Suggestion: Improved Glamour System

[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?

Also, another example of something they said was impossible but is now being implemented: Please correct me if I'm wrong, but they have said in the past that they could not implement a system to show (either on the icon or in the tooltip) whether you have already acquired a mount, minion, orchestrion roll, etc. With 6.1 they are releasing just such a system that will put a check mark on the icon of an minion, mount, etc if you have already acquired it so you can know at a glance whether you already have it.

Hope springs eternal!

[Rongway]

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?

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
====
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?

[KhevanFarstryder]

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.

This is a great point! I didn't think about the system extrapolated into the next 10 years...

I wonder how many of the items currently in the game have a dyeable and undyeable version of the same model? Wonder how much room it would save to not track the undyeable version, just the dyeable version?