Path of Exile Database Structure and Architecture

Hi! I'm a college senior taking a Contemporary Database class and we've been tasked with an assignment that has us recreate the structure and Database Architecture of any business process.

Since I'm stubborn and couldn't bring myself to do something boring like a point-of-sale system, I managed to convince my professor to let my group do the inventory or item system of an ARPG, specifically Path of Exile

I was wondering if there are any resources available as to how one would go about understanding the data structure of something with the depth of POE. Things like,

- How are items saved in player inventories?
- What fields are saved on items?
- How does the game handle things like hinekora's lock?
- Is there a better way to find these things out by maybe looking through the game files etc?

Any help is appreciated, cheers.

Other than some dev talks you won't find anything on the topic of internal structure, solutions and tech. Especially not anything database related.

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FestiveWasTaken wrote:

I was wondering if there are any resources available as to how one would go about understanding the data structure of something with the depth of POE. Things like,

poedb, PoE wiki and some others use some tooling that may be available on github. This is for game data file/s though and not the things you are asking here for. Im not aware of any resources on these. The people involved in the above however may have superior information on what you are asking here.

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FestiveWasTaken wrote:

- How are items saved in player inventories?
- What fields are saved on items?
- How does the game handle things like hinekora's lock?
- Is there a better way to find these things out by maybe looking through the game files etc?

You may have to distinct between server and client code. If I would do these things there would be a fair chance of handling these differently because there are different needs. For client the only need is probably making the coding easy. For servers however there may be other relevant constraints such as memory/HD use. Far as I know the public doesnt have any access to PoE server code.

You can however easily make (more or less) educated guesses:

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FestiveWasTaken wrote:

- How are items saved in player inventories?
- What fields are saved on items?

Unless you want to min-max something this is trivial.

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FestiveWasTaken wrote:

- How does the game handle things like hinekora's lock?

One easy way to do it is to make crafting outcome "deterministic" such as by basing it on a RNG seed that is stored as part of the item. And any crafting on the item changes the seed.