Glamour and why it's poorly designed

Hello, my name is Gokki and i'm an avid glamourer. Or i would be if the game would let me! Here's what i propose the game needs, with pros, cons and reason to do it:

FFXIV needs a Glamour Log, or Glamour Collection. This is how it would work:

Glamour Dresser:

• Dresser no longer works as storage, the 400 slots are removed. Any items remaining inside are mailed to the player upon login.
• Dresser is now only used to make Glamour Plates.
• Plates limit is increased to 999.

Glamour Log:

• Any item that the player hasn't acquired will show a greyed-out dresser icon, the ones at the very top-right of the item tooltip.
• Any item that the player has acquired will show a yellow dresser icon instead (just like the current icon that tells you it can go into the Dresser)
• Players go to the Dresser and Reflect the item into the Dresser, adding it to the Glamour Log. The item can now be discarded as its reflection is now in the Log to be used as glamour. Reflecting an item binds it to the player, making it untradable, obviously.

Glamour Log will be something similar to Orchestrion Log, Dresser or the Minion Guide.
The Log will have several major categories such as Crafted, Dungeons, Raids, Tomestones, Job, etc...
Within each of these there will be a list of sets, such as Cotton, Plundered, Initiate's, Darklight, Chivalric, Ala Mhigan, Omicron, etc...
Clicking on one of those will open a second window with the preview of that set on my character, with the different options such as Fending or Aiming - click on these will automatically show the 5 pieces plus weapon on my character.
This entire system can be filtered by Job, Role (Casting, etc), Race, Gender, Level, Dyable or Base Colour.

Optional improvements:

• Dye Storage - let us store Dyes here, up to 999 so we can apply them without taking up space in our bags.
• Plate sharing - let Plates be linkable in chat.
• Plate sharing online - have plates come with link codes we can copypaste to friends to share sets online. I would love to show my friends some glamour in messaging app and they can copypaste the code in game to preview it on their character.
• Plate application everywhere. It makes no sense for Plates to only work in cities. Please allow plates anywhere outside of combat.
• QoL: Disable plate glamour chat spam when applying a plate.

Technical considerations, i'm not an engineer but i have basic grasp on fundamentals:

• Most things can be downloaded and stored client-side, with little bandwidth going between Client and Server, updated only when a player enters or leaves the inn room for example.
• Despite feeling like there's more storage needed for this it'll actually require LESS STORAGE because most of existing items will be discarded by players and the Glamour Log will be shared in the entire account and it won't require as much data as the current system overall. I will only keep items needed for combat, everything else can be safelty discarded because its appearance is in the Glamour Log.

Right now the system only works up to 400 slots, after that it breaks down. I am unable to gain any new glamour because i am stuck with what i have in the Dresser. Additional space in the Dresser doesn't fix the problem, it just inflates it. We need a proper Glamour Collection, similar to World of Warcraft one. It's sad and frustrating that i'm seeing so many nice glamours and looks but i'm unable to express myself. The current Glamour system is woefully inadequate, clunky, confusing and unergonomic. There's a lot that can be done to improve it and i would love to provide additional detail on how best to implement it if anyone's interested (but i'm not very good at drawing to show examples).
It would lead to the following for me:

• I would do all the dungeons and raids to get all the glamour, right now i am not doing any of them because none of the glamour can be used. I haven't bothered to touch Ultimates because i have no space to store the weapon glams.
• It would free up a lot of space, my retainers are completely full and i'm unable to do more stuff that i want to.
• I want to create many more plates, many glams to have fun with but i'm stuck with the current 15, i need more. A lot more. 999 is fine if you need to limit it, i would make it infinite, and expire any plates with more than 1 year of disuse.

Add allowing individual item glamouring via the log as well so we don't have to keep random items in our inventory. A log-based glamour system wouldn't function well if there was still a need to keep an item around in storage somewhere.

Also, the retainer, squadron and eligible custom delivery npcs glamouring systems should have access to the log for the same reasons.

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Originally Posted by Mhaeric

Add allowing individual item glamouring via the log as well so we don't have to keep random items in our inventory. A log-based glamour system wouldn't function well if there was still a need to keep an item around in storage somewhere.

Also, the retainer, squadron and eligible custom delivery npcs glamouring systems should have access to the log for the same reasons.

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Yes, obviously. Everything you said is included. You can glam any specific item so long as it's in the Log and you have the job/level for it.

Just copy and paste the transmog system from WoW. FFXIV does literally nothing better than it, aside from having dyes.

Rather than having to keep items on us, I would think that a simple list of 0s and 1s for each piece of equipment in the game (whether or not you have it) would take up less data than all of those items. Right now, the glamour dresser probably works like this:

Slot 1: (itemref here)
Slot 2: (itemref here)
Slot 3: (itemref here)
...
Slot 399: (itemref here)
Slot 400: (itemref here)

and of course 0s or null values where there are no items.

Instead, you could just make a table of 0s and 1s and do it like a chart, let's say there's 5,000 total equippable items in XIV... all you'd need is 5,000 booleans stored on the character, and when you start the game all of those are set to 0 and when an item gets bound to you, it sets that 0 to a 1.

We could keep glamour plates, but they really wouldn't be necessary unless you wanted to store a whole set that you could quickly glamour, instead, you could manually glamour each piece of gear exactly how you want it. Rather than storing the dye on the glamour plate, you'd instead store the dye on the actual piece you're wearing.

Let's say I have a chest armor I want to glam to a Hempen Camise and I wanted blue dye. I'd dye the chest armor blue, and then when I glam it to the Camise, I get a blue Camise.

EDIT: To avoid the whole "But I don't want to use dye every time I glam!" or "What if I want to wear a red dress today and a green dress tomorrow!" we could change the dye system too: dyes could be a usable item that unlocks the dye option to use permanently, as many times as you want. Just make the dyes a bit harder/more expensive to obtain to account for the fact they are infinite-use.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

EDIT: To avoid the whole "But I don't want to use dye every time I glam!" or "What if I want to wear a red dress today and a green dress tomorrow!" we could change the dye system too: dyes could be a usable item that unlocks the dye option to use permanently, as many times as you want. Just make the dyes a bit harder/more expensive to obtain to account for the fact they are infinite-use.

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We could just have both. Current dyes would be great for people who don't think they'll want that color too often. Permanent dyes that are substantially more difficult and costly to obtain (not necessarily gil, but a hit to some valued resource) would be for completionists and colors people think they'd use a lot.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

Rather than having to keep items on us, I would think that a simple list of 0s and 1s for each piece of equipment in the game (whether or not you have it) would take up less data than all of those items. Right now, the glamour dresser probably works like this:

Slot 1: (itemref here)
Slot 2: (itemref here)
Slot 3: (itemref here)
...
Slot 399: (itemref here)
Slot 400: (itemref here)

and of course 0s or null values where there are no items.

Instead, you could just make a table of 0s and 1s and do it like a chart, let's say there's 5,000 total equippable items in XIV... all you'd need is 5,000 booleans stored on the character, and when you start the game all of those are set to 0 and when an item gets bound to you, it sets that 0 to a 1.

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The all-encompassing list of booleans would be bigger than the current dresser system per player. Don't get me wrong, they should still absolutely do it because the current system is pants-on-head, but it does create a memory drain to do what we're suggesting here.

It's more than possible to store a list of simple 0 and 1 bits in a form much smaller than the number of items in that list. A simple 8-bit binary number can store a list of up to 256 0s and 1s for example.

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Originally Posted by Mhaeric

It's more than possible to store a list of simple 0 and 1 bits in a form much smaller than the number of items in that list. A simple 8-bit binary number can store a list of up to 256 0s and 1s for example.

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Well no... an 8-bit number can store exactly 8 zeroes and ones. Doing it with bitvectors is probably still a better use of memory, but now we're getting into interpolation, encoding, and maintenance of a complex array of thousands of items.

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Originally Posted by Callinon

Well no... an 8-bit number can store exactly 8 zeroes and ones.

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I didn't say how many 0s and 1s an 8-bit number can hold. I said how large a list of 1s and 0s (i.e. booleans) that an 8-bit binary number could store. You seem to understand just fine that I was referring to a bit array given your bitvector comment, so I'm not sure why you even mentioned this.

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Originally Posted by Mhaeric

I didn't say how many 0s and 1s an 8-bit number can hold. I said how large a list of 1s and 0s (i.e. booleans) that an 8-bit binary number could store. You seem to understand just fine that I was referring to a bit array given your bitvector comment, so I'm not sure why you even mentioned this.

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Maybe I'm not understanding you. An 8-bit number looks like this:
00000000 (0)
all the way up to
11111111 (255)

That's 8 bits you have to work with in there, therefore 8 points of data that can be either on or off. Which bits toggled on changes the decimal value of the number, but it's still just 8 points of data:
10011001 (153)

In this way we can represent 8 boolean values in a single space instead of 8 different spaces.

I think we're talking about the same thing with different words.

An 8-bit number can alternately store ONE value between 0 and 255.

It would be slightly more memory, but not hugely so!

The current system, I would imagine, uses at the very minimum, 800 bytes of data:

400 slots, 2 bytes each (1 byte would only give you 255 possible things, which is nowhere near enough) allows for 65,535 different possible things that could be in each slot. This is assuming that each item number has a 2-byte ref# ranging from 0000 to FFFF. Now, it is possible (and quite likely) that they might use an EOF-type function (you don't actually store null values in the empty slots, you just read until you come to the end of the list), but yet when you're programming a list like this, if you tell the user that they CAN have 400 slots, then you need to allocate enough memory in case the user (or all the users in the case of an MMO) really does use all 400 slots.

So this means that you would need at least 800 bytes of data to store the contents of the glamour dresser in its current form, which is a pittance by today's computing standards.

My suggestion would take a bit more memory, but still not that much.

Looking up on xivdb, there are roughly 4,000 weapons and 14,000 armors with about 300 glamour items. However, a lot of these have duplicate models (such as the Aetherial _____) and we don't really need to duplicate the models to be honest.

If we went with my idea, you would need (currently) about 19,000 bits (or 2,400 bytes) which sounds like a lot (3 times as much as we currently use), but still a pittance by today's computing standards. This is with the duplicate models, mind you. I'm willing to bet we could shave off a good 2,000 or so of those entries if we got rid of the duplicate models.

Just as a reference, this post is ~2,300 bytes in pure-text form.

This is assuming you do not compress the data. Given that this is a system that is not accessed often, this data could be compressed on the server, sent to the client, and uncompressed at the client to populate the list (which places most of the burden on the user's machine rather than the server or the bandwidth). Since this is only going to be done while in town, and such decompression can be done in an instant by any computer strong enough to run XIV, I don't really think this would be a problem to be honest.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

It would be slightly more memory, but not hugely so!

The current system, I would imagine, uses at the very minimum, 800 bytes of data:

400 slots, 2 bytes each (1 byte would only give you 255 possible things, which is nowhere near enough) allows for 65,535 different possible things that could be in each slot. This is assuming that each item number has a 2-byte ref# ranging from 0000 to FFFF. Now, it is possible (and quite likely) that they might use an EOF-type function (you don't actually store null values in the empty slots, you just read until you come to the end of the list), but yet when you're programming a list like this, if you tell the user that they CAN have 400 slots, then you need to allocate enough memory in case the user (or all the users in the case of an MMO) really does use all 400 slots.

So this means that you would need at least 800 bytes of data to store the contents of the glamour dresser in its current form, which is a pittance by today's computing standards.

My suggestion would take a bit more memory, but still not that much.

Looking up on xivdb, there are roughly 4,000 weapons and 14,000 armors with about 300 glamour items. However, a lot of these have duplicate models (such as the Aetherial _____) and we don't really need to duplicate the models to be honest.

If we went with my idea, you would need (currently) about 19,000 bits (or 2,400 bytes) which sounds like a lot (3 times as much as we currently use), but still a pittance by today's computing standards. This is with the duplicate models, mind you. I'm willing to bet we could shave off a good 2,000 or so of those entries if we got rid of the duplicate models.

Just as a reference, this post is ~2,300 bytes in pure-text form.

This is assuming you do not compress the data. Given that this is a system that is not accessed often, this data could be compressed on the server, sent to the client, and uncompressed at the client to populate the list (which places most of the burden on the user's machine rather than the server or the bandwidth). Since this is only going to be done while in town, and such decompression can be done in an instant by any computer strong enough to run XIV, I don't really think this would be a problem to be honest.

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You forgot the dyes in the current system but yeah that sounds right. Part of me kind of expects the item id#s to be full 4-byte integers just because that'd give the system a functionally infinite number of items to allocate and it wouldn't ever have to be a consideration. I will say that their item structure absolutely considers duplicate models as separate items. For the purposes of glamour, yeah they should pare that out and get rid of the dupes, but the current system doesn't work that way and SE is all about making excuses based on existing code.

I will point out that even though the individual memory cost for this is vanishingly small, we have to consider the impact of thousands of these co-existing all at the same time. Ultros, for instance, has about 95,000 active players according to the census data. So your estimate of 2300 bytes per loaded player means you're potentially talking about 218MB of data for this one system alone. That's a lot more impactful.

what if we just deleted the jobstone and belt slots? (paladins deserve to keep their offhand glams i aint touching that) would that save memory?

Something a lot less major but what still bothers me a lot: the fact we can't actually manually sort and move the glamour plates. Honestly I'd already be happy if they let us move a plate to a different slot and not make us redo the whole thing.
Though of course I also agree with the overall point that the glamour system really needs a big update to be less frustrating. I'm pretty new in the glamour area but I already feel like there is only so much I can do thanks to the game's restrictions. :(
So I agree wholeheartedly with all of this.
(also this is my first time on the forum so I hope this is the right way to reply !)

I seriously doubt the glamour system is going to completely change anytime soon (6.0 earliest, 7.0 more realistic), for several reasons.

1. There is over 7 years of glamour coding that needs to be rewritten
2. Transmog as of the start of BFA still required you to visit a Transmogrifier to invoke the glamours, however much you liked playing paper doll with the interface.
3. Client vs Server side works differently between WoW and FFXIV
4. PC client and PS4 client changes would be necessary -- WoW has a single interface to be changed
5. People who think that the problem is one of memory, one that can be solved with bitmaps and a little bit of coding, ignore the network issues with additional data, as well as the intricacies of threading through code changes that affect everything you see on screen. Heck, I see enough issues porting into Ul'dah on Balmung, watching players appear in their undergarments for tens of seconds before their gear and glamours arrive.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

I seriously doubt the glamour system is going to completely change anytime soon (6.0 earliest, 7.0 more realistic), for several reasons.

1. There is over 7 years of glamour coding that needs to be rewritten

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Same could be said for a lot of other things that were changed or re-done in the game's life.

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2. Transmog as of the start of BFA still required you to visit a Transmogrifier to invoke the glamours, however much you liked playing paper doll with the interface.

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What exactly does this prove? It doesn't *HAVE* to be that way, that's a choice Blizzard made. And besides, there's at least 1 mount in the game that you can summon anywhere that has a transmogrifier on said mount, which makes WoW's transmog system even more convenient than XIV which still requires you to be inside a town to apply a glamour plate.

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3. Client vs Server side works differently between WoW and FFXIV

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Not sure why this has anything to do with anything. Obviously, different games work differently.

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4. PC client and PS4 client changes would be necessary -- WoW has a single interface to be changed

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This hasn't stopped them from updating other out of date systems.

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5. People who think that the problem is one of memory, one that can be solved with bitmaps and a little bit of coding, ignore the network issues with additional data, as well as the intricacies of threading through code changes that affect everything you see on screen. Heck, I see enough issues porting into Ul'dah on Balmung, watching players appear in their undergarments for tens of seconds before their gear and glamours arrive.

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My idea would not change this. Once you apply a glamour to your equipped items, everything would still function the same as it does now. My idea would only affect the game determining what glamours you have access to.

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Originally Posted by Maeka

My idea would only affect the game determining what glamours you have access to.

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And the comment I made was this wasn't going to happen any time soon, not that it wouldn't happen eventually. If you can wait 2-3 years for it, you'll probably see some of those changes. If you want it now, forget it.

I totally agree with OP

I just want to expand that, we do have in game already log of items, so implement what OP said should be easy to do

Example: Just look at Market Board, it has all tradable items in game

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Originally Posted by testname

I totally agree with OP

I just want to expand that, we do have in game already log of items, so implement what OP said should be easy to do

Example: Just look at Market Board, it has all tradable items in game

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Er.. no.. those are very different structures than what we're proposing here.

This type of change will be time-consuming and difficult to implement the way the game is currently set up, but they still need to do it. Otherwise it's just years and years of more band-aids that don't fix the problem and mounting technical debt. This is the type of thing I wouldn't expect to get outside of an expansion launch, and it'd be a marquee feature.

This would be such a HUGE QoL, not even joking.

And yeah, if the Glamour dressed also could hold dyes it would be amazing. It's a pain to rummage through your retainer's inventory just to get a pot... And keeping them in your own inventory is a lot of wasted space.

Everyone talks so much about how hard it is to implement? So what? What people enjoy is subjective i would sacrifice a raid tier if it means getting a working glamour system (i know it doensn't work like that, but with so many players i would think they would increase their teams to work on more things at once. I feel the game itself is so old a lot of basic functionality becomes dificult to implement. I'm just sad that there are so many glams i wanna try and do but can't because they game is too limited.

The problem of a WoW style trasmog is you can't store dyed pieces like that, because instead of storing gear you ticking a box. Also people seem to forget that WoW's work like that only for the past 2 expansions, prior to that XIV glam plates were far better.

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Originally Posted by Deslyxic

The problem of a WoW style trasmog is you can't store dyed pieces like that, because instead of storing gear you ticking a box. Also people seem to forget that WoW's work like that only for the past 2 expansions, prior to that XIV glam plates were far better.

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Nobody is forgetting that it's a recent addition. It's not good enough that FFXIV used to be better though. SE can't rest on its laurels and let other games pass it by. We're not paying them to play a game that used to be good.

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Originally Posted by Deslyxic

The problem of a WoW style trasmog is you can't store dyed pieces like that, because instead of storing gear you ticking a box. Also people seem to forget that WoW's work like that only for the past 2 expansions, prior to that XIV glam plates were far better.

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I already gave suggestions on how to solve the dye issue.

In fact, I think that dye system would be better than the one we have already, IMO. Simply make dyes a checkbox too and just make them more expensive/difficult to come by (but they are infinite use) and the dye could be applied when you make the plate and/or cast an individual glamour. You'd select the glamour image you want from a list of everything you have access to, and then you'd select which dye you want from those you have unlocked, click Apply, and bam. Nice and convenient.

Also saying "WoW just started this recently, and before that, FFXIV was better." is... not the right way to go about it.

Remember, FFXIV used to be worse than WoW during the 1.0 era, and WoW kinda rested on its laurels and now FFXIV is better than WoW lol. (that, and corporate greed by Blizz/Activision hurt it a lot too)

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Originally Posted by Maeka

Remember, FFXIV used to be worse than WoW during the 1.0 era, and WoW kinda rested on its laurels and now FFXIV is better than WoW lol. (that, and corporate greed by Blizz/Activision hurt it a lot too)

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I don't view either as 'better' or 'worse' than the other. They serve different communities. Some players from WoW have migrated to FFXIV, most have not. Some players of FFXIV have migrated to WoW, most have not.

WoW has been resting on its laurels since Cataclysm. It was still pretty nice to play through the first year of BFA. It doesn't help that a number of developers are apparently jumping ship to work for the next Mike Morhaime company.

I think that after 7 years of FFXIV 2+, SE has more-or-less proved that it can make money with the current design. I can, after all, still play the jobs I started playing back in 2014 with no sense of "what the heck did the company do to my job?", unlike WoW.

[For reference: 11 years of WoW, starting in BC; 6 years of FFXIV, starting in 2.3.]

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

WoW has been resting on its laurels since Cataclysm.

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There are a lot of criticisms I would level at WoW and Blizzard, but that's not really one of them. If anything, they go too far in the opposite direction where they often want to act like they can develop their way to total market capture or something. While Cataclysm was very much a copy and paste of Wrath in many respects, both MoP and Legion showed a ton of innovation on Blizzard's part. What did them in was more losing touch with the playerbase and choosing a business model that attempts to capitalize on the fear of missing out, rather than just developing a really good game people don't want to put down.

FFXIV's releases are far more formulaic, which is where I think the concerns about resting on their laurels come into play. Part of this is that SE is a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard and that SE is a normal game company on top of that, whereas Blizzard likes to be weird and focus intensely on like 5 IPs represented by a single persistent flagship title each, but part of it is definitely just on the developers for this game and the choices they make and don't make.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

There are a lot of criticisms I would level at WoW and Blizzard, but that's not really one of them. If anything, they go too far in the opposite direction where they often want to act like they can develop their way to total market capture or something. While Cataclysm was very much a copy and paste of Wrath in many respects, both MoP and Legion showed a ton of innovation on Blizzard's part. What did them in was more losing touch with the playerbase and choosing a business model that attempts to capitalize on the fear of missing out, rather than just developing a really good game people don't want to put down.

FFXIV's releases are far more formulaic, which is where I think the concerns about resting on their laurels come into play. Part of this is that SE is a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard and that SE is a normal game company on top of that, whereas Blizzard likes to be weird and focus intensely on like 5 IPs represented by a single persistent flagship title each, but part of it is definitely just on the developers for this game and the choices they make and don't make.

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^^
This, mostly.

Cataclysm suffered from the immense time it took to redo all of the 1-60 content, but that was something that *really* needed done, as that old content was showing its age. I gave Cataclysm a free pass because of how much work they had to dump into redoing the old world. But even then, it was better than WoD.

MoP was awesome. Just a few little flaws they could have fixed, but otherwise it was awesome. They had Badges of Valor, they had upgradeable equipment that wasn't RNG, they had clear goals you could work towards, and Timeless Isle was something I very much enjoyed doing with a family member. There were dailies to do, there was Timeless Isle, the farm was interesting, the locale was cool.

WoD is where you could just tell that huge changes were being made in the company. WoD threw out a ton of hype. Hype, Hype, Hype, promises for this, promises for that, they wanted to add all of this awesome stuff, OH WHOOPS WE CAN'T ACTUALLY GET THAT DONE IN TIME, SORRY! They forgot to add any sort of fun activity that could be done daily that wasn't in an instanced dungeon or raid, there was 1 daily that was boring-as-balls and they thought all the hype would carry everything over.... but it didn't; it fell flat on its face.

It really seemed to me like the team that did WoD was some inexperienced group of interns who were over-confident that they could deliver on this huge list of promises that they got to work on a tech demo and then when it came down to actually code something ready for the public, they realize that they were talking out of their behind about it the whole time and had to cut massive amounts of content.

To bring this back to main topic at hand:


I like the ideas being posted in this thread, but honestly, they feel moot until you can have glamour plates apply out in the world.

My hope is their silence on glamour dressers means they are working to implement this change for 6.0. Or at least I can dream.

I hate to have to bring this thread back 2 years later, but man I wish this kind of WoW-like Glamour system would get implemented. It would take a fairly large-scale effort on the development side of things, and would probably be relegated to being implemented inside of a new expansion, but I think it would go a long way towards future-proofing the state of Glamour and reducing the load Glamour Dressers and Glamour Plates have on the servers. I, among many others, find it extremely tiresome to have to comb through the Glamour Dresser to replace gear and swap it out for new glamour pieces due to limited space.

I understand how dyes would be a problem if they implemented that system, but then again, I think it would also reduce any hassle if the player was allowed to use a dye item and permanently have access to that color. If having dyes still be tied to a resource was needed, maybe you could just have a generic all-encompassing dye item that gets consumed upon dyeing gear, similar to how you just use a Glamour Prism upon placing gear in your dresser.

Glamour's one of the most beloved features of this game and it's strange to me that despite this, certain aspects of this feature are still cumbersome in many regards, and I hope they can be made more user-friendly and less heavy on micromanaging inventory space and retainers to keep gear for glamouring. I want to be able to use my inventory space for more useful things like materia, food, and crafting materials, rather than dungeon gear that I don't have room for in my dresser.

From Thread: Suggestion: Improved Glamour System

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Originally Posted by Rongway

I don't know exactly how the current glamour data is stored, but here are my best guesses as someone with a graduate degree in computer science.

There are almost 20,000 equipable items in the game. If you ignore belts, this number will go down; but let's assume the number of items will stay about the same or go up once we account for the items that are coming in Endwalker. That means we need log_2(20,000) --between 15 and 16-- bits to differentiate between all the different equipable items in the game, and another bit for HQ/NQ. So the glamour dresser needs 2 bytes per item to remember what the item is. The glamour dresser also remembers an item's dye. We have something like 120 dyes, and another byte can handle that. There is other information for items in general, but the dresser doesn't need to care about those things, and you're even warned that some data will be lost, such as condition and signature, when you put things in the dresser. So ignoring that information, we need 3 bytes per item in the dresser. A 400 item dresser then should require 1,200 bytes.

If instead we stored 1 bit for each equipable item we've ever obtained, the catalog would require 20,000/8 bytes. That comes out to 2,500 bytes, which is over twice the minimum data required to support a 400 item dresser. So if they're worried about storage space now, it could be much worse with a glamour catalog. There are of course data structure optimizations and compression algorithms that you could apply to reduce the storage required in either case, at the cost of increased processing requirements, but then we get back to how much processing would need to be done on many glamour catalog access requests over a period of time.

I know, 2.5 kB is not a lot. But with 24 million registered players, the total data required to store just glamour data would be about 60 GB.

And that's all before we start talking about how an increase in glamour data size would affect the data transfer volume (and cost), even with it restricted to dressers in inns.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

One bit per item, and it wouldn't matter if it's dyable or not because a catalog system would only care if you've acquired the item or not. It would be up to the client to map the bits to items and tell you which ones are dyable.

At 1 bit per item, it comes out to twice as much data as currently required.




I suspect it wouldn't make a difference if the people with multiple characters were allowed to consolidate their glamour data into a single catalog. There are probably far more people with single characters than with many alts, so account-wide glamour catalogs would only save so much space.

Besides, have you ever heard the XIV devs respond to requests for account-wide things? We may some day get a glamour catalog but I don't imagine for a second that they would make it account-wide, even if that could save them enough storage to allow a more accessible catalog.

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Original thread date was pre-EW. Following the release of EW:

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Originally Posted by KhevanFarstryder

Honest question: now with the announcement that in 6.2 they are increasing the glamour dresser from 400 to 800 items, I wonder how the memory size difference works out now? Does the current system, doubled in size, still equate to less memory space than a true/false glamour log? I wonder what size of glamour dresser they will have to get to in order to break even, when a glamour log will be smaller than the current implementation of the glamour dresser?

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Sure, here are the updated numbers for that.

As of 6.08, there are

4,500 arms
1,024 tools
10,740 armors
3,768 accessories
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20,032 visible equipment items

IDing 20,032 equipment items requires cieling(log_2(20,032)) bits, or 15 bits. Adding one more bit for HQ brings this up to 16 bits or 2 bytes. Add one more byte for dye information. So the simplest data structure for an 800 slot glamour dresser at 3 bytes per slot would take up 2.4 kB.

Keeping track of a glamour catalog would require 1 bit per item. With 20,032 items, this comes out to 20,032 bits or 2.504 kB.

With 35.8 million subscribers, assuming the vast majority of them only have one character, the total glamour storage difference between an 800 slot dresser and a full catalog might only be about 3.5 GB total among all regions. Note that there are a few items that are exact duplicates (both model and dye channel), so all of these numbers in reality should be slightly less than these calculations, but also I can't say what percentage of the subscriber base has alts, so they could also be higher.

For now, at least, it looks like it wouldn't require storing much more character data if we switched to a glamour catalog. But it's worth noting that these requirements do not scale the same as equipment is added to the game. For a glamour dresser, we could add another 12,500 items to the game and it wouldn't require any additional storage because the minimal size of ID data is the same at 20k items as it is at 32k items. However, adding 12,500 items to a glamour catalog would increase the catalog size to 4.096 kB per character, a linear increase.

Further, a glamour dresser need not take up the maximal space. A dresser that's only half full could take up only half the data storage because empty slots might not need to be explicitly allocated in the data structure. A dresser that's completely empty might take up no storage. However, a catalog would always take up the whole catalog size regardless of how many items you've collected because it still tracks everything you don't have.

So on the one hand, in the present it doesn't look like a catalog would require much more resource than an 800 slot dresser; but on the other hand, maybe they think a dresser will age better?

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http://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/blog/images/8787.png

This image shows the transmog system from World of Warcraft.
It's very simple and doesn't need as much space like the existing glamour system in FF14.
All it does is this:
1 Lists all the items you can glamour in the game - into categories e.g. helms, chest, weapons
2 Highlights and adds a tick if you own the item - either already in glamour dresser or inventory, unowned / uncollected items will be greyed out
3 If you get a new item, a message will appear "This item is added to glamour dresser" - if it's tradeable, it will remain till traded (Like in WoW - it gets removed once traded even if it said unlocked), best bet is to equip then sell.

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Originally Posted by AlenyaElizabelle

[a good look at the Transmog collection for World of Warcraft]

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You failed to let players know the important parts about this.

The gear is extremely class locked. You will never receive a Rogue's armor item if you are a Paladin, for example.

You can create all sorts of fun and interesting combinations, but ... the kicker is that you have to visit a Transmog vendor in a major city and pay an amount of gold based upon the costs associated with the armors you choose to glamour before they take effect.

I was unimpressed with the way WoW handled transmog, even though the interface looked pretty cool. I was also unimpressed with the Clown suits in Burning Crusade (and the clown suits in Heavensward).

Could SE do this? I think so, but it would involve an entirely new system in order to accomplish this. Could SE do this today? No. The Mog Store "Dream" stuff is a good start, but the current system is dependent on the fact that the armor is present in the glamour dresser when a glamour plate is created.

The deciding factor in all of this is going to be statistics about how many of the 800 slots in the glamour dresser actually get used by players. I suspect that's informing their current system in any case.

Personally, I decided I didn't need 20 different bows in the glamour dresser. I no longer have 400 occupied slots. There are a number of outfits I can do without still in there.

I'd personally prefer them to spend their time adding more glamour plates rather than dresser slots.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Personally, I decided I didn't need 20 different bows in the glamour dresser. I no longer have 400 occupied slots. There are a number of outfits I can do without still in there.

I'd personally prefer them to spend their time adding more glamour plates rather than dresser slots.

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This though. The 400 item limit can accommodate 33 full glamour plates for anyone regardless of class or job; in practice this number is 34 for most people, since more than 12 jobs lack offhand items, and up to 36 plates for people who don't play any classes or jobs that use offhands. In other words if we increased the number of plates to 35, everyone could glamour all 31 classes and jobs currently in the game and still have a couple plates left over for general costuming, without increasing the amount of space in the dresser. Beyond that, anything in the dresser is probably hoarding.

Increasing the number of plates to 50 would allow everyone to glamour every class and job for the foreseeable future and still have a dozen plates for general costuming, and this would only require a 600 slot dresser.

A dye exclusive storage would be SUPER to go together with a glam library sytem. Half of my inventory is basically dyes.

I change stuff in my glamour dresser a LOT, so having to keep constantly going back and forth with dyes on retainers/saddlebag is a major hassle. As an alternative, given possible system limitations to this - if we could apply dyes on the glamour dresser - directly - from our retainer inventories or saddlebag, would be a HUGE help already.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

A dye exclusive storage would be SUPER to go together with a glam library sytem. Half of my inventory is basically dyes.

I change stuff in my glamour dresser a LOT, so having to keep constantly going back and forth with dyes on retainers/saddlebag is a major hassle. As an alternative, given possible system limitations to this - if we could apply dyes on the glamour dresser - directly - from our retainer inventories or saddlebag, would be a HUGE help already.

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This would be nice. I currently have 4 hempen chemise's in the glamour dresser (soot black, dalamund red, jet black, and slate grey). This isn't the only item I have multiples of because of dye issues.

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

Just copy and paste the transmog system from WoW. FFXIV does literally nothing better than it, aside from having dyes.

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Just copy and paste the transmog system from WoW and dye system from GW2.