The Housing Situation

[Renik]

Well, instance housing worked just fine in FFXI from what I heard.

Also I don't think it's a storage space issue. FFXI is nearly 10 years old, it's from the era where PCs had 64MiB of RAM and 1GiB hard drives. We have 8GiB of RAM now and multi-TiB hard drives. Technology has improved a ton.

It's not about the system itself, it's about the whole game, this game stores more data than any other, specially the housing system, we have a very large range of options, customization and contents related to housing.

When it comes to housing, it doesn't matter where you place the house as long as you keep the same number of option it will take the same memory, the reason it worked in XI is the same reason most people never cared about it back then, it was very limited and served only as storage, and the game in general saved a lot less data than this one.

There's only one solution, adding more physical memory (HDDs).

[Bishop81]

It's not about the system itself, it's about the whole game, this game stores more data than any other, specially the housing system, we have a very large range of options, customization and contents related to housing.

When it comes to housing, it doesn't matter where you place the house as long as you keep the same number of option it will take the same memory, the reason it worked in XI is the same reason most people never cared about it back then, it was very limited and served only as storage, and the game in general saved a lot less data than this one.

There's only one solution, adding more physical memory (HDDs).

I can't say I know exactly what is going on at SE's data centers but computing power and memory has increased several fold over the last decade.

The way I see it, based on what I know about how computers function - as limited as it is - the server only has to store,

1. item ID
2. location and orientation of said items

That doesn't take up all that much space. Assuming, conservatively, a 64 bit item ID, 64 bit per axis, we have 3*64 for position, and 3*64 for orientation, for a total of 448 bits = 56 bytes per item. That's a drop in the ocean with GiBs of RAM and TiBs of hard drive space.

[Renik]

I can't say I know exactly what is going on at SE's data centers but computing power and memory has increased several fold over the last decade.

The way I see it, based on what I know about how computers function - as limited as it is - the server only has to store,

1. item ID
2. location and orientation of said items

That doesn't take up all that much space. Assuming, conservatively, a 64 bit item ID, 64 bit per axis, we have 3*64 for position, and 3*64 for orientation, for a total of 448 bits = 56 bytes per item. That's a drop in the ocean with GiBs of RAM and TiBs of hard drive space.

The problem here it's not only housing, but the whole game as i said. You know enough to understand that it's all about stored data and nothing else, wards don't take much memory, as they are all shared data across servers, you should be able to understand why instancing housing wouldn't solve it, and don't forget we were told where the problem was, it's in 2 of the live letters.

We can't know what kind of machines are they using, or the server structure, but we know it's a memory problem, and if we can't believe the devs... well, who knows.

Even if we weren't told about what the problem was, i can't think in any other explanation, i'm not a game developer, but it's kind of my hobby, including server development, i know what i'm talking about, it's not made up stuff, and i can say for sure that instancing housing we would not solve it.

For sources, you have 2 of the live letters between the XIV and the XVIII, i don't remember which ones, and i think they answered to the instanced housing idea in one of the live letters from the last e3.

snip

Please, stop posting this idea, because it's false, as i said instancing houses is not going to magically create more memory, unless this instanced houses are just presets without stables and gardens, and of course very minimal to no furniture allocation.

[Bluevann]

Please, stop posting this idea, because it's false, as i said instancing houses is not going to magically create more memory, unless this instanced houses are just presets without stables and gardens, and of course very minimal to no furniture allocation.

First of all, ideas cannot be "false", at most they can be impractical or near impossible to realize, both of which I do not know if they would apply to ARR since I'm not a developer and I'll keep offering my suggestion till one of them tells me why it cannot be done.

But either way, wouldn't it be much like how Personal Rooms are handled? An FC house can have up to 512 of rooms, and there's 900-ish possible slots for FC houses in every server. That is enough memory space for 450,000 personal room instances. An housing instance wouldn't take that much more space to make it impossible to give an instanced plot to everyone.

[Bishop81]

The problem here it's not only housing, but the whole game as i said. You know enough to understand that it's all about stored data and nothing else, wards don't take much memory, as they are all shared data across servers, you should be able to understand why instancing housing wouldn't solve it, and don't forget we were told where the problem was, it's in 2 of the live letters.

...

For sources, you have 2 of the live letters between the XIV and the XVIII, i don't remember which ones, and i think they answered to the instanced housing idea in one of the live letters from the last e3.

Link to the letters?

Personally I find unlikely that memory is the problem. I have already explained why.

What is the problem? Beats me. But instancing might be a way around it. It worked for FFXI. Also oddly enough, there are no limits for FC rooms (instanced?) ...

[Renik]

First of all, ideas cannot be "false", at most they can be impractical or near impossible to realize, both of which I do not know if they would apply to ARR since I'm not a developer and I'll keep offering my suggestion till one of them tells me why it cannot be done.

But either way, wouldn't it be much like how Personal Rooms are handled? An FC house can have up to 512 of rooms, and there's 900-ish possible slots for FC houses in every server. That is enough memory space for 450,000 personal room instances. An housing instance wouldn't take that much more space to make it impossible to give an instanced plot to everyone.

Make instanced housing. This allows everyone to have a house

This is the false statement, which makes the rest of the idea impossible.

If you make personal instanced housing like personal rooms, just interior with no content, i guess it would be possible, rooms take much less memory it would work as ffxi housing.

But you can't just remove all the houses some people already have, and had to pay with time and hard work.

Link to the letters?

Personally I find unlikely that memory is the problem. I have already explained why.

What is the problem? Beats me. But instancing might be a way around it. It worked for FFXI. Also oddly enough, there are no limits for FC rooms (instanced?) ...

The letters are here in the forum http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/forums/644 there you can find the transcriptions, unfortunately the letters from the e3 where the response to the instanced housing is, are not archived here.

But in one of the letters between the XIV and the XVIII, they talk about the lack of memory and how they wanted to solve it with software adjustments (server structure i assume), before having to spend a lot of money upgrading the servers or adding new ones.

[Bluevann]

This is the false statement, which makes the rest of the idea impossible.

That's a little better than how you worded it. Can you please explain me why? Again, I am no developer, and you seem to know some of this stuff, so I'd like to know. I have always assumed that, since one small house (including the basement and garden) has about thrice the size of a personal room, it'd occupy about thrice the memory space, and so I assumed that a server able to host 450,000 rooms could host at least 100,000-150,000 instanced homes, which greatly surpasses the maximum population cap of a single server. You are making me guess that this math-based guess is wrong though, and I'd like to understand why.

[Renik]

snip

You got me editing mi post with this

If you make personal instanced housing like personal rooms, just interior with no content, i guess it would be possible, rooms take much less memory it would work as ffxi housing.

But you can't just remove all the houses some people already have, and had to pay with time and hard work.

I'm not a developer, but i have some knowledge, as i said to Bishop81, we were told by the devs (3 times) that it was a memory issue, we can believe them or not, but from what i know i think it's true.

No, they don't. There is literally no difference between an instanced room and an instanced house zone. They are both just virtual boxes of marginally different size.

Yes there is, one saves more data and the other saves less, one has gardens and a stable, and the other don't, one has exteriors and the other don't.

[Intaki]

rooms take much less memory it would work as ffxi housing.

No, they don't. There is literally no difference between an instanced room and an instanced house zone. They are both just virtual boxes of marginally different size.

[Bishop81]

The letters are here in the forum http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/forums/644 there you can find the transcriptions, unfortunately the letters from the e3 where the response to the instanced housing is, are not archived here.

But in one of the letters between the XIV and the XVIII, they talk about the lack of memory and how they wanted to solve it with software adjustments (server structure i assume), before having to spend a lot of money upgrading the servers or adding new ones.

Only found,

A: Kasuga: At the moment all I can say is that we are looking into it, but we're at the point where Yoshida will make a judgment call.

Yoshida: First, we'll be adding land in patch 2.38, and it will then be possible to purchase personal housing, but the issue of how many plots to add will be under discussion until right up to the last minute. Just the other night we had a meeting which included Kasuga about even more additional plots and what kind of plans they have in order to accommodate them. At the same time we've been looking into whether we can increase the number of plots by juggling our graphic resources. Currently, we're working out all the parameters and then we'll be deciding how to do it and at what time based on the results.

Kasuga: The quick answer as to why it's not so simple to add more land is because of the infrastructure. Compared to our initial plans for infrastructure, the current demand for land has far exceeded what was predicted, and in the event that we decide to go forward with the current infrastructure, we would have no choice but to address the issue with software. And if we were to rely on a software solution, it would be difficult to secure the time required to test everything out, further delaying the release of new land.

Yoshida: Of the ideas we have at the moment, we are trying to make the final decision as to which solution is the quickest and would allow for the most land, as well considering the amount of time and resources it will take. Of course there have been those who have suggested spending millions to enhance the servers, but this would be the last resort for our engineers. We're currently looking into exactly how much we can increase the amount of land with our current resources and we'll be doing this right up to the last minute. If it appears that all other avenues have been exhausted, then I'll make the call to beef up the servers. At the very least, we will be increasing land in patch 2.38 and you'll also be able to start purchasing private housing.

Says nothing about memory.

I'm getting the impression that the "neighborhood" is what holding everything back. Rather have an stand-alone instanced house - i.e. no neighborhood - then no house at all.