Glamours

[LineageRazor]

P.S. I'm pretty sure that glamour data is stored server side so that the server can send appropriate information to your client for other players glamours as soon as they appear in view.

That's not quite what I meant. I stated that equipment sets are stored client side. This is easy to check - just log on to someone else's computer, and you'll see that all of your equipment sets are gone. That indicates that your equipment sets were stored on your original computer, and not on the server. Whenever you switch to an equipment set, your client sends your set data to the server, the server checks to see if you actually possess the equipment listed in the set, and if so dresses your character appropriately (and if not, gives you the appropriate warning triangles indicating that your inventory of equipment doesn't quite match what your equipment set is looking for). A player using third party tools can edit their equipment set to, for example, dress their mage up in Heavy Darklight Armor (the actual armor, not glamour), and the server can look at that request and say, "Nuh uh - not only isn't that gear you can wear, but you don't even have that gear in your inventory. Red Triangle for you!"

Under the current system, glamour is stored on each piece of equipment, and each piece of equipment is kept careful track of on the server. But what if we track the glamour info on the equipment set instead? Now, whenever we use an equipment set to instruct the server how to dress our character, we are also telling the server what that equipment is supposed to look like. The server will glamour the characters however the equipment set instructs, because there is nothing stored server-side to contradict that. The server HAS to trust that you did glamour your character the way that the equipment set lists. After all, you could have glamoured and then threw away the original item, or the item might be on your retainer, or in your Armoire. This means open season for those third-party tool users. They might never have set foot in Coil, and still edit their equipment set to deck themselves out in full High Allagan (not Replica - the REAL stuff).

There are ways to solve this problem, of course - and all of them require server-side investment in which the devs may well be reluctant to invest. For an obvious example, they could store the equipment sets server-side. Heck, even without glamour, this would make a lot of folks happy, since they could then access their equipment sets no matter whose computer they play the game on. The fact that they didn't build equipment sets this way from the ground up indicates to me that it's too resource-intense to consider. Another solution would be to keep track of every piece of gear that you've ever owned, and only allow equipment sets that include those pieces of glamour to be valid. This "glamour library" is something that folks have suggested many times in many "Let's improve glamour!" threads. Again, though, that sounds like a lot of data to keep track of.

You are correct that the actual imagery of glamour is stored server side. Clients aren't constantly weighed down with the visual models of every piece of equipment in the game, only the ones that are nearby. They constantly download needed visuals on a need-to-know basis. However, we need to keep track of what glamour we're wearing, so the server knows what imagery to send to the other clients - and if we store that info client-side, the server has to trust that we're being honest about how we look. Server trusting clients is the basis of every third-party hack there is. Glamour would be no exception!

[Kosmos992k]

That's not quite what I meant. I stated that equipment sets are stored client side. This is easy to check - just log on to someone else's computer, and you'll see that all of your equipment sets are gone. That indicates that your equipment sets were stored on your original computer, and not on the server. **snippage**

Indeed, you are correct.

As you say further into your post, a good solution would be to store gearsets on the server side, which would enable glamour per gearset to be handled server side without worrying about the sync between client and server, since the client would always take it's lead from the server, so to speak.

On the transmission of glamour data, I think the actual graphical assets are already client side, the server sends the data needed to reassemble any and all characters from those assets in your client. So it sends the item ID's for each gear slot for each character along with the appropriate IDs for the character's face and physique, and the client assembles it all piece by piece to render things. Transmitting graphical data from server to client would be very resource intensive and consume bandwidth like it was going out of style.

[Naunet]

Transmitting graphical data from server to client would be very resource intensive and consume bandwidth like it was going out of style.

Why is this the only MMO that ever has concerns like this in such a way that both the players and the devs twist themselves into knots trying to work out some sub-par system to get around the "problem"?

[Kosmos992k]

Why is this the only MMO that ever has concerns like this in such a way that both the players and the devs twist themselves into knots trying to work out some sub-par system to get around the "problem"?

Every MMO has its foibles, just as every forum poster does...