PS4 trailer

[Krokov]

It's not just a PlayStation 4 support they are adding it's also patch 2.16 and the addition of support makes sense since the beta starts on Saturday that week next week. Btw the update on the 14 is 2 hrs not 3 and might even be less then 2.

[Felis]

Yeah.... SO?

Why a 10 hour maintenance on the 19th, IMMEDIATELY following a 3 hour maintenance on the 14th, to put in "support" for the PS4, for whom the version is not due to be released for yet another month?


Ridiculous I say!

Yes
Only PS4 support in 2.16

I wish they would not put retainer bells in Revenant's Toll. There would be now more people. Gridania is only 5 minutes away with chocobo.

[Laraul]

The maximum size that they'd have to support(which is the problem) is 40 characters per account X 30 different gearsets (It can go higher it's just how many I know I have) X 14 different equips per gear set X 100 different hot bar skills(10 hotbars available with 10 skills per) meaning that 1 character takes 1.68 GB just for that information(assuming each piece of that information is 1 byte and its probably more than that) and since 60mil+ chars have been created so far that means to store that data just right now you'd need a min of 100.8 TB of storage.

Oh and before someone jumps on me for saying it's only 100 TB SE could afford that easily each of those things are probably 100 bytes minimum meaning the actual size would be closer to 10 PB.

You are ignoring compression, and storage space is cheap. Bandwidth is the costliest.

[Noata]

You are ignoring compression, and storage space is cheap. Bandwidth is the costliest.

That's not how it works. I work in a datacenter. Compression is impossible, a file compressed can be used unless the data your compressing needs to be referenced or updated(each time it did would require an un-compress then re-compress meaning you need to save space for the files expansion). so compression is a no go. plus the additional IO and transfer of data to read all this data that updates if you move any icon, switch any item and so on would be bad practice. for example. websites cache stuff locally to a browser to stop the front end from having to constantly query the backend database.
so to list a few flaws in storing the data on a server in a data center.
-additional monthly cost from data center to "store" data.
-additional IO that would require additional monthly fees to provide from data center.
-new design to support the amount of database queries to all clients simultaneously
#Data centers charge by the GB of space. getting 10PB would likely cost more per month then most of you make in a year.

Data center storage is not cheap... this is not paying 30 dollars for a 1TB drive. Server storage is on a whole different level and is not cheap.

Not saying its not possible. just this is done by design and not later. it could call for recoded server structure. the easiest way would be to limit what is saved. Like TERA who keep a small config file that gets pulled down locally and updated when modified and sent to server. though what they save is very limited.

[Hulan]

Not saying that you are wrong - quite the opposite - but there are a few ways to mitigate the storage space dilemma. They could store a diff file, for instance. If I were to make a gross guess, very few users actually make many changes to their macros or have many gear sets. As such, if you store only the users' alterations, rather than the individual data itself, you could drastically reduce the overhead. Depending on the format of the diff file, you could quickly and efficiently load macro and setting changes without permuting TBs of data. That's a pretty superficial improvement though.

On a a more abstract level, you could use a flyweight to enumerate commonalities between gear sets. If two people have the same gear set, you can use 16 bytes instead of 28, if 3 people use the same gear set, that goes to 17:42. Hotbars are the real sticking point, there's only so many ways to visualize that data. The issue is that hotbars are too general-purpose, abilities would be easy enough to map, but macros, gear sets, and emotes greatly increase the range of data that needs to be available. Best case scenario is the number of hotbar items * 2 bytes + 4 bytes (for region markers so that you can overload bits).

Bottom line, with a few clever data permutations, in the end, you're going to end up with ~6kB (assuming 2 bytes per item) per character for hotbars and 1.7kB (assuming 4 bytes per item) per character for gearsets. Of course, since you're assuming macros are static resources, you'll have to make those available as well, that's another 40 bytes (4 byte command * number of lines) per macro, so plop on another 4kB on the front. So call it a cool 22kB per character.

To use the number (which I am not sure where it comes from, but I'll keep things consistent) stated above, if there are 60 million accounts - active and inactive - you would spend ~1.32TB of space storing the data server side. Please by all means check my math, I do have a bad habit of loosing orders of magnitude form time to time, but I have gone over these numbers quite few times now, and I'm fairly confident in them.

It's worth noting that you could substantially reduce the bandwidth strain as well by only downloading and uploading the file on session creation and session deletion. It would cause occasional funkiness, such as when you crash after writing a new macro, but it would not effect the discussion at hand, which is transferring data to a new device. You could also mitigate the above by making downloads only constructive, while uploads are both constructive and destructive. That way you wouldn't lose new macros on a crash, but they wouldn't appear on new machines until you correctly shut down.

[TurboSol]

dat meteor wipe on king behemoth lol

[Archulak]

Meh I don't particularly care if my math is wrong because it makes ppl angry, who come in and give well thought out arguments rather that people getting upset just because they want something.

[MiriOhki]

Here's a question: Does anyone know if the keyboard/mouse support on the PS4 will actually give us the extra toolbars on the PC version? I prefer to play on PS3, but having the toolbars for stuff like stances or Limit Breaks would really come in handy.