ITT: ignorance of software engineering (Destiny)

by RC , UK, Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:33 (3402 days ago) @ Cody Miller

4. Bigger vault. Bungie says they are thinking about it. What's to think about? There's no downside.

Off the top of my head:
UI, networking, server load, resource management (of the last-gen consoles especially).

It currently uses up to 60 tile icons, plus item descriptions, and possible quantity value for 20 of those - it's not a lot in general but it's also not uncommon for console games to be optimised as close to the byte as they can get. If the guy in charge of the vault says 'I need twice the ram allocation', that isn't as simple as it may sound.

Then if you can transfer in 27 weapons to your character, and 27 weapons into the vault, and up to 36 armour pieces in, 36 out, 9 class items in, 9 class items out, materials and items and ships.... all that has an implication on the transfer to the server and syncing the data properly. Not much for 1 player. But when you have millions of players, and players seriously value these virtual items, and there have been reports of data loss in the past, you don't just do it for the heck of it.

...