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In my "question" about carry weight limitations in Skyrim, MadPumpkin said:

"You have to understand memory. Picture that I have a variable that can hold up to amount of items ID's. How do I stop the player from carrying 30 instead of the 25 cap? Tell them "you can only hold 25 items" how unrealistic is that!? puts house in pocket"

I don't understand why the PC version doesn't have that memory problem, and furthermore why can't the data be just saved in the saved game and read or written on-demand? Can you please explain it?

On the PC there is a cheat that allows you to by pass the carry limit and the game still works... is this because consoles have different memory architecture?

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There's no memory, other hardware, or software limit being reached here. All of the Elder Scrolls games and almost every RPG out there has an inventory limit. – John McDonald Dec 14 '11 at 23:59
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Oh there is definitely some hardware limit being reached by the inventory somewhere, maybe because of suboptimal list parsing, or worse. I used to collect massive amounts of items in cupboards on the PS3 version of Fallout 3 and it made the game unbearably slow. – Sam Hocevar Dec 15 '11 at 1:16
@John McDonald dragon age did not have that limit, just saying. – 0101 Dec 15 '11 at 11:07
Each console game has to deal with the hardware limits, if it doesn't, the developer did not do a good job getting the most out of it. Cross platform console development is always on the edge memory wise, i.e. dealing with out of memory's and fragmentation. So you have to set limits. If you do not however, things tend to get out of control and hard to predict memory- and performance-wise. – Maik Semder Dec 15 '11 at 13:09

1 Answer

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Console versions typically have fewer cheats because it is harder to ensure stability when the players can go in and do debug stuff. Because the platform holders don't want to be known as "unstable", they can fail you if your game crashes for any reason.

There is no central authority for PC games, so cheats don't carry as bad of a side effect. Also the PC market is filled with "tinkerers" who tend to understand what "unsupported" really means.

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