Inventory 80 Limitations aren't real, heres why.

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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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by oliveira

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

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Wow you have a way with words.

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Originally Posted by oliveira

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.

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This I can agree on.

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Originally Posted by oliveira

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by oliveira

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by oliveira

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. ;)

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

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Originally Posted by saevel

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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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Originally Posted by saevel

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by saevel

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Sarick

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.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by saevel

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.

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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.