Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Any Information RE the Editing Features that will be Available in Housing?
Coming from Wildstar, after several years of building with their system, I have found that very few games have implemented the specific housing features that made Wildstar's housing great (as far as I can tell, basically, just Rift). Does anyone know if Intrepid has given any information regarding the specific editing systems they will have in place for housing, or if they have considered any of the following features:
- (most important) Removing decor collision while in edit mode. By removing item collision from decor items while editing, you can sink one item into another item (or into a wall, or the floor, etc) to create something new. As far as I know, this feature is only available in Wildstar, Rift, and ESO currently, and unless Ashes has this feature, its housing system will never compare, because this is the main feature that allows players to create custom decors out of a couple (or a couple hundred) other decors.
- (also super important) Allowing free, or limited, size scaling of decors. Part of cobbling custom decor RE point 1, allowing free or limited size scaling of decors gives you more freedom to create anything you can imagine, because you are only limited to the shape and color of decors while cobbling if you can change their size.
- 3-way rotation of items. Pretty self explanatory, but incredibly useful as often the most desired textures or shapes of a decor are the bottoms, backs or sides.
- free movement on the z-axis, allowing you to change the height of an item regardless of whether there is a solid surface under the item.
- ability to link multiple decors as a single set to create a "single item" for the purpose of moving/rotating/(hopefully) size scaling.
- a useful coordinate placement system that allows for more precise placement of items without having to "eyeball" it. To elaborate, it is important to have the ability to click a button that moves a decor a set amount of game units along a selected axis (allowing a more precise "slide" effect), and to be able to enter a specific coordinate value along a selected axis (to automatically move the item to that coordinate).
- ability to clone the location, rotation, and size of a decor to a second decor.
- a healthy decor cap. Custom cobbling uses way more items that you would expect. Without a healthy decor cap of at least 2kish, players will be extremely limited in their ability to create complete, custom builds.
0
Comments
I am playing ESO currently, and while their housing system is robust, the low item limit (700 in the very largest houses, most other houses are in the 200-600 range, all assuming you subscribe. Free players get half that allowance) is very problematic. The OP is correct in that custom structures and builds are much more item count intensive than simply decorating an existing house.
Ideally, there would be an item limit of minimum 1k for any house, with larger houses approaching 2k.
Placement and such can be sidestepped as long as a system is in place to edit the house with third party software. EQ2, for example, has a very limited and frustrating in game interface for placing items, but an avid decorator and programmer put together software that would take the layouts you could save in game, and edit them in any way you wanted, from placement, angles, etc, and went further still by letting you create different shapes using house items. Circles, spirals, tiling, etc.
in ESO, the in game tools are much more user friendly, but there is a lot of human error involved. Furnishings rotate with your camera, so placing things square, by eye, is a real pain.
But again, an avid decorator/programmer is actively developing an add-on that expands the in-game decorating tools exponentially, offering much of the same functionality as the previously mentioned software for EQ2, but it is in-game and much, much more varied in what it allows you to do (animate scenes, activate items with other items, move groups of items, save those groups to be copy/pasted from one house to another and so, SO much more)
I guess what I mean to express hope for is that AoC will take a measured approach to housing. Focus on maximizing item counts and making as much API data available as possible so even if the in-game interface is lacking, someone will be able to do what folks have done for EQ2 and ESO, which is to expand what it is possible to do beyond the base game functionality.