Module Storage and Bookmarks Rising From 120 to 200 in Patch 7

[Burstar1]

They really should just implement some sort of personalization folder. A place where various customizations can be saved, transferred and imported as the player desires. Imagine a personal save file on your hard drive that includes all your personal bookmarks, visited systems, HUD customizations, Graphics preferences, and control bindings

This would essentially be all the tweak files that FDev currently already has scattered across your hard drive and put them on in easy to use location that you could share with friends/squadron mates and have no limits except your personal hardware specifications. The only thing this really couldn't apply to is Squadron bookmarks. That can stay as it is now and the rest of this concept would benefit all parties involved so long as the player can utilize any sort of backup policy to prevent this data loss.

 

[Rudi Raumkraut]

Okay. Worst case, then:

12 million players.
200 bookmarks each, plus a personal squadron each with another 200.
A bookmark needs: a player ID (let's assume 64-bit), a system+body ID (64-bit int), and a text description (50 char limit, let's assume worst case UTF-8 so 200 bytes).
So that's 203 bytes per bookmark, let's round it up to 256 bytes for (really bad!) database overheads.

256 bytes * 12 million players * 400 bookmarks = 1144 GB.

"Hot" cloud storage seems to cost around 3 cents per GB per month, so the total cost here would be around ... 35 dollars a month, in the absolute worst case where every single player uses every single possible bookmark. Obviously the real usage is going to be substantially less than that.


I believe them if they say there are server limitations, because I don't know their infrastructure details, but it won't be in the cost of physically storing the data on the backend.

Hmmm
You just did the math. And showed that it's peanuts, storage space, transfer volume and money wise.
It's the equivalent of one ship kit/ month(don't know exactly, put 2 pj's on top if you like ) to give the whole player base what they are asking for since years!

Still you believe them?!

To be a company which has to make money is one thing.
Decisions out of pure greed is another.

Especially if you have a community of good ppl, like you, who still believe them!

 

[Drelthar]

Because if they were stored locally and people reinstalled the game/installed on a new copy of Windows/tried to log in on a different machine all their bookmarks would be gone.

Which happens with "visited stars" already.

It'd be a file that you could save and replace.

 

[zimms]

Which happens with "visited stars" already.

[...]

And I'm still astonished this is how Frontier went about this and still stick to it in 2021.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Still you believe them?!

If Frontier had said that it was storage cost issues, then no, I wouldn't believe them. That's clearly implausible. But they didn't say that.

"Server issues" covers a whole lot of other possibilities, though.

And as you say,

to give the whole player base what they are asking for since years!

there's no reason not to give us 1000 or more if it's easy to do.

So the choices are "believe them when they say that something about their server design makes giving people large numbers of bookmarks tricky" [1] or "conclude that they actually don't want to give players the very popular extra bookmarks when it has no technical implications whatsoever, and would additionally lie about why, because ...".

[1] What, I have no idea. MMO server design is not something I've ever worked on.

 

[Drelthar]

And I'm still astonished this is how Frontier went about this and still stick to it in 2021.

Well if that was server based- -that- could cause a problem.

4 billion star systems.

 

[CMDR Sophie Joanne]

The obvious amount is infinite, why it can't be I don't have a clue.

A computer can only count to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. Infinite isn't a thing.

 

[Drelthar]

A computer can only count to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. Infinite isn't a thing.

I don't think anyone would be in danger of hitting that limit

 

[CMDR Sophie Joanne]

I don't think anyone would be in danger of hitting that limit

Someone will manage it, then complain that their first ever bookmark got overwritten!

 

[Sapient6]

[1] What, I have no idea. MMO server design is not something I've ever worked on.

My guess: the larger the bookmark limit, the more pressure there is to redesign the UI to make such a list manageable by the player. This is already super-tenuous AT BEST. Stretching to 400 bookmarks is going to exacerbate the issue quite a bit. 1000 bookmarks would be an absolute nightmare, and that's assuming the UI doesn't just outright break at some arbitrary number of bookmarks (either in the lists of bookmarks themselves, or in the display of bookmark icons spread around the galaxy map). I know this isn't technically a part of "server limitations", but if I'm honest "server limitations" sounds handwavy to me, like the sort of vague response that is meant to quash further questions.

Of course it could just be a terrible db schema, too.

 

[Ronzer]

Okay. Worst case, then:

12 million players.
200 bookmarks each, plus a personal squadron each with another 200.
A bookmark needs: a player ID (let's assume 64-bit), a system+body ID (64-bit int), and a text description (50 char limit, let's assume worst case UTF-8 so 200 bytes).
So that's 203 bytes per bookmark, let's round it up to 256 bytes for (really bad!) database overheads.

256 bytes * 12 million players * 400 bookmarks = 1144 GB.

"Hot" cloud storage seems to cost around 3 cents per GB per month, so the total cost here would be around ... 35 dollars a month, in the absolute worst case where every single player uses every single possible bookmark. Obviously the real usage is going to be substantially less than that.


I believe them if they say there are server limitations, because I don't know their infrastructure details, but it won't be in the cost of physically storing the data on the backend.

If it costs only that, and doesn't have any negative impact on the game to have 10000 bookmarks, why make this big deal out of increasing it to 200, from 120? The only thing that makes sense is so in future, when they increase it to 300, it'll seem amazing. FDev only give minimal stuff, so when they give 10% more, it seems like a lot, but really since the minimum is so small, any other game/company would already have started you off with 10 times what they gave initially. But, I know, too, that if we started off with 10000 bookmarks, in a galaxy with 400 billion systems, those would be used up and if they increased it to 11000, I'd be wondering why it's not 50000.

My bookmarks are full, so all Im always needing is just one more, anyways. My reply to anyone asking how many bookmarks FDev provide us is a Demetri Martin inspired "one less than I need".

 

[MacIntoc]

A computer can only count to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.

Hopefully not

 

[CMDR Sophie Joanne]

Hopefully not

What do you mean, hopefully not?
That is physically, the biggest number a 64-bit machine can keep track of, without having an overflow....

 

[MacIntoc]

What do you mean, hopefully not?
That is physically, the biggest number a 64-bit machine can keep track of, without having an overflow....

I mean, Apollo 11 would never have reached the moon if its 16-bit processor was limited to counting up to 65535
The limit you are talking about is the maximum number that a processor can process in 1 operation (and even then, there are operations that can handle numbers on 128 and 256 bits, even 512 bits).
But nothing prevents the computer from processing much larger numbers in several operations. As long as there is enough memory to store the numbers, their value is not limited.
By the way, try to calculate 2^2048 with your computer

 

[varonica]

What do you mean, hopefully not?
That is physically, the biggest number a 64-bit machine can keep track of, without having an overflow....

Well until we all start using 128bit CPU's. then it's 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,455

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

Maybe they used some code from the original 8bit Elite and are restricted to a max 256 entries and maybe some of the entries are used for internal purposes.

 

[Sublime]

if anything, they shot themselves in the foot by giving arx out at 400 per week = 20,800 roughly $20 per cmdr per year

You can’t assume that they are losing money by giving away weekly arx. Just because players are using free arx to buy paint jobs doesn’t mean they would be buying the arx if they were not free. I for one will never spend money on digital currencies, so without the free ones I would just simply go without the cosmetics. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Besides, many of their cosmetics seem way overpriced for what you get so they are probably priced that way because they take the free arx into consideration already.

 

[Razzerman]

Wait...I’m slightly befuddled. I’m using all 1000 bookmarks (mainly trit mining hotspots out in the wilds) - are bookmarks being limited to 200 now? Someone say it isn’t so, please

edit: not a 1000 - silly odd that I am - 128; that's a low number; I've resorted to taking screenshots of good systems and collating them in a folder by sector name

 

[CMDR Sophie Joanne]

I mean, Apollo 11 would never have reached the moon if its 16-bit processor was limited to counting up to 65535
The limit you are talking about is the maximum number that a processor can process in 1 operation (and even then, there are operations that can handle numbers on 128 and 256 bits, even 512 bits).
But nothing prevents the computer from processing much larger numbers in several operations. As long as there is enough memory to store the numbers, their value is not limited.
By the way, try to calculate 2^2048 with your computer

Yeah, okay, I was thinking in terms of a single int, but yeah, i guess..... (trails off into incoherent muttering...)

 

[Ian Doncaster]

My guess: the larger the bookmark limit, the more pressure there is to redesign the UI to make such a list manageable by the player.

That's what I'd guessed back when this topic came up back in Horizons - the bookmark list was getting a bit long, and the module list was unusable already at the 80 or so I had stored.

But the Odyssey UIs seem designed to handle a higher limit to the extent that I was surprised that a higher limit wasn't a day 1 feature - stored modules are categorised in outfitting ... it'd still get a bit weird if you had 120 of a single type of module stored, but no worse than now. Similarly the galaxy map UI categorising bookmarks - which has its flaws, categorising by "type of thing being bookmarked" is not all that helpful - but it does at least split up the single list. Agreed, bookmarks would need custom categorisation to really expand them.