Inventory 80 Limitations aren't real, heres why.

[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 you call a science seek out whats really happening right?

[oliveira]

Thats where those people doing the bad stuff 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.