200 items limitation on glamour dresser is just not enough....

As some of people already complain about how mess this glamour system is.

- 200 items limit is ridiculous. I have like 400 items I collected which span across 2 retainers. That doesn't include maybe 100-200 or so that I have to discard because I don't have place to store them.
- Going to inn just to use the dresser is a joke. The inn is so hard to go, no direct teleport not even an atherythe front of the NPC.
- Can we just have the dresser as housing item? Srsly, why don't you think about this
- Why can't I use glamour plate outside the big-city state area. What's the point for that?
- Anrmorie is also useless, pretty much. Nothing fit in there, including mog station items that I pay $$ for.
- I want to keep EVERY items that I already earned.

I hope that this will eventually get fixed because it seriously need it.
.
.
Also that 40 interactive furniture rendering limit in housing is super annoying

My theory behind the 200 item limit is that they still want people to pay the extra $2/month for retainers. SE acts as if hard drive storage cost is still super high.
I agree that ANYTHING you buy from the mog station should go into the Armoire. It's stupid that those items won't. If anything else allow us to re-buy them from the Calamity Salvager for a small amount of gil.

P.S. Even the Eternal Bonding (in-game wedding) tux and dress won't go in the Armoire nor are they on the Calamity Salvager. I guess these items I'll put in the dresser because if I lose them I'm out completely.

Remember it's still early days and this was a long time coming, although now it's implemented they can only add or improve it in the long run. It definitely is a data issue, and yeah maybe they are looking in to ways of fixing this (buying more data servers etc) who knows, but any company needs to see how used something is and in demand before they invest further. It's not like in SB early access when everyone demanded now servers just to get through Raubahn, because several days later that suddenly wasn't an issue. Buying more servers just for that wouldn't of been worth it.

Yeah I understand that. That's why I want to throw out those complains. That's for them to see and take it as feedback from player. Hopefully they will improve this system.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kurando

It definitely is a data issue, and yeah maybe they are looking in to ways of fixing this (buying more data servers etc) who knows,

---

It's not really a data issue more of a design issue.

Data wise all the dresser side needs is a simple binary toggle for each piece of gear within a slot. 0 If it's not there 1 if it is.

In this fashion if they did it hexadecimally each byte of informantion could cover 4 unique looks. in a binary sequence.

so body armour a 1 would be 1.
Body armour b would be 2.
Body armour c would be 4.
Body armour d would be 8. etc etc.

So if a player had looks c and d but not a and b the byte would simply be a C. if a player had looks b and c the byte would be a 6. or all 4 would be an F.

With that the small data string of "FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF" would be all the data required to store 256 unique looks within a single glamour catergoriy.
this equate to just 32 bytes of information.

if you multiplied that across all gear slots you could store 256 items for every slot in the glamour dresser and it would total only 384 bytes of information per character.

That means over 2000 characters glamour dressers could be stored in one single megabyte of server space.

On the actual plate side a single glamour plate might consist of 8 Bytes per slot. Basically an item id within that slot and where applicable a colour. So approximately 104 Bytes of information for every glamour plate.

So that's theoretically over 9000 glammer plates stored in a single megabyte of server space. If you gave players 25 plates each that's over 300 players glamour plates stored in a megabye.

You could basically cover something like 350 characters glamour data. (Dresser and plates) on a single 3.5 floppy disk

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dzian

if they did it hexadecimally each byte of informantion could cover 4 unique looks.

---

8 unique looks (2 of those hex digits per byte) or 4 looks per nibble (a half-byte --the amount a single hex digit represents), but you got it right by the time you got to 256 looks per 32 bytes, so that's just a nitpicky correction.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dzian

... all the data required to store 256 unique looks within a single glamour catergoriy.
this equate to just 32 bytes of information.

if you multiplied that across all gear slots you could store 256 items for every slot in the glamour dresser and it would total only 384 bytes of information per character.

---

With that one bit per item pattern, they can't just give us X number of slots to store stuff. They have to specify the exact items that each bit represents, and then we can store any of those specific items (which is how the armoire works). The only way to make a practical glamour system that way is to let it store every piece of visible gear that exists in the game, which is more than 256 per slot. (There are 1360 body pieces, for instance, though fewer for some of the other slots. Some of that could be condensed by doubling up on pieces that share a common appearance.)

But that's exactly how it should work. A while back (maybe a year or so ago) I calculated how much space it would take per character, based on the total number of gear items (minus belts) listed in the Eorzea Database. Though it was more than 384 bytes, it was still a completely trivial amount by today's standards, even accounting for the fact that they'd be storing it for millions of characters.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Niwashi

But that's exactly how it should work. A while back (maybe a year or so ago) I calculated how much space it would take per character, based on the total number of gear items (minus belts) listed in the Eorzea Database. Though it was more than 384 bytes, it was still a completely trivial amount by today's standards, even accounting for the fact that they'd be storing it for millions of characters.

---

That's exactly how WoW does it. And even though they have fewer visible slots, they have WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more items. Somehow their servers have not burst in to flames or collapsed under their own girth storing all that.

Currently, according to the Eorzea Database, the game has:
2623 arms
597 tools
216 shields
1353 hats
1360 body armour
1139 gloves
1203 leg armour
1171 shoes
588 earrings
561 necklaces
567 bracelets
632 rings
for a total of 12,010 gear items (other than belts, since those don't count when talking about glamour)

The entire thing —every visible gear item in the game— could be stored in just under one and a half kilobytes.

(By comparison, the little 96x96 pixel avatar images next to our names in these forums are about 3 kb each, or twice the size we'd need for a 100% complete glamour dresser.)

Currently, according to XIVCensus there are 12,074,001 player characters that exist in the game. About half a million of those are active characters but that's irrelevant since this would be applied to all PC data everywhere.

So if we take your estimate of 1.5KB (1536 bytes) per character to store that data, we're talking about 18,545,665,536 bytes (about 18GB) of total storage as things stand today. I'm reasonably certain I have a thumb drive around here that can accommodate that.

Even if we future-proof this a bit and give everyone twice as much space as they technically need (3KB instead of 1.5) to account for future additions (which would take about 4 expansions worth of data to accumulate), we're looking at.. what? about 36GB? Again. Thumb drive.

I can't express just how much I agree with this. As someone who loves glamour, I would very much like to free up my retainers for more useful things, and I visit my house WAY more often than I visit the inn.

Just give it some time, i'd imagine its a prototype version of the full thing. Duty recording is in same state its only for Byakko at this moment.
I think it will become a housing item its just not high enough on "to do" atm because of how delayed Eureka is.

4.3 likely has info on the dresser.

They will probably expand the dresser.... through the use of currency purchased for real money through that new app. It seemed like they planned for more things to come for people to buy with those coins so I'm just sayin. With already having to pay extra for more than 2 retainers, and now getting double chocobo space with app subscription.... Why expand inventory space for just the price of your sub when they can charge you extra for it?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Voidedge_Ragna

Just give it some time, i'd imagine its a prototype version of the full thing.

---

Part of the problem is that it's a prototype of how to do it badly. Expanding on a badly designed system just produces a larger, but still badly designed system. They've created a dresser that has slots where we can put items. That means the best they can do is expand the number of slots. They should have implemented it like a log, or like the armoire, where there are no slots, just an indicator for each item of whether we have it or not. But now that they've put in this "prototype" version and people already have items stored there, changing it to work the right way is all but impossible.

We've seen this same pattern from SE before. They implement an initial version of something that's both way too limited and not designed to expand well. Then they stall about expanding it or only add a tiny trickle of space that isn't enough to fix the problems, while complaining that it's just far too resource intensive to add more. Well, if they'd designed it right in the first place, then it wouldn't be so resource intensive. They use their own bad design as an excuse way too often.


Ok, given how it does work, I think the minimum necessary to make it usable would be:

• Either five hundred slots in the dresser with the ability to remove items, or else five thousand slots without the ability to remove items. (In either case, this would also need to increase from there with each expansion.)
• At least 30 glamour plates. (That's one per job, plus four extra for seasonal or casual outfits.)
• We should have the ability to use glamour plates from anywhere that we can change jobs. (That's after they're set up. Limiting where we can set them up is ok.)

To go beyond the minimum to use it and get it to the point of being a nice system, those first two requirements would be doubled, the third changed from wherever we can change jobs to wherever we can change gear, and a dresser item should be added to housing furniture.