Originally Posted by
saevel
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.