Can the in-game notes be updated to use more than 3900 characters?

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

I don’t really understand why this is a thing. I can get not wanting players to put entire novels worth of text in their notes, but could we get an upgrade to how many characters the notes will hold, including the invisible formatting chars?

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2

Can’t you just make a new note?

3

Yes, but it’s annoying to keep switching between them. I don’t see why they’re currently restricted to 3900 chars, but if there’s a good reason for CCP choosing that as the limit then I’d love to hear it.

4

I’m sure one of the numerous software developers on these forums would be happy to explain to you why variables with a pre-defined maximum length are more computationally efficient than strings that can grow to an indefinite length.

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5

Please do! I’m learning software development myself ATM, and I’d love to hear your explanation! :smiley:

Also, I’m not talking about removing the limit entirely, just raising it.

6

:red_circle: I would also love to hear why having dozens of notes would be more efficient than having half as many or a quarter of the count of notes with most of the content concentrated in them.

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7

Because strings in a database? Which then is easy to control etc. I’m not a real software engineer though I have programming experience so a real one can probably give you a better answer.
But I’m hazarding a guess that they don’t store notes as individual files but a database.

8

I would also like to know who is the brilliant mind at CCP who thought that automatically saving notes after changes is a good feature despite the lack of undo option.

9

EVE uses MS-SQL as the database server.

I’m assuming there is a notes tables with charId, noteId and noteContents.

To store data in a column, you have to define the type to store in the column.

SQL server provides NVARCHAR(Max) - This basically means, any character can be stored here. Up until the maximum available size. (2GB)

So when you run queries on this table, because there is a possibility of there being up to 2GB of data in that column, the query analyzer has to account for that and be prepared to allocate this amount of data during the query execution (Even if there isn’t that much data there)

This is why there is a specific size set to this column.

Take this as an over simplification. I am not a database guru by any stretch, although I am a professional software developer.

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