New glamour system please!

[Ultimatecalibur]

I never got the limitations problem... They claimed they'd rather just give us more inventory space than something like a Glamour Log, but... Wouldn't a Glamour Log store less data? I mean, all the gear currently stored on my retainer has various data attached to it; Stats, Spiritbond level, Durability, possibly stuff like Materia and Dyes, heck even Glamours, and of course the visual data for the gear... A Glamour Log, on the other hand, would just entail us taking some gear, burning it into the Log, and having ready access to that Glamour option. All that needs to be stored is the visual data in that case... Surely that is easier to work than extra inventory space?

That is incredibly naive understanding of how databases work.

First off, an empty variable contains as much data as a full variable. This means that a brand new empty character contains as much data as a maxed out character with a full inventory. An empty inventory is just full of blank/neutral data. The same is true for retainer inventories.

The creation of a "Glamour Log" would add a massive amount of new data to every character. Every character's data would need to include a yes/no variable for every single piece of gear included in the Glamour Log, even if the character never even uses it. That is somewhere around 6500 new variables and their database addresses for each character currently as of 3.1 and that number will only grow as more and more patches come out. That is increasing each character's data by a massive amount.

[WellFooled]

That is incredibly naive understanding of how databases work.

An empty inventory is just full of blank/neutral data.

As someone who is completely ignorant of how databases work, this is fascinating. Can you explain this blank/neutral data more? It seems so counterintuitive.

[Archaell]

...

If I paid attention to all the inventory topics, the main issue comes from the data updates.

For the glamour purposes "easily fixed" by having a glamour NPC to store the data and - because SE loves that - nice hefty monthly fee for the "Additional optional glamour services". For some of us it would be still cheaper option than keeping several glamour retainers.

[Lambdafish]

That is somewhere around 6500 new variables and their database addresses for each character currently as of 3.1

I'm not the most adept at programming theory, but surely binary variables (I.e. Booleans) would take up far less than an entire piece of gear with stats. 6500 yes/no values actually doesn't sound like too much of a strain, all things considered.

I also don't understand why it can't be done the same way as actually obtaining gear. Surely the game doesn't have a check list for 6500+ pieces of gear to see if you own it, it only adds the function after you obtain the gear, why not have a clause at that point to add that gears ID to the glamour log, and have that saved as an (array?).

My thinking is that it is more for a design standpoint, that displaying 6500 types of glamour is horrible for UI.

[ruskie]

I'm not the most adept at programming theory, but surely binary variables (I.e. Booleans) would take up far less than an entire piece of gear with stats. 6500 yes/no values actually doesn't sound like too much of a strain, all things considered.

I also don't understand why it can't be done the same way as actually obtaining gear. Surely the game doesn't have a check list for 6500+ pieces of gear to see if you own it, it only adds the function after you obtain the gear, why not have a clause at that point to add that gears ID to the glamour log, and have that saved as an (array?).

My thinking is that it is more for a design standpoint, that displaying 6500 types of glamour is horrible for UI.

Note numbers are without overhead that would be taking by other metadata...

6500 identifiers - let's assume it's an unsigned int(and tbh I'd likely see a long here because I assume everything in the game has an identifier) - 0 to 65535 that's 2 bytes per identifier. A yes/no would still be taking up 1 byte of storage. That's 3 bytes per single item. For a single character.

So true for a single character having 6500 items would be ~20 kilobytes. Not a lot right? Doesn't take into account overhead data of course.

Now you have 5 million accounts... with each having at least 1 character. You can see where this is going. It's a lot of data to deal with. You need to initialize or at least reserve this space for each character.

It gives computing overhead, network overhead, storage overhead.

Would it be nice to have? Yes. Can they do the UI side of things? Yes. Wouldn't be too hard. They could just limit it to per job tabs, along with other tab and then only show items you actually got.

But you need to be able to handle so and so many people accessing this data at the same time, being able to offer adequate response times and such. Could probably do some variosu tricks and optimisations as well but that would likely increase the data storage requirements.

Cannot increase inventory space due to server limitation is (kinda) understandable.

but they have no excuse for glamour log. It's just a list of equipments you used to own so the data would be just 0 or 1 multiply with the amount of equipment in the game. so it'll be like 2 kilobytes or something like that. why can't they do it? I have no clue.

Did some blind maths... 0 or 1 will still take 1 byte in memory/storage/etc... without any overhead metadata. A single file on disk no matter how small will usually take 4kilobytes because that's the smallest block assigned to store it. So even a file with a 1 in it will still take 4 kilobytes.

[Niwashi]

It's limitations with there server and memory iirc.

Just look at past live letters yoshi says limitation like every other question

Features that take up active memory are severely restricted by their servers, but this feature only takes up a bit of database storage, and a rather trivial amount at that. Their crappy old servers don't account for not having it. They just haven't bothered to write the code for it yet.

Unlike other MMOs, FFXIV does not store player data clientside, it is stored on the servers.

All MMOs store their important data server side. In the case of glamour, the server says which items (or which glamour appearances) you have available and which you're currently wearing. Your client software says how to display those items on your screen. (Which items/glamours you're currently wearing, in fact, HAS to be server side in any online game. Otherwise the server wouldn't be able to tell other people's clients how to display your character when you're in their field of vision.)

That is incredibly naive understanding of how databases work.

First off, an empty variable contains as much data as a full variable. This means that a brand new empty character contains as much data as a maxed out character with a full inventory. An empty inventory is just full of blank/neutral data. The same is true for retainer inventories.

This would only be true if SE is really terrible at designing efficient databases. More typically, an empty slot would only hold a null pointer, whereas a slot that's used would hold a pointer to another record of whatever is there. If it's something like a crafting ingredient, that record would contain just an item ID and stack size. If it's a gear item, it would be a larger record, with fields for item id, durability, spiritbond, materia, color, and glamour.

The creation of a "Glamour Log" would add a massive amount of new data to every character. Every character's data would need to include a yes/no variable for every single piece of gear included in the Glamour Log, even if the character never even uses it. That is somewhere around 6500 new variables and their database addresses for each character currently as of 3.1 and that number will only grow as more and more patches come out. That is increasing each character's data by a massive amount.

Only if you regard 813 bytes per character as "a massive amount" since that's how much space it would take to store 6500 items in a glamour log. (They'd probably give it an entire kilobyte though to allow expansion room. A kilobyte would allow for 8192 items.) They could even set it so that it only allocates that killobyte or so of space when you unlock glamours at level 50, so new or trial characters wouldn't be taking up even that little amount of space, only characters at level 50 or above.

A yes/no would still be taking up 1 byte of storage.

If there were only 1 yes/no, then you're right that it takes up at least a byte (or possibly more). But 8 yes/no values can be stored in that same byte. (And they generally would be whenever you're dealing with a system of lots of yes/no answers like a glamour log or armoire. It's a simple bitmap.) When you actually select an item from your log to use, then the system would have to translate that bit into its corresponding item ID, but it wouldn't be storing the item IDs per character.

[Laraul]

It's not do to limitations to do the hardware or the servers. That's ridiculous. How they can constantly be adding content to the game and then blame it on hardware? Yoshi isn't a programmer. Nor is the UI lead developer Hiroshi Minagawa. All the coders are probably busy working on other projects. And my guess is by now the existing code has been updated with a lot of "quick" fixes that going back and updating it would require a huge amount of time just to sort thru, find and correct those "quick" fixes to work with any major changes made to the UI.

For example, you'll find that the various interface listings are all capped at a 100 items. Like the when you talk to a repair NPC, you can select between currently equipped, then your armory slit over three different pages, then your inventory. Why they capped this list at a hundred items is anyone's guess. If they added a hundred more inventory slots, they would need to go and either double the amount each page can show at one time to 200, or split the inventory over two pages. Of course it only shows your inventory that needs to be repaired. Which would be rare and thus the second page would always usually be empty, so splitting it over two pages would be bizarre and confusing.

The point is, the existing code has no doubt become very hard to maintain. And no one whom works at SE wants to touch it.

[Sida]

For example, you'll find that the various interface listings are all capped at a 100 items. Like the when you talk to a repair NPC, you can select between currently equipped, then your armory slit over three different pages, then your inventory. Why they capped this list at a hundred items is anyone's guess.

While "PS3 limitations" has become a bit of a run of joke for every sort of UI limitations, I believe that's what is at work here. For reasons I'm not claiming I fully understand since I haven't coded for playstation, having to do something with how graphic memory handled ui objects or some sort, having too long lists would have not worked on that platform. Or something like that. Roughly the same reason we lost the TP number when we got the bars for while party.

[Laraul]

While "PS3 limitations" has become a bit of a run of joke for every sort of UI limitations, I believe that's what is at work here. For reasons I'm not claiming I fully understand since I haven't coded for playstation, having to do something with how graphic memory handled ui objects or some sort, having too long lists would have not worked on that platform. Or something like that. Roughly the same reason we lost the TP number when we got the bars for while party.

I assure you, the PS3 is not limited to lists of 100 items. Just like how the PS3 can display TP numbers. The PS3 includes all the other UI adjustments/improvements in 3.2. In all seriousness, you do realize how powerful the PS3 is right? It was released late 2006, not 1976. Why do people assume hardware is to blame when it's the software that's the issue?

The TP numbers were removed because they obfuscated the tops of the status icons. Not because the hardware was incapable.

[Alberel]

The reason limitations is always the response, is because it really is server limitations. Unlike other MMOs, FFXIV does not store player data clientside, it is stored on the servers. They did this because SE believed players would edit the files like what happened back in FFXI with .dat file swapping. If player data was clientside, inventories would be bigger and glamours could be saved, similar to what WoW is doing with the transmog wardrobe.

Please find me an MMO that stores player data clientside. Seriously. Find me ANY MMO that does this. The .dat file swapping in FFXI was nothing to do with where the player data was stored, it just replaced the mesh and texture data for the equipment in the client so when the server said a player was wearing X item that player's client was redirected to load a different item. It was a purely cosmetic change and it only affected the player with the modified client. No MMO out there will ever store player inventory client side as to do so would kill the game before it launched due to the inevitable cheats and hacks that would result from it.

That is incredibly naive understanding of how databases work.

First off, an empty variable contains as much data as a full variable. This means that a brand new empty character contains as much data as a maxed out character with a full inventory. An empty inventory is just full of blank/neutral data. The same is true for retainer inventories.

The creation of a "Glamour Log" would add a massive amount of new data to every character. Every character's data would need to include a yes/no variable for every single piece of gear included in the Glamour Log, even if the character never even uses it. That is somewhere around 6500 new variables and their database addresses for each character currently as of 3.1 and that number will only grow as more and more patches come out. That is increasing each character's data by a massive amount.

This post is incredibly misleading and irrelevant to the discussion. The amount of data actually required to store items in a player's inventory might vary but the server has to have enough space allocated for every inventory to be at full capacity if needed so it makes no difference whether an inventory is full or not. The ACTUAL data usage is irrelevant; it's the potential maximum amount of data that may need to be stored that the devs have to account for.

The most expensive items to store are likely equipment with materia slots as these need to store data for the item ID, durability, spiritbond, materia and a glamour ID. We can assume that the item ID, glamour ID and materia references are the most expensive of those attributes as they likely are several bytes each in size to account for all the possible IDs that exist (or will exist in the future). Durability and spiritbond are likely a byte each to cover the 1-100 value.

The devs will have allocated server space to each player inventory and retainer on the assumption that they could potentially hold a full inventory of melded equipment as above. That's a very large amount of data.

Conversely a glamour log would merely hold a single bit boolean value for every different item skin in the game. That sounds like a lot but it's actually very small compared to the size of actual item data. In fact it's well over 100x smaller based on a conservative estimate for how much space a melded piece of equipment would take up. For every melded item in the game SE could store well over 100 entries in a glamour log.

There's also another thing to point out here and that's how SE stores player inventory versus retainers. Player inventory is stored on the character server as part of your character data as this data is loaded and updated as part of the regular server sync that runs every 15s. They have to do this as the player inventory can be opened anywhere. That is very intensive on the servers. Retainers, however, can only be accessed from fixed locations so their inventories are stored on a separate server. This is why retainers take a few seconds to load sometimes. This is much less intensive on the server and the memory used to store retainers is much less of an issue as the server isn't syncing the data every 15s.

A glamour log would not need to be accessible from everywhere. They could very easily make it a feature accessed from inn rooms or housing furniture like the unending journey or armoire (which coincidentally also use the exact same boolean flag system that I described above). Given that a glamour log could likely store every cosmetic item in the game using less memory than a player's inventory is allocated AND it could be stored on a separate server, meaning no real impact on the primary server or character server, I see no realistic reason why we cannot have a glamour log.

Do I even need to also point out the sheer number of games that already have this feature now? SE is making excuses for something that is quickly becoming a standard of the genre. They can do it, they just won't. Given the money they're making from selling extra retainers I have to agree that it is in their interest to pretend it's not possible.