Glamour and why it's poorly designed

[Maeka]

Rather than having to keep items on us, I would think that a simple list of 0s and 1s for each piece of equipment in the game (whether or not you have it) would take up less data than all of those items. Right now, the glamour dresser probably works like this:

Slot 1: (itemref here)
Slot 2: (itemref here)
Slot 3: (itemref here)
...
Slot 399: (itemref here)
Slot 400: (itemref here)

and of course 0s or null values where there are no items.

Instead, you could just make a table of 0s and 1s and do it like a chart, let's say there's 5,000 total equippable items in XIV... all you'd need is 5,000 booleans stored on the character, and when you start the game all of those are set to 0 and when an item gets bound to you, it sets that 0 to a 1.

We could keep glamour plates, but they really wouldn't be necessary unless you wanted to store a whole set that you could quickly glamour, instead, you could manually glamour each piece of gear exactly how you want it. Rather than storing the dye on the glamour plate, you'd instead store the dye on the actual piece you're wearing.

Let's say I have a chest armor I want to glam to a Hempen Camise and I wanted blue dye. I'd dye the chest armor blue, and then when I glam it to the Camise, I get a blue Camise.

EDIT: To avoid the whole "But I don't want to use dye every time I glam!" or "What if I want to wear a red dress today and a green dress tomorrow!" we could change the dye system too: dyes could be a usable item that unlocks the dye option to use permanently, as many times as you want. Just make the dyes a bit harder/more expensive to obtain to account for the fact they are infinite-use.

[Nixxe]

EDIT: To avoid the whole "But I don't want to use dye every time I glam!" or "What if I want to wear a red dress today and a green dress tomorrow!" we could change the dye system too: dyes could be a usable item that unlocks the dye option to use permanently, as many times as you want. Just make the dyes a bit harder/more expensive to obtain to account for the fact they are infinite-use.

We could just have both. Current dyes would be great for people who don't think they'll want that color too often. Permanent dyes that are substantially more difficult and costly to obtain (not necessarily gil, but a hit to some valued resource) would be for completionists and colors people think they'd use a lot.

[Callinon]

Rather than having to keep items on us, I would think that a simple list of 0s and 1s for each piece of equipment in the game (whether or not you have it) would take up less data than all of those items. Right now, the glamour dresser probably works like this:

Slot 1: (itemref here)
Slot 2: (itemref here)
Slot 3: (itemref here)
...
Slot 399: (itemref here)
Slot 400: (itemref here)

and of course 0s or null values where there are no items.

Instead, you could just make a table of 0s and 1s and do it like a chart, let's say there's 5,000 total equippable items in XIV... all you'd need is 5,000 booleans stored on the character, and when you start the game all of those are set to 0 and when an item gets bound to you, it sets that 0 to a 1.

The all-encompassing list of booleans would be bigger than the current dresser system per player. Don't get me wrong, they should still absolutely do it because the current system is pants-on-head, but it does create a memory drain to do what we're suggesting here.