Things that inexplicably aren't patched yet (Destiny)

by Earendil, Thursday, January 15, 2015, 15:49 (3402 days ago) @ uberfoop

I would personally guess that if the object system was built with storage and tight memory usage in mind, each player's vault could probably be squeezed down to a few kB. I would be stunned if it's as high as 1MB, as even the ridiculously naive and very expandable layout I described above would be less than half that.

(It still might not be trivial to expand system like this, though.)

You could look at it a different way.

Forget the exact size of the extra slots. How much info is there on a guardian? You need to know total experience, which node is researched, and which node is selected. We also need to keep the sex/race/and hair/skin colors. That's not much more, all can be represented as bools, no integers required. A little more than a single weapon but not much more than 3 or 4 weapons at most, right?

So I think we can say that data on the character pales in comparison to the characters inventory and the amount of information that needs to be stored there. So now we can say, regardless of the exact size of 16 extra slots (or whatever) that you are increasing the percentage of the storage requirement per guardian by a not inconsequential amount.

Saying a few kb per guardian is different than saying the gaurdian database needs to go by 10%-30%.

The other thing is, you gave them the benefit of the doubt that they weren't using any sort of compression algorithm. If they were using specialized custom compression, it could be that slapping on more slots isn't as simple as changing
CreateInventorySlots(16) to
CreateInventorySlots(32)

They may have to re-write the algorithm, which depending on how fancy they got (or needed to get) could take one day or weeks. Then you'd have to convert the entire player database, and you'd have to test the everlivingshit out of it because a defect in the compression could actually wipe inventory, where simply adding slots isn't likely to.