Glamour and why it's poorly designed

[Kesey]

To bring this back to main topic at hand:


I like the ideas being posted in this thread, but honestly, they feel moot until you can have glamour plates apply out in the world.

My hope is their silence on glamour dressers means they are working to implement this change for 6.0. Or at least I can dream.

[StairFacts]

I hate to have to bring this thread back 2 years later, but man I wish this kind of WoW-like Glamour system would get implemented. It would take a fairly large-scale effort on the development side of things, and would probably be relegated to being implemented inside of a new expansion, but I think it would go a long way towards future-proofing the state of Glamour and reducing the load Glamour Dressers and Glamour Plates have on the servers. I, among many others, find it extremely tiresome to have to comb through the Glamour Dresser to replace gear and swap it out for new glamour pieces due to limited space.

I understand how dyes would be a problem if they implemented that system, but then again, I think it would also reduce any hassle if the player was allowed to use a dye item and permanently have access to that color. If having dyes still be tied to a resource was needed, maybe you could just have a generic all-encompassing dye item that gets consumed upon dyeing gear, similar to how you just use a Glamour Prism upon placing gear in your dresser.

Glamour's one of the most beloved features of this game and it's strange to me that despite this, certain aspects of this feature are still cumbersome in many regards, and I hope they can be made more user-friendly and less heavy on micromanaging inventory space and retainers to keep gear for glamouring. I want to be able to use my inventory space for more useful things like materia, food, and crafting materials, rather than dungeon gear that I don't have room for in my dresser.

[Rongway]

From Thread: Suggestion: Improved Glamour System

I don't know exactly how the current glamour data is stored, but here are my best guesses as someone with a graduate degree in computer science.

There are almost 20,000 equipable items in the game. If you ignore belts, this number will go down; but let's assume the number of items will stay about the same or go up once we account for the items that are coming in Endwalker. That means we need log_2(20,000) --between 15 and 16-- bits to differentiate between all the different equipable items in the game, and another bit for HQ/NQ. So the glamour dresser needs 2 bytes per item to remember what the item is. The glamour dresser also remembers an item's dye. We have something like 120 dyes, and another byte can handle that. There is other information for items in general, but the dresser doesn't need to care about those things, and you're even warned that some data will be lost, such as condition and signature, when you put things in the dresser. So ignoring that information, we need 3 bytes per item in the dresser. A 400 item dresser then should require 1,200 bytes.

If instead we stored 1 bit for each equipable item we've ever obtained, the catalog would require 20,000/8 bytes. That comes out to 2,500 bytes, which is over twice the minimum data required to support a 400 item dresser. So if they're worried about storage space now, it could be much worse with a glamour catalog. There are of course data structure optimizations and compression algorithms that you could apply to reduce the storage required in either case, at the cost of increased processing requirements, but then we get back to how much processing would need to be done on many glamour catalog access requests over a period of time.

I know, 2.5 kB is not a lot. But with 24 million registered players, the total data required to store just glamour data would be about 60 GB.

And that's all before we start talking about how an increase in glamour data size would affect the data transfer volume (and cost), even with it restricted to dressers in inns.

One bit per item, and it wouldn't matter if it's dyable or not because a catalog system would only care if you've acquired the item or not. It would be up to the client to map the bits to items and tell you which ones are dyable.

At 1 bit per item, it comes out to twice as much data as currently required.




I suspect it wouldn't make a difference if the people with multiple characters were allowed to consolidate their glamour data into a single catalog. There are probably far more people with single characters than with many alts, so account-wide glamour catalogs would only save so much space.

Besides, have you ever heard the XIV devs respond to requests for account-wide things? We may some day get a glamour catalog but I don't imagine for a second that they would make it account-wide, even if that could save them enough storage to allow a more accessible catalog.

Original thread date was pre-EW. Following the release of EW:

Honest question: now with the announcement that in 6.2 they are increasing the glamour dresser from 400 to 800 items, I wonder how the memory size difference works out now? Does the current system, doubled in size, still equate to less memory space than a true/false glamour log? I wonder what size of glamour dresser they will have to get to in order to break even, when a glamour log will be smaller than the current implementation of the glamour dresser?

Sure, here are the updated numbers for that.

As of 6.08, there are

4,500 arms
1,024 tools
10,740 armors
3,768 accessories
====
20,032 visible equipment items

IDing 20,032 equipment items requires cieling(log_2(20,032)) bits, or 15 bits. Adding one more bit for HQ brings this up to 16 bits or 2 bytes. Add one more byte for dye information. So the simplest data structure for an 800 slot glamour dresser at 3 bytes per slot would take up 2.4 kB.

Keeping track of a glamour catalog would require 1 bit per item. With 20,032 items, this comes out to 20,032 bits or 2.504 kB.

With 35.8 million subscribers, assuming the vast majority of them only have one character, the total glamour storage difference between an 800 slot dresser and a full catalog might only be about 3.5 GB total among all regions. Note that there are a few items that are exact duplicates (both model and dye channel), so all of these numbers in reality should be slightly less than these calculations, but also I can't say what percentage of the subscriber base has alts, so they could also be higher.

For now, at least, it looks like it wouldn't require storing much more character data if we switched to a glamour catalog. But it's worth noting that these requirements do not scale the same as equipment is added to the game. For a glamour dresser, we could add another 12,500 items to the game and it wouldn't require any additional storage because the minimal size of ID data is the same at 20k items as it is at 32k items. However, adding 12,500 items to a glamour catalog would increase the catalog size to 4.096 kB per character, a linear increase.

Further, a glamour dresser need not take up the maximal space. A dresser that's only half full could take up only half the data storage because empty slots might not need to be explicitly allocated in the data structure. A dresser that's completely empty might take up no storage. However, a catalog would always take up the whole catalog size regardless of how many items you've collected because it still tracks everything you don't have.

So on the one hand, in the present it doesn't look like a catalog would require much more resource than an 800 slot dresser; but on the other hand, maybe they think a dresser will age better?

[AlenyaElizabelle]

This image shows the transmog system from World of Warcraft.
It's very simple and doesn't need as much space like the existing glamour system in FF14.
All it does is this:
1 Lists all the items you can glamour in the game - into categories e.g. helms, chest, weapons
2 Highlights and adds a tick if you own the item - either already in glamour dresser or inventory, unowned / uncollected items will be greyed out
3 If you get a new item, a message will appear "This item is added to glamour dresser" - if it's tradeable, it will remain till traded (Like in WoW - it gets removed once traded even if it said unlocked), best bet is to equip then sell.

[DPZ2]

[a good look at the Transmog collection for World of Warcraft]

You failed to let players know the important parts about this.

The gear is extremely class locked. You will never receive a Rogue's armor item if you are a Paladin, for example.

You can create all sorts of fun and interesting combinations, but ... the kicker is that you have to visit a Transmog vendor in a major city and pay an amount of gold based upon the costs associated with the armors you choose to glamour before they take effect.

I was unimpressed with the way WoW handled transmog, even though the interface looked pretty cool. I was also unimpressed with the Clown suits in Burning Crusade (and the clown suits in Heavensward).

Could SE do this? I think so, but it would involve an entirely new system in order to accomplish this. Could SE do this today? No. The Mog Store "Dream" stuff is a good start, but the current system is dependent on the fact that the armor is present in the glamour dresser when a glamour plate is created.

The deciding factor in all of this is going to be statistics about how many of the 800 slots in the glamour dresser actually get used by players. I suspect that's informing their current system in any case.

Personally, I decided I didn't need 20 different bows in the glamour dresser. I no longer have 400 occupied slots. There are a number of outfits I can do without still in there.

I'd personally prefer them to spend their time adding more glamour plates rather than dresser slots.

[Rongway]

Personally, I decided I didn't need 20 different bows in the glamour dresser. I no longer have 400 occupied slots. There are a number of outfits I can do without still in there.

I'd personally prefer them to spend their time adding more glamour plates rather than dresser slots.

This though. The 400 item limit can accommodate 33 full glamour plates for anyone regardless of class or job; in practice this number is 34 for most people, since more than 12 jobs lack offhand items, and up to 36 plates for people who don't play any classes or jobs that use offhands. In other words if we increased the number of plates to 35, everyone could glamour all 31 classes and jobs currently in the game and still have a couple plates left over for general costuming, without increasing the amount of space in the dresser. Beyond that, anything in the dresser is probably hoarding.

Increasing the number of plates to 50 would allow everyone to glamour every class and job for the foreseeable future and still have a dozen plates for general costuming, and this would only require a 600 slot dresser.

[Raikai]

A dye exclusive storage would be SUPER to go together with a glam library sytem. Half of my inventory is basically dyes.

I change stuff in my glamour dresser a LOT, so having to keep constantly going back and forth with dyes on retainers/saddlebag is a major hassle. As an alternative, given possible system limitations to this - if we could apply dyes on the glamour dresser - directly - from our retainer inventories or saddlebag, would be a HUGE help already.

[rahz]

A dye exclusive storage would be SUPER to go together with a glam library sytem. Half of my inventory is basically dyes.

I change stuff in my glamour dresser a LOT, so having to keep constantly going back and forth with dyes on retainers/saddlebag is a major hassle. As an alternative, given possible system limitations to this - if we could apply dyes on the glamour dresser - directly - from our retainer inventories or saddlebag, would be a HUGE help already.

This would be nice. I currently have 4 hempen chemise's in the glamour dresser (soot black, dalamund red, jet black, and slate grey). This isn't the only item I have multiples of because of dye issues.

[Benjo]

Just copy and paste the transmog system from WoW. FFXIV does literally nothing better than it, aside from having dyes.

Just copy and paste the transmog system from WoW and dye system from GW2.