Strike #3 for May.

[Khelek]

could someone explain this to me?
SE says they cannot increase inventory due to PS2 limitations.
Yet in besieged, your inventory has 20 items added to it, making it 80 spaces instead of 60...wtf

SSSSHHHH!! you're not supposed to figure that one out! ;(

[Taj]

could someone explain this to me?
SE says they cannot increase inventory due to PS2 limitations.
Yet in besieged, your inventory has 20 items added to it, making it 80 spaces instead of 60...wtf

The inventory size restrictions aren't because of PS2 limitations, they're because of storage limitations serverside. Temporary items aren't stored in the database, so they don't impose storage requirements. Let's make a very generous estimate and say that there's 450,000 active characters to make use of an additional 20 inventory spaces. That's 9000000 inventory spaces. (Inventory spaces consume storage spaces regardless if they're being used.) Each inventory space requires four bytes to store the Item ID, one byte to store the quantity (whether or not the item stacks is irrelevant) and another byte to store it's ID relative to your inventory. At 6 bytes per inventory slot, adding 20 additional spaces to everyone's inventory would cost Square-Enix a whopping 51 megabytes of storage space. That's just too much.

[LD]

Damn.
How does Mog Locker work then?
Why throw in an extra 70 spaces per character (ya know, besides the fact that we need them)?

Edit: Wait, megabytes? ;x

[Taj]

Damn.
How does Mog Locker work then?
Why throw in an extra 70 spaces per character (ya know, besides the fact that we need them)?

Edit: Wait, megabytes? ;x

Yes, megabytes.

[LD]

Ok, so why not just add new mog house quests instead of jumping around the issue?
What made SE put on this whole play with Mog Lockers?
Saying "We magically found a way to get more space." when all they did was say "Screw it, they can have it, but they gotta do this & this for it."


....I just answered my own question, didn't I?

[Khamsin]

Damn.
How does Mog Locker work then?
Why throw in an extra 70 spaces per character (ya know, besides the fact that we need them)?

Edit: Wait, megabytes? ;x

Yes, megabytes.

This is reminiscent of Austin Powers.

Back in the '70s, 51 megabytes *pinky* was a lot of space, too.

[Kiro]

TERABYTES OMG?

[Rocl]

TERABYTES OMG?

more like
TERRORbytes

[Mifaco]

could someone explain this to me?
SE says they cannot increase inventory due to PS2 limitations.
Yet in besieged, your inventory has 20 items added to it, making it 80 spaces instead of 60...wtf

The inventory size restrictions aren't because of PS2 limitations, they're because of storage limitations serverside. Temporary items aren't stored in the database, so they don't impose storage requirements. Let's make a very generous estimate and say that there's 450,000 active characters to make use of an additional 20 inventory spaces. That's 9000000 inventory spaces. (Inventory spaces consume storage spaces regardless if they're being used.) Each inventory space requires four bytes to store the Item ID, one byte to store the quantity (whether or not the item stacks is irrelevant) and another byte to store it's ID relative to your inventory. At 6 bytes per inventory slot, adding 20 additional spaces to everyone's inventory would cost Square-Enix a whopping 51 megabytes of storage space. That's just too much.

don't forget the SQL trickery needed to actually access these items!

[Taj]

could someone explain this to me?
SE says they cannot increase inventory due to PS2 limitations.
Yet in besieged, your inventory has 20 items added to it, making it 80 spaces instead of 60...wtf

The inventory size restrictions aren't because of PS2 limitations, they're because of storage limitations serverside. Temporary items aren't stored in the database, so they don't impose storage requirements. Let's make a very generous estimate and say that there's 450,000 active characters to make use of an additional 20 inventory spaces. That's 9000000 inventory spaces. (Inventory spaces consume storage spaces regardless if they're being used.) Each inventory space requires four bytes to store the Item ID, one byte to store the quantity (whether or not the item stacks is irrelevant) and another byte to store it's ID relative to your inventory. At 6 bytes per inventory slot, adding 20 additional spaces to everyone's inventory would cost Square-Enix a whopping 51 megabytes of storage space. That's just too much.

don't forget the SQL trickery needed to actually access these items!

Nonsense, Square-Enix doesn't believe in SQL databases. They prefer blazing fast, flatfile csv databases instead.

[Kaylia]

could someone explain this to me?
SE says they cannot increase inventory due to PS2 limitations.
Yet in besieged, your inventory has 20 items added to it, making it 80 spaces instead of 60...wtf

The inventory size restrictions aren't because of PS2 limitations, they're because of storage limitations serverside. Temporary items aren't stored in the database, so they don't impose storage requirements. Let's make a very generous estimate and say that there's 450,000 active characters to make use of an additional 20 inventory spaces. That's 9000000 inventory spaces. (Inventory spaces consume storage spaces regardless if they're being used.) Each inventory space requires four bytes to store the Item ID, one byte to store the quantity (whether or not the item stacks is irrelevant) and another byte to store it's ID relative to your inventory. At 6 bytes per inventory slot, adding 20 additional spaces to everyone's inventory would cost Square-Enix a whopping 51 megabytes of storage space. That's just too much.

The amount of storage space required isn't as much of a problem as the delay it takes to execute the querry. I've no idea what's the condition of their server, but it's not impossible they can't add more without a negative impact on the speed some querry are executed.

[Kuya]

My only complaint with any quest is the semi-quest you get at the beginning of the game: turn Adventurer's Coupon... you get 50 gil, which can't buy armor from an NPC. It should be 200-500(about enough for two pieces of level 1 gear from a NPC)... then, again, that might be exploitable by RMT.

Dude, if they ever fix that its gonna have to be ninja'd. Can you imagine what would happen if they put it in update notes? It would get its own thread saying: ZOMG LOOK THEY CHANGED THE QUEST SO NOW YOU GET 250 MORE GIL, HOWS THAT GONNA GET ME A RIDILL, OR A PENIS?

or something similar

[Taj]

could someone explain this to me?
SE says they cannot increase inventory due to PS2 limitations.
Yet in besieged, your inventory has 20 items added to it, making it 80 spaces instead of 60...wtf

The inventory size restrictions aren't because of PS2 limitations, they're because of storage limitations serverside. Temporary items aren't stored in the database, so they don't impose storage requirements. Let's make a very generous estimate and say that there's 450,000 active characters to make use of an additional 20 inventory spaces. That's 9000000 inventory spaces. (Inventory spaces consume storage spaces regardless if they're being used.) Each inventory space requires four bytes to store the Item ID, one byte to store the quantity (whether or not the item stacks is irrelevant) and another byte to store it's ID relative to your inventory. At 6 bytes per inventory slot, adding 20 additional spaces to everyone's inventory would cost Square-Enix a whopping 51 megabytes of storage space. That's just too much.

The amount of storage space required isn't as much of a problem as the delay it takes to execute the querry. I've no idea what's the condition of their server, but it's not impossible they can't add more without a negative impact on the speed some querry are executed.

Not really. They're already querying for your items, increasing the size of the resultset by 20 rows would make a whopping difference of 1-2 milliseconds, and that's being generous.

[Kaylia]

I thought he said doubling your inventory space (not that it change anything here) but a 1 millisecond is still a lot in the end when you have hundreds of request at the same times. If they never planned to give more than 60 spaces, adding additional slot can cause problem depending how they designed it at first.

[Wizerd]

I thought he said doubling your inventory space (not that it change anything here) but a 1 millisecond is still a lot in the end when you have hundreds of request at the same times. If they never planned to give more than 60 spaces, adding additional slot can cause problem depending how they designed it at first.

Even if that's true, you'd think their playerbase would be important enough to them that they'd "redesign" it a little.

I would gladly wait an extra 1 second after zoning to see the items in my inventory. I already wait ~5 seconds before they show up in the first place. 15 in Whitegate.

[Khamsin]

Speaking of "redesigning", why haven't they redesigned the movement system to not depend on your clock speed or FPS? Would such an update to the server and client that would break pos.exe (in a way that wouldn't be fixed with new memlocs) and employ movement within the game in an entirely different manner be all that hard?

[Taj]

Speaking of "redesigning", why haven't they redesigned the movement system to not depend on your clock speed or FPS? Would such an update to the server and client that would break pos.exe (in a way that wouldn't be fixed with new memlocs) and employ movement within the game in an entirely different manner be all that hard?

Nope.

[Tordall]

Unless their database is properly normalized (and has remained so) then adding additional stuff could make it f*** up majorly.

Changing large, live databases is not really something to be taken lightly. Especially if the people that originally designed them, and that have been modifying them were programmers rather than DBAs (myself being a programmer).

That said, if you know exactly what the data you're working with is going to be, you can do some really cool stuff with on-the-fly compression/storing the data in such a way that it takes at most log(# of items) checks to find it, etc.

If it's designed to be fast, it's gonna be hard to expand. If it's designed to be easy to expand it's gonna be hard to make it go really fast.

More than storage size, it's probably the amount of work that would have to go into retooling the whole item system to change it.

That and there would be implications to the FFXI economy if suddenly everyone had unlimited storage space.

[Taj]

Unless their database is properly normalized (and has remained so) then adding additional stuff could make it f*** up majorly.

Changing large, live databases is not really something to be taken lightly. Especially if the people that originally designed them, and that have been modifying them were programmers rather than DBAs (myself being a programmer).

That said, if you know exactly what the data you're working with is going to be, you can do some really cool stuff with on-the-fly compression/storing the data in such a way that it takes at most log(# of items) checks to find it, etc.

If it's designed to be fast, it's gonna be hard to expand. If it's designed to be easy to expand it's gonna be hard to make it go really fast.

More than storage size, it's probably the amount of work that would have to go into retooling the whole item system to change it.

That and there would be implications to the FFXI economy if suddenly everyone had unlimited storage space.

....You don't have to change the structure of the table to add Inventory slots. The slot limit is imposed server-side by limiting the number of rows that belong to a given player. Why is this so complicated for people to grasp?

[Kaylia]

I would gladly wait an extra 1 second after zoning to see the items in my inventory. I already wait ~5 seconds before they show up in the first place. 15 in Whitegate.

Wouldn't change a thing for zoning. What take so long is the sloppy process of changing your character from one zone to the other.

Beside items, their database probably doesn't have anything important. (key item/quest/character info). Anyway, when I'm saying the delay matter, I'm talking about the "limit" after which server receive more request than it can handle. Like I said, I dont know their server situation, but if they are close to that limit, they can't add anything that would slow down the process by an important amount.

Speaking of "redesigning", why haven't they redesigned the movement system to not depend on your clock speed or FPS? Would such an update to the server and client that would break pos.exe (in a way that wouldn't be fixed with new memlocs) and employ movement within the game in an entirely different manner be all that hard?

Movement do not depend on your clock speed/FPS, but changing the way it works would cause too much problem. They would need to redesign way more than the "movement".

Right now, every movement are calculated on your pc, so you don't have to wait for the server to "confirm" your request. What would happen if they made movement server side would be something like
1) Every time there is a lag, your character stop moving (not fluid/choppy movement can be annoying)
or
2) Once the lag end, your character is teleported back in time to the position it was when it started lagging (fluid movement, but time jump when it synchronize with the server again would be as annoying)


The only thing they could do is to scan illegal movement on the server, and it's probably what they are doing right now to ban bot (detect movement speed by looking at time spent to go from point A to point B)