A overly technical view on the Glamour System

[Jeeqbit]

numbers in code are stored as a data type called INTEGER.

Well, they could be floats/decimal numbers.

Now, this was assuming a number was being used. Why is there doubt?

They use a number. The ASCII is just a lodestone thing. Problem solved.

The reason it’s in bits will be explained in the next section.

Yes, bit tables are sometimes used for things like this. What makes you believe they aren't doing it as efficiently as they can?

[DaringDan]

Well, they could be floats/decimal numbers.

That's my bad. I should have specified I meant numbers for identifiers.

They use a number. The ASCII is just a lodestone thing. Problem solved.

Good to know. It was more of a passing thought when I looked at the Lodestone, but I should have looked into it.

Yes, bit tables are sometimes used for things like this. What makes you believe they aren't doing it as efficiently as they can?

I guess I just looked at the different systems in the game, and wondered why the glamour system works the way it does. If you take into account that ARR was made while half the team was maintaining 1.0, it makes sense that a N-to-N solution would be taken, which would be easier to implement, but come with the limitations of the current glamour dresser. This is also why I added that last section, talking about how the solution makes sense on paper, but maybe not in practice, and that it may require some important changes. But, more than anything, I just wanted to try and get the ball rolling on a conversation about potential solutions.

[Jeeqbit]

I guess I just looked at the different systems in the game, and wondered why the glamour system works the way it does.

1. They use physical machines rather than cloud servers. That means it's not really easily scalable like a cloud server. They decided against cloud servers because they are slower, despite the advantage of them being able to scale.
2. Having to transfer inventories to different physical servers seems a real challenge for them, so for example you don't carry your chocobo saddlebag into a duty server or your retainers to other worlds.
3. They are most likely taking into account network or database transfers over a large number of players at a given time as well.

I don't fully understand their reasons, because as an earlier poster stated, modern hardware is extremely good and it was even extremely good when I was doing tasks like this a decade ago. But they deal with a lot of users and seem to have their reasons.

As far as UI goes, we have experienced evidence of a disconnect between the UI team and... anyone else that knows how to code, in the past. They said it's "impossible" to show on tooltips when you have obtained items already, but there was definitely a way to do it if you really wanted to, even if the client got the information from the lodestone instead of directly from the server. And shortly after, they did it, proving their own argument wrong.

Maybe it is the UI team not working closely enough with programmers, but this really dented my confidence in how the UI team was being managed.

If you take into account that ARR was made while half the team was maintaining 1.0

The glamour dresser itself was added after a few expansions, I recall, so it wasn't something we had in ARR. But we did have glamour prisms for as long as I can remember (although there used to be different types).

Honestly, I wasn't aware of that. If you don't mind, could you link those?

Nobody is going to link that sort of thing on the official forums. It's against the rules.