Is there any in-game record of Bazaar recipes?

[mg262]

I'd rather not look at the list of all recipes (or whatever you call them --- by recipe I mean what you loot need to sell to unlock a Bazaar item). But it would be nice to be able to refer back to the ones I have already unlocked, especially for consumables. Is there any way of doing this in the game?

Thanks!

[DigginTiger]

not to my knowledge. You can either use your own memory or write down everything.

[Hinnyuu]

There is no in-game record, though there are some very vague hints in bestiary entries regarding some items. Nothing concrete, though.

[mg262]

Thanks! It feels like writing down everything would get unbelievably messy.

It's very annoying about the glitch that means buying an item resets the counter to zero, rather than just subtracting materials.

Ah... I just looked up a spreadsheet, and realised that most of the things you can get are not repeatable, even for consumables. That changes things!

[Hinnyuu]

Originally posted by mg262:

It's very annoying about the glitch that means buying an item resets the counter to zero, rather than just subtracting materials.

That's not a glitch, that's how it's always worked, and according to the official guides is how it's supposed to work.

[mg262]

Ah, interesting -- I got the term from http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Bazaar_(Final_Fantasy_XII) .

[Casurin]

Originally posted by mg262:

Ah, interesting -- I got the term from http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Bazaar_(Final_Fantasy_XII) .

No idea why they talk such ♥♥♥♥ there, but that is - as Hinyuu said - intended that way and a technical choise as remembering every item-combination for every receipe possible would make the savefile insanely large and complex.

[Melodia]

Yeah usuall the FF Wiki is pretty good at avoiding POV like that.
And being a choice to keep save file size down does make sense -- never heard that explanation but I can believe it.

The only repeatable ones, afaik, are for consumable items, and a couple that just give another loot piece (such as the High Arcana). That said, if you for instance forget if you made an Arcturus, and want an Arcturus yeah the game won't let you know in any way (though this is unrelated to the over-selling item factor).

[Daedalus007]

Originally posted by Melodia:

Yeah usuall the FF Wiki is pretty good at avoiding POV like that.
And being a choice to keep save file size down does make sense -- never heard that explanation but I can believe it.

The only repeatable ones, afaik, are for consumable items, and a couple that just give another loot piece (such as the High Arcana). That said, if you for instance forget if you made an Arcturus, and want an Arcturus yeah the game won't let you know in any way (though this is unrelated to the over-selling item factor).

Back in the day, the Playstation 2 port of a certain Elder Scroll game would cause major issues due to runaway save file sizes that exposed inherant flaws in the memory card system. Even the Xbox ended up burning through hard drive space eventually but the memory card system back in the day of the original FF12's release was the limiting factor.

That said, there are programmatic ways around it (matrices, list arrays & lookups, etc) but I get why they didn't want to bother testing all that out with the limited time & budget they were given. I'm not privy to how they coded it, but I am aware of how the PC port of Zodiac Age was so completely half-baked that it should never have been priced above $20 at most. So janky that GBs of unused (standard-definition) files and (PS2) assets are still present in the VBF file doing nothing but eating up hard drive space for no good reason.

They could have come up with a solution but were too lazy/stupid/budget-restricted to do so. They are Japanese devs, so they should be pretty great at optimizing for console hardware even if they suck at PC coding. If they say there was no reasonable/easy way to do it then I'll take their word on it.

[Schloss Ritter]

Thing is, the game does track in your save which one-time recipies have been completed since it doesn't allow you to do them again. So, the question remains why this information can't be called up in a menu somewhere.

[Daedalus007]

Think of it this way: it is more like instead of storing extra data, it merely has a binary 1 or 0 as to whether or not a recipe can be repeated. Then these values are further compressed and stored in a predetermined order as a list matrix so that the game can do very quick lookups in the lookup table/matrix. It is much easier to do it that way (from a programming perspective) but of course it limits flexibility of how open you can have things and how easily you can patch in stuff later. Considering the original FF12 Vanilla and IZJS were on the Playstation 2, the patching scenario wasn't a worry at all; the limited console memory (both RAM and memory card space) was an issue.

[mg262]

If there are ~1000 items you can sell (guessing here, but doubt it's more?) and you use 1 byte to track the quantity of each item sold (not tracking sales in excess of 255), and decrement the counts when a Bazaar item is made, then that's still only 1kB of data. I doubt they were trying to optimise space usage at that level -- more likely just that it was easier to code up the version that's in the game.

[Melodia]

Of course the other explanation could be as simple as 'it's purposeful' for the same reason a lot of rare game and other secrets are pretty much impossible to find without a guide. They specifically wanted it that way.

[Hinnyuu]

Originally posted by mg262:

If there are ~1000 items you can sell (guessing here, but doubt it's more?) and you use 1 byte to track the quantity of each item sold (not tracking sales in excess of 255), and decrement the counts when a Bazaar item is made, then that's still only 1kB of data. I doubt they were trying to optimise space usage at that level -- more likely just that it was easier to code up the version that's in the game.

Have you looked at how small save game files on consoles used to be? 1kB is a lot.

But of course it could very well have been a conscious design decision for entirely other reasons, too. We're unlikely to ever find out.

[Melodia]

Eh....PS2 mem cards held about 8.5MB, 1KB is pretty small.

Now PSX cards....those were 128KB with each save 1/15th that so yes, in that case 1KB is a lot. But this was a PS2 game.