plausible. 128 sounds like a "programming sound round number" and more in line to what I've seen with older games from SquareSoft.

Japanese companies have a tendency to stick to set programming standards even through different platforms (and I'm used to play around with stuff from CAPCOM lol so I know what I saw on their games, they DO stick with a specific style of coding regardless of the team who made the game).

The most important point on this thread (to me) is the fact that the PS2 never was any *real* limiting factor on any issues. And seeing how such an awesome system can be bashed like if it was the source of all problems on the world (of Vana'Diel) is just a shame.

Another point I'd like to mention regarding this thread, we're all pulling our arguments from you know where and due to that, I'd like to mention:

Chill, guys... Let's keep the discussion up though, it's being a interesting conversation. ;)

[Demon6324236]

Maybe its because I don't care much but honestly it looks more like a pissing contest than an "interesting conversation" from here.

[saevel]

One obvious reasoning for Square Enix design choices and shortcomings is that they are trying to run the network communications conservatively with their server so the networking costs and server loads are manageable.

People who do not understand the underpinnings of programming should not be trying to speak with authority on this. It's a memory limit on the PS2, there is only a finite amount of memory and that memory needs to contain EVERYTHING that is needed at that moment in time. This includes animations, sound and music data, zone data, character data, npc / player data, map data along with the engine code itself. That all has to fit within a 32MB allotment, go over and you'll trigger an exception which crash's the code. To facilitate the demands of a MMO on a console with limited resources SE has hard coded limits on everything. Each line is a couple of bytes, not much really but when your looking at such tight memory limits you realize they would have to remove something else before they could extend it.

This has nothing to do with sever limitations, inventory data is so tiny and is only loaded once when you zone. Get rid of the PS2 and suddenly your memory hard limit becomes much manageable.

[Sarick]

Good lord ... does this guy got an issue or something ....

Sarick you need to stop your making yourself look VERY stupid right now.

Inventory is stored on the server not on your PC. When you go to open a new inventory device that list is then downloaded. This is know to anyone who's used a latent checker before.

Temp items are just bit flags as someone else has already said. That means 1 bit per item, for 50 items your looking at 7 bytes of memory give or take, and that's for ALL temp items as their unique to each zone.

I know the actual items are stored on the server. I also see you only listed PC instead of client, looks like in you don't even acknowledge consoles.

The limitation is how it's displayed, how they're listed and translated in inventory memory. I'm not the one being stupid you just don't seem to understand everything that's involved with items. I don't care if it's 1 bit that says you own the item. When you look at the object data in your list it uses memory to display those icons.

By calling me a fool after ignoring the part that takes up the largest amount of memory you stuck you foot in your mouth. You're only talking about 1/2 the process used to display them on the client. It still needs to show the icons and the names. You seem to think those pictures of items and text words are 0 bytes of data in the list.

Saevel you need to stop your making yourself look VERY stupid right now.

[Sarick]

Hm ... It's being said:
Limitations are related to how stuff is presented, not how stuff is stored.

Wow you have a way with words.


One obvious reasoning for Square Enix design choices and shortcomings is that they are trying to run the network communications conservatively with their server so the networking costs and server loads are manageable.

They've stated it multiple times on several different occasions that the major roadblock on changing behaviors on this game and it's system is server load. And why you think you're blocked from spamming auction house searches or spamming viewing your moogle mail inbox ? It's annoying, but all these limitations boil down to what exactly you said. Everything is sever sided and changing stuff without method would either cause massive LAG or crash the server.

This I can agree on.


Still if the lists are limited to, say 128 items (I don't think it's 80 items as Sarick said but I've never tried to disassemble this game. Having the list be 128 slots at maximum and reducing a bit to make room for eventually raising it to the maximum value of 128 sounds plausible. 128 sounds like a "programming sound round number" and more in line to what I've seen with older games from SquareSoft.

The number SE said was 80 for temps and 80 for Inventory. The 80 part was the limit to transfer from one list to the other. Having them paged is just about the same as having what we currently have. the difference here though is the list only shows temps + main inventory. An example of combined list would show temps + main inventory and when you reach the bottem of the main inventory it's select mog sach > at the end of that it'd select mog locker etc. This list wouldn't use those inventory.

You see that's the way one inventory could be made to hold more items. What if Keys, meds and food, crystals &clusters ,linkshells, hand, head, feet, body, and etc. had their own inventory. I think you understand this well and are very rational.


The most important point on this thread (to me) is the fact that the PS2 never was any *real* limiting factor on any issues. And seeing how such an awesome system can be bashed like if it was the source of all problems on the world (of Vana'Diel) is just a shame.

You understand things so well it's amazing. It's also something I agree on. People like to pin the problems on the consoles because everyone is so used to having gigabytes of ram to edit text documents. Bigger is better mentality, most don't even know how much a book with 1 megabyte would hold. So, when they see small numbers it must be not enough to do anything with.


Another point I'd like to mention regarding this thread, we're all pulling our arguments from you know where and due to that, I'd like to mention:

Chill, guys... Let's keep the discussion up though, it's being a interesting conversation. ;)

Sadly most people don't see the key points like you do.

[Sarick]

This has nothing to do with sever limitations, inventory data is so tiny and is only loaded once when you zone. Get rid of the PS2 and suddenly your memory hard limit becomes much manageable.

It's already been said by the devs themselves that they can't display more then 80 of items per page but they can keep adding more 80 inventory sacks. Do you not see how this limitation can be bypassed if the inventory is presented in a different fashion? Is it that complex to understand that if the items can be made into multiple sacks it can also be paged.

Heck if they gave us bag1,bag2,bag3,bag4,bag5,bag6,bag7,bag8, then let us access them all when equipping or using items etc from macros it'd be no extra ram on the ps2 side then it already is. The 80 item limit is only a problem if it's contiguous in one inventory because they're talking about loading them all at once. Get it?

[saevel]

It's already been said by the devs themselves that they can't display more then 80 of items per page but they can keep adding more 80 inventory sacks. Do you not see how this limitation can be bypassed if the inventory is presented in a different fashion? Is it that complex to understand that if the items can be made into multiple sacks the real limit doesn't exist client said.

Heck if they gave us bag1,bag2,bag3,bag4,bag5,bag6,bag7,bag8, then let us access them all when equipping or using items etc from macros it'd be no extra ram on the ps2 side then it already is. The 80 item limit is only a problem if it's contiguous in one inventory because they're they're talking about loading them all at once. Get it?

Your really not that computer savy... never taken intro to computer programming i take it.

Your idea can't work, ever. Your memory only has at most 2 sets of inventors, period. Your macro's wouldn't work as your client would have NO IDEA what the item ID was for the item your attempting to equip that wasn't in your inventory. To make the client aware of that item ID it must be in whatever data structure they use, that structure takes up memory space.

[oliveira]

Your really not that computer savy... never taken intro to computer programming i take it.

Your idea can't work, ever. Your memory only has at most 2 sets of inventors, period. Your macro's wouldn't work as your client would have NO IDEA what the item ID was for the item your attempting to equip that wasn't in your inventory. To make the client aware of that item ID it must be in whatever data structure they use, that structure takes up memory space.

A computer program, in it's purest form is made of two things:

Code and data. At an "atomic" level, even a single machine instruction may have data encoded in it.

On a program that has been compiled from an higher level language (C++ on this case), these are called pointers (memory locations and it's indexes) and it's a construct or struct (an structure or an set of structures) which define how stuff is stored inside of the system memory. If it's the structure of the data tables which make things difficult, fixing the problem would require these structures to be changed. All right.

Now think with me. Imagine they having the fields of the database optimized for the structure format they use on the client so they save on processor time at the server. Then imagine the mess it would be if they decided to update the system and have to re-index all the database for all the servers this game has.

If that is the case, they would NEVER risk screwing the server, the service and losing customers if an alternative solution can be developed. Also if they can do something else that make people forget this specific issue, even better. I think if some of you even tried to put yourselves on their shoes would get to understand that for Square Enix there's a lot at stake with this product. Even if it has been demoted from product #1 to product #2 or even product #99 still their company image is at stake.

[Sarick]

Your really not that computer savy... never taken intro to computer programming i take it.

Your idea can't work, ever. Your memory only has at most 2 sets of inventors, period. Your macro's wouldn't work as your client would have NO IDEA what the item ID was for the item your attempting to equip that wasn't in your inventory. To make the client aware of that item ID it must be in whatever data structure they use, that structure takes up memory space.

You aren't even 100% sure of what your talking about here when you said "Your memory only has at most 2 sets of inventors'" You sure you don't mean integers? Oh wait I see you misspelled inventory!

The awareness is on the server side not the client as you pointed out already. The server just lets the client know you own the objects and it displays them mostly. When you kill a mob that drops an exclusive item before it's presented to the pool the server checks to see if you already have it from all your bags storage etc. If you do it own it then doesn't drop another one.

Like I said the inventory display is the bottleneck. The server already knows if you have the item or not. It's not like when you swap gear it would take 1 minute to access/load and translate the items from each sack.

It would work it just wouldn't be fast enough for quick access because each bag would need checked loaded and unloaded before being processed. We could still have an inventory space that list page by page over 80 for storage.

Exactly how much does each item use in bytes for that data structure. Because on the PS2 they load back to back as soon as I open each bag/sack there is no long wait to download the list from the server.

[saevel]

The awareness is on the server side not the client as you pointed out already. The server just lets the client know you own the objects and it displays them mostly. When you kill a mob that drops an exclusive item before it's presented to the pool the server checks to see if you already have it from all your bags storage etc. If you do it own it then doesn't drop another one.

Like I said the inventory display is the bottleneck. The server already knows if you have the item or not. It's not like when you swap gear it would take 1 minute to access/load and translate the items from each sack.

It would work it just wouldn't be fast enough for quick access because each bag would need checked loaded and unloaded before being processed. We could still have an inventory space that list page by page over 80 for storage.

Seriously you people can't be this stupid, this has to be some sort of trolling.

How the in hell would the client know what to tell the server to equip? It has ZERO idea if the item's ID isn't already inside memory. You have your current inventory and whatever the last "storage" container you opened inside memory, a total of 160 entries. You client can not reference more then 160 items at once, don't know how to make that anymore clear. To be able to reference more they would have to make space by removing something else, the past couple of years it's been the Auto-Translate function that's been canalized to provide space for the 80 item and the temp items. There is a finite size to every list in the game, number of monsters within your target-able range, number of spells, number of zones, number of job abilities, even the number of buffs that your client can display. These lists had their limits hard coded to prevent an exception from happening that could random behavior or possibly crash the game.

As to the poster trying to sound like they took a class or two, stop reading wiki. Instruction and Data pointers have existed since the birth of the first computer, they are not unique to HLL.

Anyhow all the information necessary has been presented. This is the internet and you have zero inclination to learn anything, now your just trying to wriggle out of having to admit you where horribly wrong. There is no conspiracy by SE to lie to it's players about memory limits, their not secretly holding out bigger inventory's from you. It's a very real engineering problem that can not be solved without something else being sacrificed.

[Frost]

From what I understood the limitations were due to the amount of items that the PS2 could reference at one time.

iirc most of the issues were stemmed form the 'possible' temp items, and the theoretical maximum accessible items at one time was 255. During the xbox beta anyways, and they've changed stuff since. The items were broken down like so: 160 for having 2 open inventories, Like bank/inventory, storage/inventory, locker/inventory etc, 50-60 for temp items, and the rest were for "Event Items" things like the temporary items you get in MMM/Assault that you have to trade into NPCs and such, as well as the various butterflies, fireflies, compasses etc to exit the battle arena.

While we do not use all the 255 slots, they are used, or at the least reserved for use.

That's old information, and they've since done some amazing origami with packing stuff into the PS2 format, like inventory pages, ability pages/trees (like corsair rolls, dancer abilites, 'ready', etc.) And I'm sure that they are probably working on making even more, as they've eluded to with splitting up JA timers, UI changes, etc. For all we know they may bring over the rest of the FFXIV interface, which we're already kinda seeing. Maybe a tabbed inventory where things that have their own situational drop table like crystals, geodes, and seals get their own tabs; as well as a split between crafting+junk items/equip-ables/consumables ('bottom list', 'mid list', 'top list (yellow)'.

We'll just have to wait and see.

[Sarick]

Seriously you people can't be this stupid, this has to be some sort of trolling.

How the in hell would the client know what to tell the server to equip? It has ZERO idea if the item's ID isn't already inside memory. You have your current inventory and whatever the last "storage" container you opened inside memory, a total of 160 entries. You client can not reference more then 160 items at once, don't know how to make that anymore clear. To be able to reference more they would have to make space by removing something else, the past couple of years it's been the Auto-Translate function that's been canalized to provide space for the 80 item and the temp items. There is a finite size to every list in the game, number of monsters within your target-able range, number of spells, number of zones, number of job abilities, even the number of buffs that your client can display. These lists had their limits hard coded to prevent an exception from happening that could random behavior or possibly crash the game..

Anyhow all the information necessary has been presented. This is the internet and you have zero inclination to learn anything, now your just trying to wriggle out of having to admit you where horribly wrong. There is no conspiracy by SE to lie to it's players about memory limits, their not secretly holding out bigger inventory's from you. It's a very real engineering problem that can not be solved without something else being sacrificed.

For the record PS2 has a an hdd and swap files aren't a rocket science. Everything isn't needing loaded at once. If your in White gate you don't need music loaded from Jeuno.

[oliveira]

There is no conspiracy by SE to lie to it's players about memory limits, their not secretly holding out bigger inventory's from you. It's a very real engineering problem that can not be solved without something else being sacrificed.

This is a very good point. Basically what I said on my post. But I still think that the real issue is related to the scale of the changes required to break this 80/160 limit thing. So they prefer to add more parallel storages keeping the current structure. If the client was the reason for the limit, they could just change the client coding and be done with it.

[oliveira]

For the record PS2 has a an hdd and swap files aren't a rocket science. Everything isn't needing loaded at once. If your in White gate you don't need music loaded from Jeuno.

PlayOnline does use a swap file while it's running. :)

But really currently I am not sure if it's used anyway. It was when the game had a feature to quick jump into POL Viewer while keeping the character logged in.

[Sarick]

This is a very good point. Basically what I said on my post. But I still think that the real issue is related to the scale of the changes required to break this 80/160 limit thing. So they prefer to add more parallel storages keeping the current structure. If the client was the reason for the limit, they could just change the client coding and be done with it.

From what he's been saying unless I'm reading it wrong extra parallel storage aren't possible. They can't be accessed contiguously or even chain accessed.

Why would they not be totally upfront about the limitations? Well, extra content ids might be a start. Then again we have so many items that could be stacked like they did clusters.

Player: can you make sneak and invisible cast outside party.
Rep: No that would make people harass others when they cast sneak or invisible on them.
Player: Oh yea Like they cure bomb, haste or protect & shell harrass random people. I see your point.

They did say ALL our storage woes would end soon and didn't mention it being PC exclusive so it brings a few things to think about. Maybe we'll get our own auction house type of storage.

[oliveira]

They did say ALL our storage woes would end soon and didn't mention it being PC exclusive so it brings a few things to think about. Maybe we'll get our own auction house type of storage.

They're a Japanese company and it's their culture not discuss the measly details from their work with customers. Even some American companies do such things. If you work with nVIDIA you have to sign a enormous NDA agreement to even see a sheet of paper with low level register information for a GPU chip. Or if you want to develop a game for the XBOX360 platform you have to sign a NDA and pay a tax to have access to XBOX360 system information. It's how these businesses are run.

I while this subject isn't even closely related to the stuff I mentioned, the practices are. I don't think they are comfortable talking with us about how their game engine and server structure works.

[Sarick]

From what I understood the limitations were due to the amount of items that the PS2 could reference at one time.

This is what I'm calling the display limit.


iirc most of the issues were stemmed form the 'possible' temp items, and the theoretical maximum accessible items at one time was 255. During the xbox beta anyways, and they've changed stuff since. The items were broken down like so: 160 for having 2 open inventories, Like bank/inventory, storage/inventory, locker/inventory etc, 50-60 for temp items, and the rest were for "Event Items" things like the temporary items you get in MMM/Assault that you have to trade into NPCs and such, as well as the various butterflies, fireflies, compasses etc to exit the battle arena.

Interesting..



While we do not use all the 255 slots, they are used, or at the least reserved for use.

This should at least be used to allow item stacking so that if you have 80/80 and an item that stacks is 1/12 it uses that space to stack it.



That's old information, and they've since done some amazing origami with packing stuff into the PS2 format, like inventory pages, ability pages/trees (like corsair rolls, dancer abilites, 'ready', etc.) And I'm sure that they are probably working on making even more, as they've eluded to with splitting up JA timers, UI changes, etc. For all we know they may bring over the rest of the FFXIV interface, which we're already kinda seeing. Maybe a tabbed inventory where things that have their own situational drop table like crystals, geodes, and seals get their own tabs; as well as a split between crafting+junk items/equip-ables/consumables ('bottom list', 'mid list', 'top list (yellow)'.

We'll just have to wait and see.

This is a very interesting post frost. Thank you for adding to the topic. I'm very interested in the last part you mentioned about situational sorting.

[Sarick]

They're a Japanese company and it's their culture not discuss the measly details from their work with customers. Even some American companies do such things. If you work with nVIDIA you have to sign a enormous NDA agreement to even see a sheet of paper with low level register information for a GPU chip. Or if you want to develop a game for the XBOX360 platform you have to sign a NDA and pay a tax to have access to XBOX360 system information. It's how these businesses are run.

I while this subject isn't even closely related to the stuff I mentioned, the practices are. I don't think they are comfortable talking with us about how their game engine and server structure works.


That's where those people doing the bad stuff (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/27235-Inventory-80-Limitations-aren-t-real-heres-why.?p=361928&viewfull=1#post361928) you call a science seek out whats really happening right?

[oliveira]

Thats where those people doing the bad stuff (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/27235-Inventory-80-Limitations-aren-t-real-heres-why.?p=361928&viewfull=1#post361928) you call a science found out whats really happening right?

I won't comment about SE policies as I have no basis to do so, but I can comment that in line with what I wrote on that post, hackers figured out that all PS3 models could play PS2 discs if SONY wanted them to. SONY choose to not enable the newer units work with PS2 discs so they could sell the titles through their online service (SONY Entertainment Network/SEN) without having to compete with used discs sold at Game Stop or other used game dealers.

That's the kind of policy you don't talk about at the street as while it makes sense as a business policy it's not a good PR stunt. I think this kind of idea is part of the reasoning for that culture.

Now think if someone goes through the PC version of FFXI code, discover something in it that could cause Square Enix PR discomfort and come here at this very forum and post his/her findings...

It's really ask for trouble, no ? And if I am not mistaken, that might even be covered by the ToS.

[Sarick]

Now think if someone goes through the PC version of FFXI code, discover something in it that could cause Square Enix PR discomfort and come here at this very forum and post his/her findings...

It's really ask for trouble, no ? And if I am not mistaken, that might even be covered by the ToS.

Its true if they posted technical facts. I don't think just saying hey guys there's a probably a way around these issues but it would need a lot of extra reworking would get to much attention. So far everything that's been discussed is based on information already released publicly by SE or other locations.

Seeing the private servers like the video shown provide evidence that people have done things to figure stuff out or that video would be totally faked. It's doubtful someone would produce something like that without knowing a few things.

What yu have is a stand off of groups that might or might not know inside details. They sure aren't going to openly post about it here. The people who are arguing PS2 limitations who might have done sneaky work with PCs can't really argue either way unless they have worked with the ps2 engine directly. Likewise the people saying the limit isn't there can't provide total evidence either.

[oliveira]

Seeing the private servers like the video shown provide evidence that people have done things to figure stuff out or that video would be totally faked. It's doubtful someone would produce something like that without knowing a few things.

The people who made the MS Windows program which allowed the FFXI DLL to be loaded without PlayOnline Viewer were sued into oblivion by Square Enix, if it matters anything for this discussion.

[Sarick]

The people who made the MS Windows program which allowed the FFXI DLL to be loaded without PlayOnline Viewer were sued into oblivion by Square Enix, if it matters anything for this discussion.

It does because it adds more verification.

I do still want to know more about how they're getting around the limitation. Since they made that statement it questions the limits that they say are there.

[saevel]

From what he's been saying unless I'm reading it wrong extra parallel storage aren't possible. They can't be accessed contiguously or even chain accessed.

You've been putting your hands over your ears and refusing to understand. Instead you just invent things and attribute that to what the other person said if you don't like what their saying. You might want to talk to a doctor about that.

Additional storage "containers" are easy to implement though each is a small ID number. Server side you can hold as many items as the server database has space, many thousands and thousands are theoretically possible. The problem is the client communicating it's desires to the server. The client must know the items actually exists and is valid before it can communicate to the server the command to equip it. To do this whenever you hit a macro the client does a quick search through your inventory, it's just a list inside memory, and pulls the item ID from whatever text you typed. If there is no item in memory with that text it considers it invalid and skips it. Once it has the ID it then sends the command to the server to equip that id into the slot id you specified. Something along the lines of "EQ 45732 12" to equip item #45632 into position 12. If that item doesn't exist inside the clients memory then it has no way to tell the server what to do.

That's the crux of the issue, the item info needs to be in memory in order for the client to manipulate it and the client only has a finite limited space for that item info, 160 to be exact. To create more they would first have to drop something in the auto-translate, reduce the number of zone ID's, reduce the number of displayable objects, ect. We're talking scrapping bytes here but with only 32MB of memory there isn't much to scrape. It doesn't load windurst's music when your in jeuno, thats a very stupid way and proves you know absolutely nothing. I loads jeuno's BGM when in jeuno, and it loads windy's BGM when in windy. In fact every different zone has a list of zone textures and resources that need indexed in memory, they don't actually need to be loaded but the client's engine needs to know they exist and where to find them if it does need them. It loads those lists whenever you zone into a different zone. Item modules OTH are different as the client must be expected to render any model on any character at any point in time, so it must keep the model list in memory at all times. At five races each model has at least five entry's.

See it's very logical why the inventory limits exist. Not some secret cover up, no it's just an engineering problem. Get rid of the PS2, or separate PS2 from PC / 360 accounts and it goes away.

[Mifaco]

I repeat: Unless a Windower dev comments here, or someone specifically explains how inventory works in a programming context with proof, this really is pointless speculation.

[Arcon]

How the in hell would the client know what to tell the server to equip? It has ZERO idea if the item's ID isn't already inside memory. You have your current inventory and whatever the last "storage" container you opened inside memory, a total of 160 entries. You client can not reference more then 160 items at once, don't know how to make that anymore clear.

I can't say how exactly the PS2 handles it, but for PC this definitely isn't true. All items are in memory, at all times. I'm somewhat sure this applies to the PS2 as well.

There's two different types of item data. One is storage data, largely invisible to the player. This containts stuff like the item ID and certain item flags (whether or not it's rare, exclusive, equippable, auctionable, sellable, tradeable, augmentable, which jobs/races/levels can equip it, which slot it goes in, which skill it corresponds to, etc.). The other data is display data, which contains the item name, image and a description text, as well as all the previous information. Thus displaying an item costs a lot more than storing the item. All items can be stored in memory very easily, even 480 items (all item locations maxed out) wouldn't cost much more space than displaying only a few items.


I do still want to know more about how they're getting around the limitation. Since they made that statement it questions the limits that they say are there.

Where and when did they say then?


I repeat: Unless a Windower dev comments here, or someone specifically explains how inventory works in a programming context with proof, this really is pointless speculation.

Repeat all you want, it's still wrong. This thread is pointless for an entirely different reason.

[CapriciousOne]

SE says that the reason is that it would take forever to farm 99 of some items so that you could list on the AH. Which imo is a great reason to start just allowing people to list items in whatever quantity they want and allowing buyers to purchase in whatever quantity they want. However, that would probably require them to make a lot of changes to the algorithm that determines which sellers item gets purchased. All in all worth it if you ask me.

Well there isnt much of an algoritm needed to do so as i've seen on other games. There need not be an algorithm at all to determine anything at all to be honest. just put up a listing of the items, the quantitiy, and the asking price and just let us peruse the list and PICK which stack WE find reasonably priced to purchase. I dont need an algorithm to do that FOR me do you? Make the sellers compete for buyers more directly.

For example,

Light crystal 12 3600g(300/crystal)
Light crystal 36 7200g(200/crystal)

Obviously you would by the stack of 36 in pursuit of a stack of 99. And yes you would be correct it would require an overhaul of the AH in its current state to accomplish that level of efficiency. None the less would be awesome but so would being able to list more than 7 items since there are 10 slots in the ah sell list.

[CapriciousOne]

People who do not understand the underpinnings of programming should not be trying to speak with authority on this. It's a memory limit on the PS2, there is only a finite amount of memory and that memory needs to contain EVERYTHING that is needed at that moment in time. This includes animations, sound and music data, zone data, character data, npc / player data, map data along with the engine code itself. That all has to fit within a 32MB allotment, go over and you'll trigger an exception which crash's the code. To facilitate the demands of a MMO on a console with limited resources SE has hard coded limits on everything. Each line is a couple of bytes, not much really but when your looking at such tight memory limits you realize they would have to remove something else before they could extend it.

This has nothing to do with sever limitations, inventory data is so tiny and is only loaded once when you zone. Get rid of the PS2 and suddenly your memory hard limit becomes much manageable.
See for me it is this bolded state that is MY reason behind anything I've stated, and probably others as well. How many ppl are still playing this crap on an ACTUAL PS2 at this point? Do they even still manufacture those these days? Most people I know that still play this game are playing on either a PC, Xbox360, or PS3 which has way more ram and processing power then the ps2. I am one of those playing this on my PS3 that if memory serves me correctly came with like 1GB DDR3 Ram as well some other memory too and I upgraded my hard drive from the standard 2.5inch 60GB to a 2.5 inch 500GB hard drive. So for me all i'm hearing in terms of SE is a bunch of excuses to support a bunch of lazy and cheap a$$ PS2 users when PS3 are so much cheaper than the 600 I paid for mine when I got it back in 2007.

[Mirage]

1 GB RAM in a PS3? I wish.

[oliveira]

See for me it is this bolded state that is MY reason behind anything I've stated, and probably others as well. How many ppl are still playing this crap on an ACTUAL PS2 at this point? Do they even still manufacture those these days? Most people I know that still play this game are playing on either a PC, Xbox360, or PS3 which has way more ram and processing power then the ps2. I am one of those playing this on my PS3 that if memory serves me correctly came with like 1GB DDR3 Ram as well some other memory too and I upgraded my hard drive from the standard 2.5inch 60GB to a 2.5 inch 500GB hard drive. So for me all i'm hearing in terms of SE is a bunch of excuses to support a bunch of lazy and cheap a$$ PS2 users when PS3 are so much cheaper than the 600 I paid for mine when I got it back in 2007.

Sheesh all that vitriol is baseless, useless and will not cause SE to drop the PS2.
Square Enix stopped putting the blame on the PS2 and decided to fix things properly.

Every time people talk about the game problems, the PS2 is the culprit. Every single time.

[Sarick]

Sheesh all that vitriol is baseless, useless and will not cause SE to drop the PS2.
Square Enix stopped putting the blame on the PS2 and decided to fix things properly.

Every time people talk about the game problems, the PS2 is the culprit. Every single time.

People who hate the horse and buggy shouldn't complain because others use them. It's not going to make the the road crews repave the roads for highway use if they outlaw them on low traffic public roads.


Directed at PS2 haters who blame everything on old hardware.

Why do people keep doing this its because they want a 2001 game to be updated to a 2012 game and see the consoles as a threat. It's obvious that the easiest solution is get rid of consoles. Hate to break it to you people but this game is old too. You talk about people still using old PS2's yet you play a game that was created around the PS2 about the same time. You're playing something originally created 10 years ago telling people MOVE on is hypocrisy. A few of the newer systems have trouble playing this game right because it's so old. So, should those players be told they should move on because their system is too advanced?

hypocrisy at it finest.

As for them saying all our storage woes comment I think a rep starting with C said that on the FAT Chocobo topic. Makes you think doesn't it? NO I don't know the link half the people wouldn't see/accknowlege it even If I did.

[Sarick]

See for me it is this bolded state that is MY reason behind anything I've stated, and probably others as well. How many ppl are still playing this crap on an ACTUAL PS2 at this point? Do they even still manufacture those these days? Most people I know that still play this game are playing on either a PC, Xbox360, or PS3 which has way more ram and processing power then the ps2. I am one of those playing this on my PS3 that if memory serves me correctly came with like 1GB DDR3 Ram as well some other memory too and I upgraded my hard drive from the standard 2.5inch 60GB to a 2.5 inch 500GB hard drive. So for me all i'm hearing in terms of SE is a bunch of excuses to support a bunch of lazy and cheap a$$ PS2 users when PS3 are so much cheaper than the 600 I paid for mine when I got it back in 2007.

This is why people have these misconceptions is stupid post like this. The PS3 loaded FFXI has no real techical advantage memory wise over the PS2. The PS3 are either using PS2 chips, Partal emulation or full emulation of the FFXI client.

You are playing the exact same client as the PS2. Also, the PS3s with Backwards compatibility are no longer being produced. I suppose you should follow your own advice and UPDATE that outdated hardware with a spiffy new slimline model. After all, you're one of the reasons (IN YOUR OWN TERMS) SE makes excuses to support a bunch of lazy and cheap a$$ PS2 users.

Also PS3 doesn't have 1 GB of ram. It has 2 separated banks of 256MB one is fast ram the other is slower. Details aren't needed just look up the frenken specs (http://www.semperthree.com/PS3-Specifications.html).

[Sarick]

You might want to talk to a doctor about that.

Such anger, so much rage it tickles me. You might want to talk to a doctor about that.


Additional storage "containers" are easy to implement though each is a small ID number. Server side you can hold as many items as the server database has space, many thousands and thousands are theoretically possible.

No kidding I think you realize why I made this topic. I already made it clear why this wouldn't work in some situations but the limit isn't the PS2 short comings. It could still chain check each item or buffer them in a swap file but it'd be much slower. You tend to only think inside the box you can't possibly grasp everything if you think in such a linear manner.



That's the crux of the issue, the item info needs to be in memory in order for the client to manipulate it and the client only has a finite limited space for that item info, 160 to be exact. To create more they would first have to drop something in the auto-translate, reduce the number of zone ID's, reduce the number of displayable objects, ect. We're talking scrapping bytes here but with only 32MB of memory there isn't much to scrape.

More linear thinking.

We can still have a sach that hold more then 160 items if they are stored differently. A storage container doesn't need to be referenced full time if your simply holding items in it.

32 Megabytes Windows 95 had a requirement (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/138349) of 4 megabytes and it didn't even need a gigabyte to install it.


See it's very logical why the inventory limits exist. Not some secret cover up, no it's just an engineering problem. Get rid of the PS2, or separate PS2 from PC / 360 accounts and it goes away.

Are you willing to openly admit to hacking the PS2 client to backup your evidence? I've given examples to back up my reasons. You've said this. >>


Additional storage "containers" are easy to implement though each is a small ID number. Server side you can hold as many items as the server database has space, many thousands and thousands are theoretically possible.

Technically you admitted you are wrong about containers. Perhaps you realized that a few post ago. Woosh. Now you need to think outside the box and approach the limitations differently so you can bypass them. Present them differently and they won't take up the space you've been complaining about. Psst, a little secret the action house does this already.

[Camiie]

Sheesh all that vitriol is baseless, useless and will not cause SE to drop the PS2.
Square Enix stopped putting the blame on the PS2 and decided to fix things properly.

Every time people talk about the game problems, the PS2 is the culprit. Every single time.

I know what you mean. What people don't seem to get is that these limitations are not going to magically vanish once PS2 is no longer supported. The game engine is still coded with those limitations no matter what system it's being played on. Even if they did do away with PS2 support, they may not have the ability or the interest to fix everything.

[Arcon]

I know what you mean. What people don't seem to get is that these limitations are not going to magically vanish once PS2 is no longer supported. The game engine is still coded with those limitations no matter what system it's being played on. Even if they did do away with PS2 support, they may not have the ability or the interest to fix everything.

Interest I can't say, but ability yes, most definitely. It's true, people like to blame everything on the PS2, which is often incorrect, but in some cases it isn't. For everything memory related PS2 is a massive bottleneck, which is what this falls under.

[Camiie]

Interest I can't say, but ability yes, most definitely. It's true, people like to blame everything on the PS2, which is often incorrect, but in some cases it isn't. For everything memory related PS2 is a massive bottleneck, which is what this falls under.

Even if it was as simple as flipping a virtual switch to double our storage, and I kind of doubt that's the case, it's not just memory that's a bottleneck. They also love to fall back on congestion and bandwidth concerns. Will the next villains holding back FFXI from ultimate greatness be people stuck with slow connections? Far be it from me to defend SE for anything, but they do have stuff like that to consider where you and I personally may not.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

Even if it was as simple as flipping a virtual switch to double our storage, and I kind of doubt that's the case, it's not just memory that's a bottleneck. They also love to fall back on congestion and bandwidth concerns. Will the next villains holding back FFXI from ultimate greatness be people stuck with slow connections? Far be it from me to defend SE for anything, but they do have stuff like that to consider where you and I personally may not.

The game was made for 56kbps, no connection now will be too slow.

[Sarick]

Even if it was as simple as flipping a virtual switch to double our storage, and I kind of doubt that's the case, it's not just memory that's a bottleneck. They also love to fall back on congestion and bandwidth concerns. Will the next villains holding back FFXI from ultimate greatness be people stuck with slow connections? Far be it from me to defend SE for anything, but they do have stuff like that to consider where you and I personally may not.

Keep in mind they're also in the busyness to make money. If players suddenly can hold 30,000 items or something on one character they would be less likely to buy all the extra content ID's for mules etc. If you have 1000 players with 3 or more mules that's a lot of lost cash.

When they opened up the ability to transfer RARE-EX items to mules it helped create/maintain extra content ID's.

I feel if they do add a super storage they'll link it's capacity/inventory globally to all your characters on that account. Secondly base it's capacity on the number of content id's you maintain. No matter what character you're on common items could be stored or removed from any character on your account unless you lose capacity (id's) then they could only be removed. I'm taking about the items you can mail to yourself, trade etc, not the EMPS and things that can't be mailed.

This would be win win win for everyone because SE would get extra money for content id's and "I'm muling gear would be something from the past!"

[saevel]

Even if it was as simple as flipping a virtual switch to double our storage, and I kind of doubt that's the case, it's not just memory that's a bottleneck. They also love to fall back on congestion and bandwidth concerns. Will the next villains holding back FFXI from ultimate greatness be people stuck with slow connections? Far be it from me to defend SE for anything, but they do have stuff like that to consider where you and I personally may not.

Maybe not for you two but for myself the occupation that provides me with the money to play this game does. Performance profiling and engineering is what I do and that's why I can easily spot exactly where the problems are. It isn't just FFXI that has these problems, all software has limitations in one way or another. By passing those limitations is a game of compromises, for every additional feature or concept you implement there is a price to pay. Sometimes those prices are acceptable, sometimes their not. In the case of anything related to consoles (or other application devices) adding more HW resources isn't an option most of the time. You must learn to work within the constraints your giving, and in this case their stuck with 32MB of system memory and 4MB of video memory. When you have so little yet are trying to pack in the complexity of a MMO your quickly reduced to counting kilobytes and cutting corners to squeeze out as much as possible. Some things can be kept on the HDD and dynamically loaded, some things can be kept on the server, others must remain in memory. If you want to add to one thing you must first take away from something else, removing a bunch of auto-translate would free up enough memory for bigger storage, possibly reducing the maximum number of PC / NPCs displayable at once could also do this. Resources like audio / textures / models are all loaded dynamically yet there needs to be a place for them to load to, so you've gotta keep a region free at all times to handle data your working with.

Ultimately, consoles are not a good place for dynamically growing games, aka MMO's.

[Camiie]

The game was made for 56kbps, no connection now will be too slow.

But if they start increasing the amount of currently displayed items, don't you think that could potentially cause issues with those 56kbs connections that people still are forced to use in some areas? SE has to consider that. People here can say "screw them" like they do to PS2 players, but SE doesn't necessarily have that luxury.

I personally have friends that use dial up because they aren't offered any better service. I wouldn't trade those friends for all the inventory in the world.


Ultimately, consoles are not a good place for dynamically growing games, aka MMO's.

That die has already been cast though, and SE can't just hit Fold and re-roll.


Keep in mind they're also in the busyness to make money.

The bottom line is always a concern as well. Not just from potential lost content IDs as you mentioned (Nice ideas btw), but the changes people want may not come as cheap or as easy as they think. I mean, SE can't even keep up with their road map. They can't even put out game content they promised years ago. Now people want what may or may not be a hefty re-tool of how our game clients work and communicate. I think they're expecting too much from a company that desperately wishes we were playing a certain something else (XIV).

[Sarick]

But if they start increasing the amount of currently displayed items, don't you think that could potentially cause issues with those 56kbs connections that people still are forced to use in some areas? SE has to consider that. People here can say "screw them" like they do to PS2 players, but SE doesn't necessarily have that luxury.

I personally have friends that use dial up because they aren't offered any better service. I wouldn't trade those friends for all the inventory in the world.

It might not be so bad if it could be done dynamically. The main inventory and such maybe but having something like a fat chocobo type storage would only be loaded when you're adding or removing stuff. This is where Saevel and myself didn't communicate together well until he made the post about near infinite storage stored on the server side database.


The bottom line is always a concern as well. Not just from potential lost content IDs as you mentioned (Nice ideas btw), but the changes people want may not come as cheap or as easy as they think. I mean, SE can't even keep up with their road map. They can't even put out game content they promised years ago. Now people want what may or may not be a hefty re-tool of how our game clients work and communicate. I think they're expecting too much from a company that desperately wishes we were playing a certain something else (XIV)

SO true, also thanks for the kudos on my ideas.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

But if they start increasing the amount of currently displayed items, don't you think that could potentially cause issues with those 56kbs connections that people still are forced to use in some areas? SE has to consider that. People here can say "screw them" like they do to PS2 players, but SE doesn't necessarily have that luxury.

I personally have friends that use dial up because they aren't offered any better service. I wouldn't trade those friends for all the inventory in the world.



That die has already been cast though, and SE can't just hit Fold and re-roll.



The bottom line is always a concern as well. Not just from potential lost content IDs as you mentioned (Nice ideas btw), but the changes people want may not come as cheap or as easy as they think. I mean, SE can't even keep up with their road map. They can't even put out game content they promised years ago. Now people want what may or may not be a hefty re-tool of how our game clients work and communicate. I think they're expecting too much from a company that desperately wishes we were playing a certain something else (XIV).

No, because games move on. The people stuck in the 56kbps area are probably less than 0.5% of the playerbase if that, limiting the remaining 99.5% of players by that is a terrible way to run a MMO and even worse for a company.

[Arcon]

Even if it was as simple as flipping a virtual switch to double our storage, and I kind of doubt that's the case, it's not just memory that's a bottleneck. They also love to fall back on congestion and bandwidth concerns. Will the next villains holding back FFXI from ultimate greatness be people stuck with slow connections? Far be it from me to defend SE for anything, but they do have stuff like that to consider where you and I personally may not.

Only that bottleneck isn't real and never was. 56kbps is plenty for any MMORPG connection. And items don't have to be transferred all the time but only after zoning and log on. This is nothing compared to other data that has to be sent constantly. I presented an example here (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/21514-Request-More-Information-in-the-Equipment-Window?p=292398&viewfull=1#post292398).

[Sarick]

No, because games move on. The people stuck in the 56kbps area are probably less than 0.5% of the playerbase if that, limiting the remaining 99.5% of players by that is a terrible way to run a MMO and even worse for a company.

I don't think the 56k thing is as limiting as the latency. I bet if SE increased the cap al hell would break lose and the servers would practically die like they do when we're downloading the updates. Not only that I don't think the clients are designed to handle/buffer that much data. A lot of excess packets would be dropped or the client would freeze up do to the buffers overfilling. The extra data transfer would put a burden on the servers I can't imagine. 56k to 1 megabit or even 8 megabit per second is a huge jump in bandwidth.

I've actually crashed and locked GM's up on Sierras SOLD OFF The Realm just walking back and forth or taking a bunch of tiny steps (enough to not show animation) (NOT HACKING). They would become back buffered so bad that I could log off log back on and have 2 of me on screen at the same time. The developers couldn't figure it out however I gave the devs all my findings and they fixed the issues by dropping excess packets and gave me free subscriptions for it.

Now days I just play the games for fun.

[Mirage]

No servers would die if they just added a few new mirrors for the version updates. You know, like they have for when you download other games from them. I downloaded the test server client at 3 MB/s, while even many days after FF11 version updates, I am only getting 10 kB/s. They clearly have the network capacity to do this.

Alternatively, they could start offering torrent downloads for the FF11 updates, which you'd install by running a small program that came with the update and detected your FF11 install directory, then extracted the files there. This has even been done in the past, by a single person in his spare time. There is no way SE doesn't have the knowledge required to do this.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

I don't think the 56k thing is as limiting as the latency. I bet if SE increased the cap al hell would break lose and the servers would practically die like they do when we're downloading the updates. Not only that I don't think the clients are designed to handle/buffer that much data. A lot of excess packets would be dropped or the client would freeze up do to the buffers overfilling. The extra data transfer would put a burden on the servers I can't imagine. 56k to 1 megabit or even 8 megabit per second is a huge jump in bandwidth.

I've actually crashed and locked GM's up on Sierras SOLD OFF The Realm just walking back and forth or taking a bunch of tiny steps (enough to not show animation) (NOT HACKING). They would become back buffered so bad that I could log off log back on and have 2 of me on screen at the same time. The developers couldn't figure it out however I gave the devs all my findings and they fixed the issues by dropping excess packets and gave me free subscriptions for it.

Now days I just play the games for fun.

It was believable up until: and gave me free subscriptions for it.

[Sarick]

No servers would die if they just added a few new mirrors for the version updates. You know, like they have for when you download other games from them. I downloaded the test server client at 3 MB/s, while even many days after FF11 version updates, I am only getting 10 kB/s. They clearly have the network capacity to do this.

Alternatively, they could start offering torrent downloads for the FF11 updates, which you'd install by running a small program that came with the update and detected your FF11 install directory, then extracted the files there. This has even been done in the past, by a single person in his spare time. There is no way SE doesn't have the knowledge required to do this.

To bad they didn't so what wow dis and give access to torrenting (sp) the updates. This would've given everyone some quick updates.

[Sarick]

It was believable up until: and gave me free subscriptions for it.

Seriously, No Joke. There where a few other things. THe Producer offered me two boxed games from their software lineup I just said no thanks gimme another years subscription for each account. Anyway a few hackers was crashing the game to duplicate items and the data based got nerfed causing my account and the gm's etc to lose subscripion registrations for a few days. It unique to company updated subscriptions.

The producers name was Mark, the Devs where Stephen, Konnon, Jayrod, and the head GM was Paula. I spoke to each of them a lot in game on the phone etc. Can't make this stuff up if you want to research it go ahead it was one of the first mmos before ultima online etc. It's an antique now glorified chat room IMHO. It spurred off the TSN later changed to INN network and sold.

So believe what you will, Look a few things up and you'll figure it out. Those where the days. Back in TSN you'd pay $17 a month to play 30 hours! So we're lucky that AOL pay by the hour stuff dropped.

I best get back on topic, F I derailed my own topic lol.:confused:

[RAIST]

For the record PS2 has a an hdd and swap files aren't a rocket science. Everything isn't needing loaded at once. If your in White gate you don't need music loaded from Jeuno.

This may be why some aren't getting it......the PS2 in no way, shape, or form works like the OS's commonly found on a PC.

The PS2 continuously streams the FFXI data...it doesn't take advantage of things like resident memory or virtual memory like a PC does, so you can't load a TSR, save off data to a swap file, and so forth. More or less, EVERYTHING needed for FFXI has to fit within it's available physical memory locations so it can be streamed through it's buses continuously. Because of this requirement, some space is reserved for use even if it isn't currently being displayed/used---because depending on user input or a request/response from the server it may be needed at any given moment.

That is what the issue is with displaying more inventory options---in order to do something so "simple" like adding a tab to the UI for the PS2, they have to FIRST clear a memory space for it within the stream(s). If there is no available space within the targeted stream, then something must first be removed so it can be replaced with the new item. Apparently, they have run up against a serious limit in this area.

[Sarick]

This may be why some aren't getting it......the PS2 in no way, shape, or form works like the OS's commonly found on a PC.

The PS2 continuously streams the FFXI data...it doesn't take advantage of things like resident memory or virtual memory like a PC does, so you can't load a TSR, save off data to a swap file, and so forth. More or less, EVERYTHING needed for FFXI has to fit within it's available physical memory locations so it can be streamed through it's buses continuously. Because of this requirement, some space is reserved for use even if it isn't currently being displayed/used---because depending on user input or a request/response from the server it may be needed at any given moment.

That is what the issue is with displaying more inventory options---in order to do something so "simple" like adding a tab to the UI for the PS2, they have to FIRST clear a memory space for it within the stream(s). If there is no available space within the targeted stream, then something must first be removed so it can be replaced with the new item. Apparently, they have run up against a serious limit in this area.

This is what causes the black screen of death when loading some large cut scenes that SE hasn't fixed or even acknowledges. Thank you for explaining this to everyone. When zoning to a new area it did clear out a lot of data and re-load content from the HDD but, it eventually would cause a lot of memory fragmentation. This in turn appeared to create a few memory leaks that eventually would crash the console.

This would cause some NPCS with large text blocks to stall when chatting with them. Eventually these freezes where to much a hassle. As each expansion was added they became worse. They started when the first Abbysea areas where added. Go figure. Anyway the graphics would slow to a halt after a while do to this streaming.

Also something to note the Japanese client has more available capacity then the US because the English text uses more space to communicate the same information when compared to Japanese. Spells list, items list etc in the menus are sometimes 1/8 to 1/2 the size of English words. This is one of the problems NES and SNES had when they translated the games. They had to find ways to pack the English dialog because it was so much bigger compared to the original Japanese dialogs.

Here are the specs for the PS2..

Apparently it has 32 megabytes of ram, 4 megabytes of VRAM, and 2 megabytes of dedicated sound ram.
(http://www.absolute-playstation.com/ps2_hardware/system_playstation2_tech.htm)

[saevel]

The PS2 has any OS, a pocket calculator has an OS. It may not have a complicated monolithic kernel that provides multiple layers of device abstraction, but there is still code controlling memory allocation, bus arbitration and I/O access. It loads this code from it's firmware when it's turned on, and this code is used to boot from a disk or other storage medium. That medium contains code that is loaded and executed exactly like any other automated processing system on the planet.

FFXI is no different on the PS2 then it is on the PC or 360, just tighter resource constraints. Check out the size of FFXI's memory pool on the PC sometimes, it's not huge by today's standards but it's eight times or more the size of the entire PS2's memory pool.

[Camiie]

No, because games move on. The people stuck in the 56kbps area are probably less than 0.5% of the playerbase if that, limiting the remaining 99.5% of players by that is a terrible way to run a MMO and even worse for a company.

That's easy to say when your best friend isn't part of that 0.5%

[Daniel_Hatcher]

That's easy to say when your best friend isn't part of that 0.5%

No, It's not. Even if they were my friend I still don't believe that the 0.5% should in turn force the remaining 99.5% into a crippled game.

[Camiie]

No, It's not. Even if they were my friend I still don't believe that the 0.5% should in turn force the remaining 99.5% into a crippled game.

FFXI without friends is as crippled as a game can possibly be.

[Sarick]

That's easy to say when your best friend isn't part of that 0.5%

I tend to agree with her on this Daniel, Not everyone can get a high speed connection. I don't see where these Numbers are coming from though. I looked around and only found this (http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/business/news/plenty-of-internet-users-cling-to-slow-dial-up-connections-85360/)

Other then that nothing stood out.

[FrankReynolds]

Well there isnt much of an algoritm needed to do so as i've seen on other games. There need not be an algorithm at all to determine anything at all to be honest. just put up a listing of the items, the quantitiy, and the asking price and just let us peruse the list and PICK which stack WE find reasonably priced to purchase. I dont need an algorithm to do that FOR me do you? Make the sellers compete for buyers more directly.

For example,

Light crystal 12 3600g(300/crystal)
Light crystal 36 7200g(200/crystal)

Obviously you would by the stack of 36 in pursuit of a stack of 99. And yes you would be correct it would require an overhaul of the AH in its current state to accomplish that level of efficiency. None the less would be awesome but so would being able to list more than 7 items since there are 10 slots in the ah sell list.

I suggested more AH slots and they said it would create too much stress on the server. I replied "How is me placing XXX items on sale on one account more stressful than me placing XXX Items for sale over multiple accounts and then usually leaving them logged in 24/7 to bazaar the items that still wouldn't fit on the AH?"

They responded with ..............

Could you imagine sorting through 99 different sized stacks of fire crystals trying to find the cheapest one? They would have to either show all prices (no more bidding) or allow you to post as many as you want and just set the price per individual item. Ie you post 27 fire crystals at 100g each and then one guy buys 5 of em, another guy buys 3, some other guy buys 250 and cleans you and a few other people out etc.

[CapriciousOne]

Keep in mind they're also in the busyness to make money. If players suddenly can hold 30,000 items or something on one character they would be less likely to buy all the extra content ID's for mules etc. If you have 1000 players with 3 or more mules that's a lot of lost cash.

When they opened up the ability to transfer RARE-EX items to mules it helped create/maintain extra content ID's.

I feel if they do add a super storage they'll link it's capacity/inventory globally to all your characters on that account. Secondly base it's capacity on the number of content id's you maintain. No matter what character you're on common items could be stored or removed from any character on your account unless you lose capacity (id's) then they could only be removed. I'm taking about the items you can mail to yourself, trade etc, not the EMPS and things that can't be mailed.

This would be win win win for everyone because SE would get extra money for content id's and "I'm muling gear would be something from the past!"

Personally I would love to delete the mules I have and just keep as much as I can on one content ID I don't dual box or anything so if it wasn't for the storage and crafting limitations I wouldn't even have the mules. Even now I'm thinking about just selling off all my mules stuff and just deleting them all now. Personally it is inconvenience to have too keep logging in and out between mules especially when you can only transfer 8 items at a time when you have like maybe 80 items to toss at your mule. I mean I really just hate the extreme means SE goes to just to make us spend more money or time than is otherwise justified. Realistically a person can store more than 80 items in any storage compartment and master as many crafts as their hearts desired. I feel artificial limitations is just insulting to the client base but unfortunately this isn't my company so (shrugs)(sighs)

You know if we could level all crafts to 100 on one character I would totally be for an add-on account service that doubled the slots capacity for each storage type on a tiered bases in line with the cost of an addition content ID. For instance, the first storage upgrade would double all mog house storage options to 160 for 1 dollar. The second upgrade would cost 2x the first and would double it to say either 240 or 320 slots per type. Its a great idea but I don't realistically expect it to come to fruition and it would eliminate the need of mules for storage. Or they could still do that and make it an option where instead of being able to make additional content Ids you can just pay for the additional storage if you havent already skilled up a craft on your mule(which I haven't but i'm sure others have) or you can create additional content ids but you cant upgrade your storage unless they are deleted first.


Maybe not for you two but for myself the occupation that provides me with the money to play this game does. Performance profiling and engineering is what I do and that's why I can easily spot exactly where the problems are. It isn't just FFXI that has these problems, all software has limitations in one way or another. By passing those limitations is a game of compromises, for every additional feature or concept you implement there is a price to pay. Sometimes those prices are acceptable, sometimes their not. In the case of anything related to consoles (or other application devices) adding more HW resources isn't an option most of the time. You must learn to work within the constraints your giving, and in this case their stuck with 32MB of system memory and 4MB of video memory. When you have so little yet are trying to pack in the complexity of a MMO your quickly reduced to counting kilobytes and cutting corners to squeeze out as much as possible. Some things can be kept on the HDD and dynamically loaded, some things can be kept on the server, others must remain in memory. If you want to add to one thing you must first take away from something else, removing a bunch of auto-translate would free up enough memory for bigger storage, possibly reducing the maximum number of PC / NPCs displayable at once could also do this. Resources like audio / textures / models are all loaded dynamically yet there needs to be a place for them to load to, so you've gotta keep a region free at all times to handle data your working with.

Ultimately, consoles are not a good place for dynamically growing games, aka MMO's.

Ultimately I agree with you about consoles as they generally are not dynamic in nature but at the same time I feel like the static nature of consoles is the very thing that should allow programmers shorter turn around times because they are programming to specific hardware instead of the lowest common denominator like PCs
Most of the software limitations are usually the hardware that is running it, and the other is usually the programmers creativity. The difference with PC and console games is the performance is usually scalable to the hardware it is being executed in PCs. Even with the same outdated code, better hardware still usually equals better performance of the same application. Keyword: USUALLY.


Only that bottleneck isn't real and never was. 56kbps is plenty for any MMORPG connection. And items don't have to be transferred all the time but only after zoning and log on. This is nothing compared to other data that has to be sent constantly. I presented an example here (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/21514-Request-More-Information-in-the-Equipment-Window?p=292398&viewfull=1#post292398).

Well I only tried playing one game online using a 56k modem and that was Midnight Club 2 and that was horrible with the disconnecting constantly, so I completely disagree with you. I dare say you must be delusional in terms of MMO.

In this day and age of technology and high speed internet upwards of what 10mbps, really? In addition, PS2 hard drives at best where only capable of transfer speeds of like 100megabits/s(12.5megabytes/s) combined with a 56k ps2 modem which I think also had LAN as well compared to PS3s that are running SATA HDD at speeds from 1.5 to 6 Gigabits/s (187.5megabytes to 750 megabytes/s) over at least 3mgpbs connections and you think the only bottleneck was 56k and it wasn't real? I take it you never tried downloading a DVD image of anything over a 56k modem that took like 3-4 hours before and you're talking about a MMO that is constantly sending data even if you are just standing in place on bazaar? Really?


This is why people have these misconceptions is stupid post like this. The PS3 loaded FFXI has no real techical advantage memory wise over the PS2. The PS3 are either using PS2 chips, Partal emulation or full emulation of the FFXI client.

You are playing the exact same client as the PS2. Also, the PS3s with Backwards compatibility are no longer being produced. I suppose you should follow your own advice and UPDATE that outdated hardware with a spiffy new slimline model. After all, you're one of the reasons (IN YOUR OWN TERMS) SE makes excuses to support a bunch of lazy and cheap a$$ PS2 users.

Also PS3 doesn't have 1 GB of ram. It has 2 separated banks of 256MB one is fast ram the other is slower. Details aren't needed just look up the frenken specs (http://www.semperthree.com/PS3-Specifications.html).

Sorry I mispoke about the the actual amount of ram and video ram on the ps3 while I was contemplating the actual throughput of said memory and that gap between ps2 and ps3. I am well aware of the fact the fact that PS2 compatibility units aren't being produced as well because I am out of warranty and have to pay 150 for each repair for my fatty.

I suppose I can elaborate more for clarity sake. In the same way your typical pc manufacturer makes 32bit and 64bit versions of the same driver, and how SE installs updates of the same client for pc, xbox, ps2, I was just thinking it would be great if there was a ps3/360 version done by the same teams that produce content for those systems anyway. In other words just because ps2 has those limitations, doesnt mean I on ps3 should be limited or slowed down by them as a result. Just like there is typically a “slow” lane for people turning off on the highway, the same should be done for the client as well as the game itself. Personally if SE was to deliver “PS3 driver” version of the client with all the changes we requestion I would be more than willing to pay a higher monthly fee to compensate for said adjustments and improvements if it would stop all this excuse making for this and that other. Xbox/PS2 is technically the 32 bit version and ps3/360 is the 64bit version of the same software. I would even pay for a re-release version like they did with some of the ps1 games that had even more limited resources for the ps1 but are now on the ps3.


Sheesh all that vitriol is baseless, useless and will not cause SE to drop the PS2.
Square Enix stopped putting the blame on the PS2 and decided to fix things properly.

Every time people talk about the game problems, the PS2 is the culprit. Every single time.

Im sorry if it sound like I'm blaming the ps2 itself but as me rant above just described there is nothing preventing se from creating a “64bit version” of the game for 360/PS3 hardware. Just like when an update is released for pc, ps2 and xbox there is a point where it detects the hardware and dowloads the appropriate update version the same could and should be done for our consoles. Hell I would even be for giving those features only to ps3/360 users myself so


People who hate the horse and buggy shouldn't complain because others use them. It's not going to make the the road crews repave the roads for highway use if they outlaw them on low traffic public roads.


Directed at PS2 haters who blame everything on old hardware.

Why do people keep doing this its because they want a 2001 game to be updated to a 2012 game and see the consoles as a threat. It's obvious that the easiest solution is get rid of consoles. Hate to break it to you people but this game is old too. You talk about people still using old PS2's yet you play a game that was created around the PS2 about the same time. You're playing something originally created 10 years ago telling people MOVE on is hypocrisy. A few of the newer systems have trouble playing this game right because it's so old. So, should those players be told they should move on because their system is too advanced?

hypocrisy at it finest.

As for them saying all our storage woes comment I think a rep starting with C said that on the FAT Chocobo topic. Makes you think doesn't it? NO I don't know the link half the people wouldn't see/accknowlege it even If I did.

This is exactly why we do it but I DON'T see consoles as a threat. One thing I do notice particularly during the Besieged and Campaign battles is the amount of lag that DESPITE being on PS3 and running a 25mbps internet connection. Either I am too fast or the server is too slow or bogged down by other slow users.

Essentially most the ideas people are coming up with for jobs, storage etc would seriously impact the performance of the ps2 at one point or another, whether you admit or not. In its current state with the content that exists now, I've had buddies of my who consoles COMPLETELY SHUT OFF during these events and sometimes even outside of those events. So admit it or not the old 32 bit systems are clearly pushing its limitations as is even before new content arrives.

I'm not telling people to move on form the game it self but the console that they are running it only. Technically it not hypocrisy because I play this game mostly for my buddies and hanging out with them and I do like the way SE develops the storylines of the missions for those who actually read the dialogs in cutscenes or replay them afterwards I also DO pay for a 2012 mmo in DC Universe Online while still paying to play this one. Oh and for the record with the way consoles are designed they also capable as serving as a pc of sorts as well according to a friend who used his ps3 to turn in his term paper when his actual pc broke.

[Arcon]

Well I only tried playing one game online using a 56k modem and that was Midnight Club 2 and that was horrible with the disconnecting constantly, so I completely disagree with you. I dare say you must be delusional in terms of MMO.

I dare say you must be delusional when it comes to technology. Connection speed and disconnecting issues are unrelated. I had a shitty ISP a while ago and I was disconnecting constantly on a 50Mbps connecting. And I was playing this on 128kbps a long time ago, with no issues, because it was a stable connection. Not like it's hard to check for yourself, go and monitor your network activity during a busy Voidwatch fight.


In this day and age of technology and high speed internet upwards of what 10mbps, really? In addition, PS2 hard drives at best where only capable of transfer speeds of like 100megabits/s(12.5megabytes/s) combined with a 56k ps2 modem which I think also had LAN as well compared to PS3s that are running SATA HDD at speeds from 1.5 to 6 Gigabits/s (187.5megabytes to 750 megabytes/s) over at least 3mgpbs connections and you think the only bottleneck was 56k and it wasn't real? I take it you never tried downloading a DVD image of anything over a 56k modem that took like 3-4 hours before and you're talking about a MMO that is constantly sending data even if you are just standing in place on bazaar? Really?

What are you talking about? This entire blob is completely off-topic. Yes, I did download a 571MB file on a 56kbps connection and it took me weeks because I couldn't stay logged in too much at a time. How is that in any way, shape or form relevant? If the inventory size was doubled, it would not be 571MB. It would take exactly twice as long to load upon zoning, completely regardless of the connection. So instead of 5 seconds it would take 10 seconds. How quickly after zoning somewhere do you need all your items? If the 5 seconds make a difference, then yes, this may be inconvenient to some people. Otherwise it would be completely unnoticeable. Connection plays no role in this equation. Hence, this bottleneck is not real.

Most data is not sent from the servers. Servers send surprisingly small amounts of data, which is all translated client-side. Run into a full Voidwatch battle and I still doubt you'll see it go anywhere near 56kbps. Yet the battle runs just fine. Online games simply don't need to run on fast connections, they need to run on responsive connections. Latency always matters more than speed for games. Hence the 56kbps bottleneck isn't real.

[Kristal]

Spells list, items list etc in the menus are sometimes 1/8 to 1/2 the size of English words. This is one of the problems NES and SNES had when they translated the games. They had to find ways to pack the English dialog because it was so much bigger compared to the original Japanese dialogs.

For Seiken Densetsu III, the fan translation team rewrote half the code to get proper English translation (adding their own compression/decompression code), upgraded the fonts to look better AND fixed a dozen bugs from the original.

[Mirage]

I'm +1ing that just cause I love SD3.

[Plasticleg]

They're still making sales with mules and security key-chains. If people are still buying/supporting them, why would a company spend money to lose potential-money from these sales?

[FrankReynolds]

They're still making sales with mules and security key-chains. If people are still buying/supporting them, why would a company spend money to lose potential-money from these sales?

The charged $9.99 for a security token that most people bought just for the extra storage. I'm sure they can find a way to make a buck or two off this if they feel the need.

[Plasticleg]

The charged $9.99 for a security token that most people bought just for the extra storage. I'm sure they can find a way to make a buck or two off this if they feel the need.

By spending money, getting off their asses to raise the 80 limit or add another storage unit.

[Laraul]

This may be why some aren't getting it......the PS2 in no way, shape, or form works like the OS's commonly found on a PC.

You are 100% correct! It's not a PC! Or at least it's not until you obtain the fabulous Linux kit for PS2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2)!

[Arcon]

You are 100% correct! It's not a PC! Or at least it's not until you obtain the fabulous Linux kit for PS2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2)!

And while the operating system then may be similar, the underlying hardware still isn't, neither is communication with the hardware.

[oliveira]

Just a random comment out of humor...

PS2 is a 64 bit system so the PS2 FFXI is already a 64 bit program (lol)...

PS2 CPU is a custom upgrade of the MIPS64 core (as seen on the Nintendo 64 and other systems like the PSP, for example) with a lot of custom stuff from Toshiba packed in. It's so specific it got a special numbering for itself "R5900" as it has a lot of the R5000 features in it.

It's old but it's still quite powerful and if SONY wanted they could easily make a real PS2 handheld today if they felt like it.
They don't, simply because the feeling of "old is bad" is soo strong on our society. SONY and other companies actually spent 40 years to create this feeling on the society, they won't stop that trend now.

SE is being victim of making a product "so good" (yes FFXI is still good) people don't want to stop using it ... lol

[Godofgods]

Inventory 80 Limitations aren't real, heres why.


Yes. The dev teams are just screwing with you, thats all. They just dont want us going out and getting new items... -_-

[zataz]

i say do it lol let this game go the way of skyrim on the ps3 >.>

[zataz]

incase no one knows how bad it is for skyrim (a game with memory issues just look) for ps3
http://forums.bethsoft.com/forum/182-playstation-3/

[Sarick]

Yes. The dev teams are just screwing with you, thats all. They just dont want us going out and getting new items... -_-


Did you see the age of the original post? Why are you posting sarcasm at this point? Did you read the whole topic? The post just before yours contains technical info. The second post in the topic says SE is working on a better inventory method. :p

Oh wait, your bumping the post because you agree with everything in the topic that says I'm right. Hows that sarcasm?

Thank you for your support.

[Sarick]

incase no one knows how bad it is for skyrim (a game with memory issues just look) for ps3
http://forums.bethsoft.com/forum/182-playstation-3/

What does this have to do with PS3? If you're going to add to the topic at least post on this forum the technical reasons for PC/PS2/PS3 limitations. The FFXI BC on PS3 is PS2 based not using the PS3 potential.

[Rezeak]

Personally i'd rather have 10 (namable) sacks with 80 slots than 1 sack with 800 slots cause then i can sort things by sacks (like consumable, Melee gear, DRK OCD gear, Mage gear and so on)

Imo 80 items per sack or w/e is enough.

[Sarick]

Personally i'd rather have 10 (namable) sacks with 80 slots than 1 sack with 800 slots cause then i can sort things by sacks (like consumable, Melee gear, DRK OCD gear, Mage gear and so on)

Imo 80 items per sack or w/e is enough.

I kind of agree with this but, the real solution is a different "storage" method. Eight named spaces would be awesome but having another storage space that holds AH levels of items (IE: a real mog house) would enable players to store stuff without the mini systems we have today. The slips are nice, the key items are nice. No matter how we put it these items are limited to what the developers choose. This makes them cumbersome and inefficient to store/retrieve.

I stand by the AH menu like warehouse storage system that is linked to all content ID's on the account. The problem I have is explaining it to the community/development bros. It's like trying to explain how one men can lift ten tun monolithic stones using only fulcrums.

http://www.youtube.com (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCvx5gSnfW4)

[oliveira]

The Phantasy Star Portable games (Based on Phantasy Star Universe) for PSP have such a feature, which is called "shared storage". You can have up to 4 characters and all of them have access to that shared storage while at the equivalent of "mog house" into that game. You can at any time push items to that shared storage but you can only pull the items if you are at "your room".

And it has 1000 spaces, I think.

[Demon6324236]

In PSU it was 250, I have no idea about PSP though.

[Sarick]

The Phantasy Star Portable games (Based on Phantasy Star Universe) for PSP have such a feature, which is called "shared storage". You can have up to 4 characters and all of them have access to that shared storage while at the equivalent of "mog house" into that game. You can at any time push items to that shared storage but you can only pull the items if you are at "your room".

And it has 1000 spaces, I think.

I don't think it'd be fair to have this shared storage if it was accessible anywhere. :P This is one half of what I'm talking about. The limits are a lot larger, stored differently then the 80 slots we're used to seeing. They'd be more like looking at the AH list pulling or putting items up. The only differences would be you own all the items in it and they're listed categorically like the AH with the amounts stored.

[Mirage]

Personally i'd rather have 10 (namable) sacks with 80 slots than 1 sack with 800 slots cause then i can sort things by sacks (like consumable, Melee gear, DRK OCD gear, Mage gear and so on)

Imo 80 items per sack or w/e is enough.
That's sort of a false dilemma. Why can't you have one sack with 800 items where you can organize items by type while still keeping them all in the active inventory so that it works with macros?

[Llana_Virren]

That's sort of a false dilemma. Why can't you have one sack with 800 items where you can organize items by type while still keeping them all in the active inventory so that it works with macros?

That got answered eons ago, memory limitations forced the 80 item limit, which is why you can't use items or equipment directly from satchel/sack.

Short of overhauling and allowing over 80 items in a single inventory cache, having multiple, customizable satchels would be the easiest way of storing and organizing gear. And the satchel items should be KIs, not inventory -1 moogle slips.

[saevel]

That's sort of a false dilemma. Why can't you have one sack with 800 items where you can organize items by type while still keeping them all in the active inventory so that it works with macros?

Server space is much cheaper and near infinite (as far as this game is concerned) vs PS2 system memory. To actively manipulate items they need to he loaded into local memory, each entry in your item's list is just a 1D array that contains a set of values (Unique item ID, ID DB #, bit flags, special text / indicators). They have allocated enough memory to hold 160 of those entries, 80 for inventory 0 and 80 for whatever other inventory you have open (1,2,3,4,5,6,7). Adding another inventory is easy, it's just larger character data on the server but locally the character data is the same.

If we wanted inventories bigger then 80 one of two things needs to happen. Not apply to PS2, or remove something else that is loaded into main memory.

[Mirage]

That got answered eons ago, memory limitations forced the 80 item limit, which is why you can't use items or equipment directly from satchel/sack.

Short of overhauling and allowing over 80 items in a single inventory cache, having multiple, customizable satchels would be the easiest way of storing and organizing gear. And the satchel items should be KIs, not inventory -1 moogle slips.

I'm not convinced it couldn't be worked around as long as they didn't care about keeping the PS2 and PC clients identical.

[Demon6324236]

Easy, make it part of the new UI that wont be on PS2 or 360.

[saevel]

I'm not convinced it couldn't be worked around as long as they didn't care about keeping the PS2 and PC clients identical.

That is ultimately the problem. It could easily be done on the PC and 360, more then enough local memory to add a bigger array. There comes one slight problem, once someone has "upgraded" their account to this they could never ever load that character onto a PS2 system. One of two things would happen, one is the console would crash and / or possibly corrupt server side data, of it they actually did good programming it would refuse to load the character.

[Mirage]

Yeah. I mentioned that in an earlier post somewhere. I don't think that would ever become a real problem, though. Just make it so each player needs to change the setting manually, along with a notice that clearly tells us that it would kill PS2 compatibility for that account.

[FrankReynolds]

One of two things would happen, one is the console would crash and / or possibly corrupt server side data, of it they actually did good programming it would refuse to load the character.

Or they could just make it so that the extra slots did not load and thus could not be accessed when a character is logged in on a ps2/3.

[Freebytes]

I would be happy with an inventory search feature for now. Something like a command line /search inventory [item name] that would show where the item(s) is located.

[Arcon]

I would be happy with an inventory search feature for now. Something like a command line /search inventory [item name] that would show where the item(s) is located.

While I'd like that as well, there's a Windower plugin to do that in the meantime.

[Llana_Virren]

Or they could just make it so that the extra slots did not load and thus could not be accessed when a character is logged in on a ps2/3.

Doesn't work that way, sadly. And god help you if the 81st inventory slot is your Rag or Moogle Slip. There's no way for the game to simply "truncate" inventory space.

[Mirage]

God help him? Why exactly? He said it would be unavailable while logged in on a PS2, not that it would be gone forever.

[Llana_Virren]

The point being that when you log onto a new system your inventory is not defaulted. So any time you log in on a PS2 at that point, you would be playing russian roullette with your inventory. And god help the developers trying to figure out how the game will decide what data will load.

Of course, Temp Items take up the "ghost space" in inventory, so there's another reason why adding inventory on both consoles shouldn't be impossible. That said; the suggested solution requires killing the PS2 first, rather than forcing the Devs to come up with some middle ground between the two.

[saevel]

God help him? Why exactly? He said it would be unavailable while logged in on a PS2, not that it would be gone forever.

You don't get to pick which items are suddenly ~gone~. Take a 10 slot expansion for example, so 90 on all inventories. The PS2 can only open 160 total, 80 per. You lost access just the bottom 10 items in every inventory item, and ohh btw this isn't the bottom 10 as in the bottom of the bottom, their item ID's 50H ~ 59H. You have no control what's stored in those slots server side, sorting is controlled in your client no the server.

Also has potential to have something your wearing not be loaded as each equipped item takes up an inventory slot.

I simply see too much potential for problems, best would be to not allow that character to load on a PS2.

[Mirage]

So don't let it be loadable by PS2s. I thought we went over this already :p.

[FrankReynolds]

The point being that when you log onto a new system your inventory is not defaulted. So any time you log in on a PS2 at that point, you would be playing russian roullette with your inventory. And god help the developers trying to figure out how the game will decide what data will load.


You could always store your items into a space that does not get truncated before changing systems IE. mog slips, NPCs, mog house storage. Ever loaded FFXI on a new computer and logged in without installing the expansion packs? Where does all your stuff that was in your mog locker go? It all comes right back once you install Treasures of Aht Urgan

[Llana_Virren]

You could always store your items into a space that does not get truncated before changing systems IE. mog slips, NPCs, mog house storage. Ever loaded FFXI on a new computer and logged in without installing the expansion packs? Where does all your stuff that was in your mog locker go? It all comes right back once you install Treasures of Aht Urgan

I'm not suggesting your gear will be los forevert; but rather, if you have these super spiffy "extra slots" that are suggested for PC only, and happen to go to a friends house, or your PC crashes, or for whatever reason log into a PS2, this extra gear would be unlocatable as a result of being stored in PC-only recognized memory locations. That makes for a sour gaming experience.

The idea of having additionally gear locations within the active inventory which a console cannot recognize/retrieve is simply not realistic. Until such time as PS2 support is wholly withdrawn, this will not happen.

There are many better solutions for inventory saving, including nameable inventory sacks which are listed as KIs versus slips which sit in inventory.

[Mirage]

If you can't call items from those inventories with macros, they are not better solutions.

And the idea would be that it would be for users that would never ever log in with a PS2. How many PC players seriously know someone who lives close to them who had a PS2 capable of running FF11 (HDD and all)? Not to mention, FF11 for PS2 doesn't even exist in Europe. Why would I give any damns at all about not being able to log in on a PS2 anymore when I live there? Every laptop I own is capable of running the game better than a PS2, so that's what I do if my desktop PC breaks down.

The thing that really is simply not realistic here, is the idea that any significant amount of the current PC users would ever log in on a PS2.

[Demon6324236]

It should be a 1 time 'upgrade' on your account. If chosen, you lose the ability to log in on PS2, perhaps 360 as well depending on if they are a limiting factor as well. Once chosen, you get a much larger inventory for your character, if you do not, then nothing new. That solves the problems it seems.

[FrankReynolds]

I'm not suggesting your gear will be los forevert; but rather, if you have these super spiffy "extra slots" that are suggested for PC only, and happen to go to a friends house, or your PC crashes, or for whatever reason log into a PS2, this extra gear would be unlocatable as a result of being stored in PC-only recognized memory locations. That makes for a sour gaming experience.

The idea of having additionally gear locations within the active inventory which a console cannot recognize/retrieve is simply not realistic. Until such time as PS2 support is wholly withdrawn, this will not happen.

There are many better solutions for inventory saving, including nameable inventory sacks which are listed as KIs versus slips which sit in inventory.

I would say that if you know your going to be playing on a PS2 somewhere, then you plan ahead and move the stuff you need to a place that you can access it from. I'm gonna be honest though. I highly doubt that this is a regular occurrence. FFXI is not the kind of game that you just pop onto for a few minutes and most people aren't going to want you monopolizing their system / TV for hours on end. I suspect that (like me) most people bring their own laptop/gaming system when they go to play at friends houses, work, school etc.

They really shouldn't base features on the unlikely chance that some guy is gonna go play FFXI at a friends house and not bring his laptop / game system and his friend is only going to have a 10 year old PS2 and the guy forgot to move his stuff to a safe place ahead of time. Think about it. In that highly unlikely scenario, the player is really at fault. Not the game.

[Kristal]

Yeah. I mentioned that in an earlier post somewhere. I don't think that would ever become a real problem, though. Just make it so each player needs to change the setting manually, along with a notice that clearly tells us that it would kill PS2 compatibility for that account.

Since when has that stopped anyone from doing anything stupid?
"Whoops, I navigated through 5 confirmation windows, but I still managed to accidentally drop my relic. Again."

What SE could do for all systems is the ability to use items from the other two inventories. Not gear swaps, but things like holy water or echo drops. Then when the PS2 is discarded, overhaul the whole inventory system.

[saevel]

What SE could do for all systems is the ability to use items from the other two inventories. Not gear swaps, but things like holy water or echo drops. Then when the PS2 is discarded, overhaul the whole inventory system.

Not possible. You really need to understand data structures and code to get this.

As a player you just hit a macro /item "Holy Water" <me>

To the computer it's something like

Item_ID = lookup_item("Holy Water") #Searches through local inventory dataspace for holy water
Item_Used = use_item(Item_ID) #submits use item request to server to use itemID returned from search and store returned Boolean value.
If Item_Used = True then Print "Item X used" else Print "Error message, Item not found"

That's kind of the logic the program must use. Before it sends the command to the server it first needs to know the actual unique item ID, to get that it search's through the local item storage to find it. If it's not in the local storage (aka inventory) then it doesn't know what ID to send.

[Llana_Virren]

I would say that if you know your going to be playing on a PS2 somewhere, then you plan ahead and move the stuff you need to a place that you can access it from. I'm gonna be honest though. I highly doubt that this is a regular occurrence. FFXI is not the kind of game that you just pop onto for a few minutes and most people aren't going to want you monopolizing their system / TV for hours on end. I suspect that (like me) most people bring their own laptop/gaming system when they go to play at friends houses, work, school etc.

They really shouldn't base features on the unlikely chance that some guy is gonna go play FFXI at a friends house and not bring his laptop / game system and his friend is only going to have a 10 year old PS2 and the guy forgot to move his stuff to a safe place ahead of time. Think about it. In that highly unlikely scenario, the player is really at fault. Not the game.

The point is that you cannot always predict this. PC could crash, laptop might be forgotten, etc. Giving room for a player to miss out on gear (and potentially be unable to play) because of game-design, and blaming it then on a player chosing to log in on the wrong interface, is not good.

Look, I can't stand that PS2 still gets support. But at the same time I'm not buying into this whole "just make it so PS2 players can't get to extra gear." Cut PS2 support, -then- adjust inventory. Otherwise, there are other solutions.

1. Mog Slips become nameable and are stored as KIs. (inventory +1 for each Slip).

2. Mog Slips (as KI) either require talking to the Moogle (current) or allow you to move items to-and-from just like you can currently with Satchel/Sack slots (proposed).

3. Mog Slips are not gear-type exclusive (proposal) which allows you to store your own "sets" in a slip, versus only gear-by-type (current) such as Relic, Relic -1, Relic +1, etc.

[FrankReynolds]

The point is that you cannot always predict this. PC could crash, laptop might be forgotten, etc. Giving room for a player to miss out on gear (and potentially be unable to play) because of game-design, and blaming it then on a player chosing to log in on the wrong interface, is not good.


Again, you're talking about a highly unusual occurrence. Your suggesting that the playerbase as a whole be penalized because some guy's computer might crash, or he might forget to pack his bags before he leaves to go play FFXI away from home. Just think about how that sounds for a minute.


Programming features that people can choose to use or not is one thing. Not adding features just because someone might occasionally be inconvenienced by an act of god, or their own forgetfulness is silly. I mean If I forget to bring my laptop home from work tomorrow and I forgot to save all my macros, will people have to stop playing until I have it back so as to ensure that they don't enjoy a better experience than me?

[Mirage]

Hurry, shut down the servers! I can't log in this week and I don't want everyone else to get more gear than I can get!

[Llana_Virren]

Again, you're talking about a highly unusual occurrence. Your suggesting that the playerbase as a whole be penalized because some guy's computer might crash, or he might forget to pack his bags before he leaves to go play FFXI away from home. Just think about how that sounds for a minute.


Programming features that people can choose to use or not is one thing. Not adding features just because someone might occasionally be inconvenienced by an act of god, or their own forgetfulness is silly. I mean If I forget to bring my laptop home from work tomorrow and I forgot to save all my macros, will people have to stop playing until I have it back so as to ensure that they don't enjoy a better experience than me?

I'm saying that the justification for these requested changes is to "ignore people who don't play under my circumstances and give me more".

Penalization would be to take something away from you. I'm simply saying don't be selfish and worry about what benefits you without understanding how it affects other people. Again, I despise the PS2 just like everyone else pretends to on these forums; the first step however is to stop supporting the PS2 before creating a second standard of gameplay.