On Thu, Oct 07/99, "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...> wrote:

> From: "Kimes, Dean W." <Dean_Kimes@...>
>
> 640 items ( the correct product of 8x8x10) per account, double that with
> bank and inventory plus wearables, would be devastating in terms of storage
> space even if every item was a simple 2 byte ID code and a 1 byte quantity
> and a 1 bit flag for bank/inventory and another byte (at least) for
> container location.

I decided to do a back of the envelope calculation on this and came up
with some interesting info. Here's the numbers

640 items in bank max
640 items in char inv max
21 items on character

1301 total item slots

Now some ballpark guesses.

Let's give them 8 bytes to save each item descriptor and flags. I think
that's overly generous but I think the results will still be pretty
amazing.

1301 * 8
10408

now we have 8 characters possible per user
10408 * 8
83264

now we have a guesstimated 130,000 users
83264 * 130000
10824320000

So basically we are talking about 10 gig of data. Even if we doubled,
tripled, or quadrupled the amount of storage for the character items the
storage required to back it up wouldn't even fill the hard drive of the
average pc used to play Everquest. And remember, this is for every user
of EQ at 8 accounts per user, all full, and all assuming 8 slot storage
filling both bank account and inventory. If you divide this by 24, the
number of current servers, you get
10824320000 / 24
451013333

450 meg

Now granted, this would require that they had written a custom program
to extract just the character info records from the database, but still
the actual amount of storage here is pretty minimal.

So I don't think item growth on characters is a significant issue in
terms of storage capacity here.

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