How do you think the devs can improve the Glamour Dresser System?

[Zandread]

Everyone can agree that the Glamour Dresser system needs a lot of work. It's messy and clunky and a pain in the a** to use. Worst of all is the Armoire. I know that you can get job gear from the Calamity vendor, but, why do we need to? Why can't we store it in the Armoire so we can easily use it for glams? It doesn't make sense. All lvl 60/70/80 Antiquated(or otherwise) Job-specific gear should be storable in the Armoire.

[gilmorej]

Best case scenario? They rework the glam system to be like WoW's system -- Any piece of gear that has ever hit your inventory gets its appearance unlocked in the glamor system for you to use, even after you trash the original piece of gear.

[Nothv13]

Best case scenario? They rework the glam system to be like WoW's system -- Any piece of gear that has ever hit your inventory gets its appearance unlocked in the glamor system for you to use, even after you trash the original piece of gear.

Basically this. Yet they never will because the game is on spaghetti code that for some reason can't such a system.

[Penthea]

Best case scenario? They rework the glam system to be like WoW's system -- Any piece of gear that has ever hit your inventory gets its appearance unlocked in the glamor system for you to use, even after you trash the original piece of gear.

In addition to this I wish we could store dye in the glamour dresser. It's very tiresome to have to fetch dye every time considering the dresser is in an area with no vendors or access to a fc chest. Sure you could store them on your retainers but there is an incredible amount of dyes so that would take up an unreasonable amount of slots.

Sure the above would be fixed if we could get a dresser furnishing but that isn't here yet due to technical limitations of the game. Adding a feature that allows for the storage of dye would actually be possible given that the dresser already stores other items.

[Deceptus]

Best case scenario? They rework the glam system to be like WoW's system -- Any piece of gear that has ever hit your inventory gets its appearance unlocked in the glamor system for you to use, even after you trash the original piece of gear.

This is the best solution and it's baffling why it hasn't been done.

So many people say the 1.0 spaghetti code isn't holding us back but Yoshi has specifically said the old code is the reason a WoW-style glamour system can't be done. The old code requires that any glamour gear be physically somewhere and that physicality requirement puts strain on the system.

[Bright-Flower]

I wish they could copy WoW's transmog system and make it work like that. When you get a new item, its appearance is saved to a collection. On tradable items you could have this occur after it beomces soul bonded or w/e. No need to hold onto items, not in the armorie or glammour dresser or anywhere.

[hobostew]

I figure its less spaghetti code and more that it would have to either be laggy or it would have to trust the client a lot more which can open itself up to other problems. I think I remember someone (maybe the WoW devs?) talking about that being a concern back before they added the collections tab but their game has some anti-tampering stuff running in the background so it's less of an issue for them.

[StriderShinryu]

Pie in the sky? As others have already said, a complete rework that puts in more in line with WoW. Also, some method to adjust or toggle various items and layers for different appearances of the same items (sort of like we already have with the visor command on some hats/helms). Even if this causes clipping, it can sometimes be well within the acceptable range of the individual players. Oh, and a more nuanced dye system so that we can dye different parts of different pieces of gear different colours, or even multiple colours to allow transperenices and layering.

Realistic? A few more glamour plates and a little more room in the dresser. Maybe some loosening on when/where you can change plates.

[Jin-]

Didn't they say that it's "following" us everywhere but it's just hidden when closed and every other player has to load everyone's wardrobe when they are in the zone?

Or am I totally wrong? Either way it's this mysterious spaghetti code

[Packetdancer]

Basically this. Yet they never will because the game is on spaghetti code that for some reason can't such a system.

If I give them the benefit of the doubt, it's probably because their storage backend isn't well-suited to it. The game has a truly phenomenal amount of gear, and if you were to just maintain a list of every piece of gear that had ever passed through your hands (or even just every bit of gear you'd ever equipped), it could get pretty large if it was just a table of "Player X has Gear Piece Y unlocked".

IF the backend were designed for it from the start, they could've ensured the database in use had the capability for special fields of some form, like a sparse bitfield where bit X is 1 or 0, and X = a given gear piece's item ID. That would make it far easier to store 'player has seen this gear piece' without such a list having actual potential legitimate performance and storage implications. But if they're already entrenched with their data storage representation and have no good way to extend it with something like a sparse bitfield data type, maintaining a list like that really actually could be prohibitive.

Which, to be fair, boils down to "spaghetti code" (or at least, "deeply entrenched legacy code"), albeit "spaghetti code" where it could genuinely be a valid reason.

On a wild guess, the armoire probably works off a non-sparse bitfield, making it much easier to load, but also much more restrictive in what you can put into it (and still becoming problematic as you expand the number of items that can fit in there, particularly because since it's a subset of all gear in the game you probably require a lookup table to map item ID -> armoire slot ID).

Didn't they say that it's "following" us everywhere but it's just hidden when closed and every other player has to load everyone's wardrobe when they are in the zone?

Or am I totally wrong? Either way it's this mysterious spaghetti code

If I remember the explanation I've heard before correctly, it's that for glamour plates to work, your entire wardrobe has to be loaded (because the glamour plates are not separate data... arguably the first mistake, and presumably the one place it could feasibly be corrected). And for your wardrobe to be loaded, it needs to load up to 400 additional item records into memory; it's actual instances of items (or at least, some form of item instances) as opposed to just item IDs, because you can dye items before putting them into the wardrobe, it remembers if they're HQ or not, etc.

And because the game (admittedly rightly) doesn't just implicitly trust the client, the server presumably needs to load those objects to be able to handle glamouring things. Loading your personal wardrobe on the client side isn't an issue, but loading the personal wardrobe of everyone in a zone could probably have performance implications when the zone needs to be responsive for combat purposes. (One need only look at Second Life regions where something has gone Terribly Wrong in terms of loaded resources server-side to see what the implications could be.)

Which, one assumes, is why glamour plates only work in sanctuary zones.

From what I understand, this is also why the glamour dressers only work in personally-instanced areas like inn rooms or the barracks, where you know no other players will be present; evidently editing that data structure while other players are present has Bad Implications or something for overall zone state.

Honestly, justifications like that do seem technically possible, but also make me terrified to imagine what the actual implementation of the glamour system looks like on the server.

Though, to be fair, I've seen scenarios just as bad in actual code I've had the misfortune to work on. Scenarios where a product has been out for years, and was built atop the bones of a previous product which itself was forked off of yet another even earlier thing, and so you have a codebase where some parts are older than some of the programmers working on it, full of "well, I'll do this for now and fix it later" solutions to meet deadlines where "later" never arrived and the original author has moved on long ago and now everyone is afraid to touch that code for fear of breaking whatever house of cards is built atop it... and in those cases, "spaghetti code" almost seems like a generous description.

(It's actually a common enough scenario to have a term to describe it among engineers: "code rot".)

And given that from what I understand, now-FFXIV is built atop some of the bones (and certainly the data structures) of FFXIV 1.0, which itself had supposedly repurposed chunks of FFXI on the server side...

But regardless of how things got into this situation, it doesn't change the fact that it's frustrating as heck.