An Incomplete List of Un-armoire-able Items

[HONK]

We understand that there are a handful of items that you would like to be able to store; however, there is a limit to the amount of data that the Armoire can handle. With that said though, rest assured that the development team will continue to look into making more items storable with the Armoire, and additionally they will be looking into adding more items that can be purchased through the Calamity Salvager. It will take them a bit, so please sit tight for the moment.

I'm not a programmer but wouldn't each item just be a number with a 1 or 0 at the end for whether the item's there or not? How much memory can that use up?

Correct me if I'm wrong but this does sound like a poor excuse.

[Nyalia]

I'm not a programmer but wouldn't each item just be a number with a 1 or 0 at the end for whether the item's there or not? How much memory can that use up?

Correct me if I'm wrong but this does sound like a poor excuse.

While you're right that they could have a bitmask flag for each item and store each item in a single, global item database with each item having a reference to each character, and if their data was structured like that, it wouldn't add any extra space to increase the size of the armoire, period. However, that makes a bunch of assumptions about the structure of their data, and the structure described above is highly inefficient for generating stuff like inventories.

Depending on the structure of their data, I could buy that it takes up to four bytes per item. A high estimate, sure, but how can it take more than four bytes? That's a lot of information space. At four bytes per item, adding 100 items to the armoire for an estimated 5 million characters (another high estimate) would cost them a grand total of ten cents. If you want to raise that to a thousand new items for five million characters, it would take a whole dollar of harddrive space.

So, the space argument seems absurd to me, but not quite for the reasons you were thinking.

[BobbinT]

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This is all depends on the database engine technology SE were using. What you described are similar to what RDBMS has which does takes up alot of spaces and cost alot, not to mention that it will tax the performance.

However, if SE were using a far more sophisticated database engine like OODB, this alone would really save alot of spaces and not to mention that it allows far more complex database management and even faster performance. Social media like facebook or Google search engine were using the similar technology and as many ppl can see, we rarely deal with noticeable delays with them. There are even more advanced DB engines, but I wouldn't bore you with IT tech stuff.

I assume that majority of current MMO would've already using far more advance DB engines. And even if it's true, they do have more challenge of setting up more features to support any future additions. But I have to admit from IT point of view, space argument are kinda a bit weak and old news. Would expect to have better reasoning than this. ^^;