Versatile Property Manager

When you have a rather large highly decorated home, but want to change things up a bit and swap to a new home, it's very cumbersome. I could pack up my old home, but then I don't have access to any of my items. Making it difficult to decorate the new home. You could stuff your inventory, or force the items into the bank which would certainly overflow it. But, if you ever wanted to change back to your previous home you're starting at square one.

It would be nice if the property manager had an "option" to save items locations, but not the items themselves. Allowing you to decorate freely, and swap back and forth. Like the Deck system, where I can use the same equipment across different setups.

 

Greetings Shadow
Unfortunately this would be hard to achieve. One you place a lot or a house there is a mesh that is created that determines where you can place things. If you were to store your house with deco in the property manage and decide to change the house this would affect the positions of stuff surrounding the house and defiantly affect where you have placed things in the house. Even placing the same size house would create a different mesh. I did think that maybe you could use the Decoration Palette to store stuff then change your house and maybe not fill up your bank, but I have to try this to see first. Will let you know shortly.

Edit:
Ok I tested and claimed a village lot, placed a village house, and placed a few deco items. Opened the Window Selector in the top right corner and moved the deco to the Decoration Palette window where it became Hidden then changed the house to empty. Then went to the Decoration Palette again and there was nothing in it. All items except the house which I removed were sent to the bank. So the end result is that the Property Manager is great for storing property you create and save like Halloween themed house or your favorite house and deco but these are not to be changed.

 

I guess @Shadow is proposing that the "saved layout" would be associated with a particular style of house and not transferrable between houses, which would be a nightmare due to differing placements of walls, doors etc.

It's a nice idea but I suspect would end up being more complex than it seems at first glance and likely to produce unforeseen bugs or otherwise unpredictable behaviour. For instance, there are lots of highly customisable items in the game as well as lots of stock items; does the saved layout need to remember which specific instance of generic chair #3 was placed at the end of the table, or will it accept any instance of generic chair #3 which is in the player's backpack when applying the layout? How about a weapon or trophy which might have specific recorded properties? How about containers where the contents may have changed? How can the (potentially huge) list of items be presented to the player in a way which makes clear exactly what is included in the layout? If item A was placed on top of item B but item B is not available when applying the layout, does the whole layout fail or does item A fall to the ground, do you need some extra logic for checking whether the placement of each item is legal when the layout is applied... Just some considerations off the top of my head and I'm sure there would be others.

 

Yes, perhaps I wasn't as clear as I could have been. I don't want to bring the layout from one home to another. I want access to the items in that home to decorate a second home without having to reclaim everything, or lose the layout from the original home so that I could always convert back to that later.

The closest thing to this is the deck manager, where I can have one deck save a specific set of gear equipped. I can create a second deck, and use the same cloak as an example without having to have two identical cloaks, or having the cloak removed from the first deck when I assign it to a second deck. If you don't have that piece of equipment on you, it doesn't get equipped when you swap decks. If you remove an item from your home and sell it or whatever, it's no longer there when you swap back to that home.

There are likely many ways to implement something like this, and without knowing how it's currently coded, I can't speak intelligently on a good solution. I'm assuming it would require some form of container to store items which are currently placed in any given lot (managed slot). Then you could access those like you would from the bank and place them. Items you place from your inventory would end up added to that container and be available in your first home if you swapped.

A single lot can have an absurdly high number of items attached to it, and the only options currently (that I am aware of) is to force all your items back to the bank (which would overload my modest bank slots rather quickly). I think this may also cost CotOs. Or manually grab all you can carry, and try and swap things manually.

Make sense?

 

On a side note, you would need to code it to check if the items are already placed in any other active lot. Otherwise, you'd open things up to duplication exploits.