A overly technical view on the Glamour System

[DaringDan]

I don't mean this to be discouraging or insulting, but have you spent any time looking into the resources that exist for data mining and understanding both how the client operates and the data exchanged between client and server? There's an absolutely ridiculous amount of work that has already been done with regards to reverse engineering the client, and you could dispel some misconceptions very quickly with it.

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

That aside, from a design standpoint, flagging on a per-item basis is wholly undesirable for one big reason (and one immediately apparent if you're familiar with similar systems like WoW transmog!): model overlap. You don't need to save a colossal bitmask for 16000 items when thousands of them are just duplicate models, nor would you want to.

To be fair, the transmog system was the first thing I thought of, since I already maxed out my dresser multiple times, and had to split hairs on what I'd keep and discard.

Hexadecimal is always going to be more compact than the same value in base 10. As far as I know, lodestone IDs are just short hashes used to obfuscate the 'true' item IDs. Universalis don't care - Universalis pulls the ID straight from the game's item table.

So Universalis is using the real ID, while the hex is a fake to hide the real IDs. Got it.