Realistic Solution to Inventory Space (Programming idea that would lower server data)

[Vasala]

Ultimately I wish they would give us a glamour log to help clear out all the inventory eaten up by items saved for glamour but expanding the armoire would at least help til we could get a true glamour log.

[kattzkitti]

You have my full support for this. This would have zero cons for me, while also having some additional pros that are probably only relevant to me personally.

[Lambdafish]

I've been playing a lot of GW2 and I wish the dye system in XIV worked like that. Buying rare dyes off the mogstation would "unlock" the dye in the pallete, and you would simply need to craft the recipe (with shards as you said) in order to dye the gear.

I like this idea and I wish the dev team would listen.

[Shougun]

I've been playing a lot of GW2 and I wish the dye system in XIV worked like that. Buying rare dyes off the mogstation would "unlock" the dye in the pallete, and you would simply need to craft the recipe (with shards as you said) in order to dye the gear.

I like this idea and I wish the dev team would listen.

Many items have more than one dye location as well, up to four.

I believe just adding a glamour log would significantly cull inventory issues. Then like many MMOs just larger decor storage areas (Wildstar has up to 2.5k exterior and 2.5k interior and a 1k decor storage box lol) and crafting spaces (although with our larger inventory and a glamour log it might be okay anyways). 140+ slots and 2x 175 for crafting / tokens / leveling gear (no need to keep for fashion).

As for the system, unless I misunderstood, I would massively prefer a new glamour log rather than piggyback the armoire- the interface would be horrible for glamour / item managing vs all other competitive MMOs. Would likely be one of if not the worst glamour systems lol. Although I respect that you're (OP) trying to be feasible and friendly to the devs. Imo, It's not good enough a system to use for a glamour log and if its not meant to be a glamour log then a glamour log could do it all better anyways (imo lol).

[Jpec07]

I don't think they're necessarily charged for data usage (as they have dedicated servers and aren't cloud-based to our knowledge), but reducing the amount of data in memory would reduce some load on the systems. At the same time, I'm not sure if what you're suggesting would help with that (especially since most of the more expensive pieces should be living in memory as references rather than independent objects--or else what are the devs thinking?).

I'd be very curious to see how they have it coded and organized. The idea that characters move around between zones seems strange to me, when the more practical solution would be to put coordinates on the character object, and change memory references on the character and zone for one another.

Idk. I get the sense that Yoshida isn't a programmer, and that, to explain things to him, the devs had to use language that isn't technically precise (which is why some things he says about server load and such don't make a lot of sense from a programming standpoint).

[The_NPC]

As much as this sujestion to add to your idea OP can get... exploitable... u could have it so any "Base" gear (IE: gear that doesn't have a glamour cast apon it) that gets put in the Armoir gives the player 1 copy of the dye back

I say "Exploitable" cause then gear would get sold way higher than others on MB just cause it comes with a free rare, possible Mog-store, dye that you then get to use... granted I personally see it as a small CON for the high.many PRO's it may give.

[Blackcanary]

You do there is a thread that has been made for new idea's to improve the game right?

Not trying to be rude but a lot of you new guys in the fourms need to learn how to use the search bar.

[Myvar]

I think you're misunderstanding what a variable is. A variable is a single space that can hold one of many values. Each of the five qualities you listed could be a single variable, except for the materia on an item which could be six. So that's about 10 variables per item.

[Talraen]

You're making an assumption about the armoire that may or may not be correct: that items in it are stored by ID. If they are, then adding things to the armoire shouldn't really be any problem. You'd basically just flag it as armoire-able and presumably the system sorts itself out. However, for efficiency's sake, I strongly suspect the armoire contents are stored as boolean bits, one per item. If that's the case, then to put more items in the armoire, they'd have to increase all user data for every character by a number of bits equal to the number of items that could be stored, a number which will continually increase over time. Granted, it's not actually that huge a number (the Eorzea DB lists just over 15,000 items at present), and I do hope they do something like this at some point, but my point is that it's unlikely the system already exists as you described it.

To go into a bit more detail, let's see if we can get a decent low-end guess of how much space inventory actually takes up.

The items themselves are listed in the DB by hex codes, with the ones I've seen having 11 digits, so that's a minimum of 44 bits. Dye color could be stored as 3 bytes (RGB), so 24 more bits. Durability and spiritbond are displayed as whole %'s but definitely don't increase that way. My guess is 16 bits each for those. I suspect materia is stored very inefficiently, but since there are less than 255 varieties of materia at present, let's be generous and say 8 bits per materia, times 5 slots. Character IDs are past 17 million now, so for safety let's say those are stored as 32 bits. In total, that's a maximum of 172 bits per item, or (rounding up) 22 bytes. The item ID itself is 6 bytes. The result is, if you store four times as many items this way as you have slots, you're still using more data. Not sure if that makes it a good or bad idea, but there it is.

[KisaiTenshi]

Realistic Solution to Inventory Space (Programming idea that would lower server data)

First and foremost, I want people to read the full idea before jumping to any conclusions. This is an idea meant to solve current glamour issues in game while at the same time reducing the amount of data that is stored on the server for every character out there. To explain this I want everyone to understand a few things about how Square Enix is looking at things and how they make their decisions:

1) Money spent on the game must be kept within current budget

Whoa, I'll stop you there. This is not a "data expense" problem. Nor is it a storage problem. It's a synchronization problem. I'll tell you straight up from a game I had a NDA with that there is nothing necessarily stopping the developers from having infinite space, but it comes at one extreme penalty.

More items you can have = larger packet sizes, too large of packet means fragmentation. If you know how and why MMO players tamper with the MTU settings, you'd know that the maximum packet size is just under 1500bytes. Those 1500 bytes have to be sent every 200ms (for 5fps of game play.) Within those 1500 bytes you have to store your character's coordinates, gear, physics, etc

So if you sit there and watch a packet monitor you'll note that opening, the inventory, picking up or dropping an item, or consuming an item, re-polls every item. Hence part of the reason FFXIV can do all these AOE dances in the first place is that the game doesn't constantly have to send updates to 100 inventory spaces every 200ms when the inventory is open.

So if you had say, 1000 spaces instead, now instead of 100 items fitting in one packet, it now takes 10, which means it takes 2 seconds to open or close the inventory, and everything else in the game grinds to a halt until it does. That makes playing dungeons impossible without "locking down" the inventory in some way so only part of it is available.

So here's where I'm going to suggest another idea.

Reverse how the Armory system works. Instead of having 25 items per slot, have one armory page for each class/job. While in a Duty no gear can be swapped except what is in the Armory for the class/job the Duty is for. The reason it works the way it does right now is to allow re-using gear between classes, which is all and good... if all your classes are the same level and you really have no desire to glamor anything. In V1.0 they removed a few item slots to reduce the complexity of the models, not necessarily the data sync requirements.

Then with the game's main inventory, have a "Field" and a "Dungeon/Duty" inventory. Field inventory consists of the current inventory we have. The Dungeon/Duty can only contain finished consumables (and item drops from the Duty.) When the Duty ends, the player can keep the consumables in the Duty inventory for next time, but the gear drops must be transferred to the field inventory, a retainer, or destroyed before another Duty can commence. The "field" inventory would not be available during Duty's.