Science & Industry

Great suggestion!!!

Not much to comment except that.
The only thing i would like to see is that CCP Greyscale replys and that this subject doesnt die out.

Think you should have posted this in the "Crius state of play" thread instead of a separate one since much more people would have read it.

Inger Geten

Good luck with the 3000 likes....

Yeahh

I know your my bro... but you finally posted this and not just kept nagging in the corp about it.

Good for you (and hopefully us...)

Good luck (gave you a like... nearly there..)

Agreed, would love to see stackable BPO/BPC.

Only real problem i can foresee is building from any of the stackable 'single' runs ?

Thank you for this possitive info. :)

Then I wan't nagg about it for a couple of years, did suspect it was something "Dodgy" or it would have happened.

Well Life goes on (hopefully).

I think you should be able to repackage un-researched blueprints too. Like, why do I even have to say this?

This is a thing we would like to do, but it's just about non-trivial enough that we're not in a position to commit to a timeframe right now.

I am really glad to hear this is on the radar. Back when you put out your industry survey early this year, this was my number 1 request. Unfortunately, Cruis made this issue worse, not better.

For those who don't appreciate how difficult this is: the problem CCP faces is the way the Eve database handles items. Items can be in two states--packaged or unpackaged. Only packaged items can stack together and be sold on the market. Only unpackaged items can have attributes. You can have a stack of rifters and put them in your hauler and fly them around. However, if you want to use one, you first assemble it. This is when it gets a unique ID number and attributes such as hitpoints. This is also why you cannot repackage something which is damaged. If that were possible, repackaging and then reassembling something would instantly repair it for no cost.

The second problem is that BPOs and BPCs both have the same TypeID number. They are really the same item with the only difference being the runs attribute. BPOs have infinite runs. (A special flag number.) BPCs have limited runs. When you buy a blueprint from an NPC off the market, it is packaged. When it is first used, the game assembles it into a unique item and gives it attributes: ME, TE, and runs. This is also why it took so long for them to be able to give us different icons for BPOs and BPCs-until they figured out how to change the icon based on the runs attribute of the blueprint.


The way I believe everyone imagines BPC stacking would require unique IDs for each BPC. So item 691 is the Rifter BPO. Make a new item, say 100,000 be the Rifter BPC with 0 ME, 0 TE. Then item 100,001 would be the Rifter BPC with 0 ME, 1 TE, etc. Change the runs remaining attribute to quantity, and allow us to use blueprints while packaged. You could stack and unstack them just like we do any other commodity item today.

The problem is implementation. The Eve database had about 22,000 items in it last time I checked. Of those, about 3200 are blueprints. CCP would need to add 121 new items for each blueprint, so that each ME/TE combination came out as a unique part number, that would be approximately 387,000 new lines in the database. Then imagine the changeover going through everyone's inventories and converting every BPC from one TypeID to one of 121 different TypeIDs. Hope there are no typos accidentally converting BPCs into BPOs or one item into a different item. Also, go through all the other sources of BPCs (LP stores, mission rewards, all the loot tables) and ensure they don't accidentally start dropping BPOs instead.


The other way BPC stacking could be accomplished would be to create a completely new function just for blueprints, which appears to the user like stacking, but it would need to behave differently behind the scenes. When the user tried to drag BPC B on top of BPC A, it would check that they are the same blueprint, then if they have the same ME and TE attributes. If so, add the runs from B to A and destroy blueprint B. Also, since the quantity attribute is the flag to differentiate between BPOs and BPCs, there would need to be error handling to prevent anyone from stacking so many BPCs together they create a BPO.

Once this is done, they would need to create a new function to unstack BPCs, because if I want to invent something 10 times, I need 10 BPCs not one giant stack.

The second would probably be the easier solution for QA.

From industrialists' point of view, it's NOT trivial at all.

1. Crius has created too many T2 BPCs which only require 3 hours to make in POS. This is a nightmare for industrialists. Nobody wants to log on every 3 hours to babysit his production lines.

2. Because of the short production time, nobody is using Rapid Assembly Array anymore.

3. Like others have said, we need longer runs to really utilize ME saving.

4. It can greatly reduce the burden of item database and also reduce Industry UI loading time.

From the technical perspective, "repackaging" BPCs (without losing ME & TE attributes) is quite difficult. But "combining" BPCs should be much easier to implement. As for "separating' BPCs, I don't think many people are keen on it.

After thinking about this over lunch, I believe my last suggestion was unreasonable.

If BPOs were returned at the start of the job, then an arbitrarily large number of jobs could be started simultaneously from the same BPO. That would be bad, expecially for capital ship BPOs and T2 BPOs.

And we cannot expect different behavior for BPOs vs BPCs, because they are the same item. So therefore, returning the BPC at the beginning of a job shouldn't happen either.

So please give us a way to combine BPCs with the same ME and TE attributes into one with the sum of the runs attribute. Then give us another function to split a BPC into multiple smaller BPCs.

In the OP, one of the main benefits of combining BPCs was improving the response of the UI. When you have many BPCs, it takes considerable time for the UI to load.

In the leadup to Crius, it was announced that many blueprints were going to have their copy times greatly increased. Also, installation costs for copying would no longer be trivial. So a great number of people made a large number of BPCs while they were still fast and cheap, intending to invent from them sometime in the future.

I currently have about 20,000 T1 BPCs squirreled away in dozens of small secure containers, and I am a fairly small-time operator. I would love to be able to combine them so that I could keep them in one place and easily see what I have and find what I am looking for. However, if stacking were one-way (I could stack blueprints but not un-stack them) it would make my T1 BPCs useless for the purpose they were made--invention. I need 50 BPCs to do 50 simultaneous inventions to get ~250 runs of a T2 module in a day. Combining them would limit me to doing 1 invention per day no matter how many alts I have. So the obvious solution is to not take advantage of the new function we just begged CCP to introduce?

No, unstacking is important too.