House Decorating Suggestion

One minor thing I noticed during Release 1 that bugged me a bit was the restrictive nature of being able to 'stack' items via the decorating system. As versatile as this system is - which is amazing! - I would love to add the further versatility of being able to stack or combine items in unexpected ways.

For instance, I really wanted to turn the fountain into a lush jungle fountain, by stacking the plants in it. However, except for a small strip in the center of the 'pool', they were blocked from being placed in/on the fountain. I probably spent two hours on trying to get it to work before giving up.

Some of the most amazing creations were possible in UO because of the ability to stack items - any items, in any combination you wanted... sinks made out of troughs and counters, elaborate mantled fireplaces out of marble chairs and tables and gold and glowing crystals, and of course the fishtanks out of cloth.... Restricting the stacking of items to what makes sense to the developers will prevent a lot of the decorating creativity that was possible in that otherwise far inferior system.

 

I thought the devs were looking for the community to contribute assets to be used in the game, I'm not sure stacking would work in a non-isometric world.

 

It wouldn't work the same way, certainly, but for instance, you were limited on where you could place things on tables/bookshelves, I already mentioned being able to place thing in/on top of the fountain, etc. They've designed this wonderful system of being able to place items anywhere... I just feel like that ought to include 'on top of other items' so they can be combined in creative ways.

 

I also noticed that you could only move limited options of items into walls....

I hope they change it, because you can create such nice stuff with beeing able to move for example a table halfway into the wall creating a new half table .
I was not able to contribute to screenshots at R1 due to too many crashes, but i had already a nice restaurant with intresting looks with abusing the wall and pushing items in different ancles into it. Unfortunatly i could often not succeed as many dit not alow it.

I also support Nir Antae request to give us as much freedom to combine, stack, turn items as possible. This is the only way we can all create different looks then other houses. We need creative freedom.


And most of the bottles and potions had a far to large sice. They need to be reduced to maybe 50%. Or create different options.

 

+1

Probably stacking cannot work like in a isometric world, but anyway I think you have nice ideas!

 

"Runs to look up Isometry"

Isometry

In mathematics, an isometry is a distance-preserving map between metric spaces. Given a metric space, or a set and scheme for assigning distances between elements of the set, an isometry is a transformation which maps elements to another metric space such that the distance between the elements in the new metric space is equal to the distance between the elements in the original metric space. In a two-dimensional or three-dimensional space, two geometric figures are congruent if they are related by an isometry: related by either a rigid motion, or a composition of a rigid motion and a reflection. Up to a relation by a rigid motion, they are equal if related by a direct isometry.
Isometries are often used in constructions where one space is embedded in another space. For instance, the completion of a metric space M involves an isometry from M into M', a quotient set of the space of Cauchy sequences onM. The original space M is thus isometrically isomorphic to a subspace of a complete metric space, and it is usually identified with this subspace. Other embedding constructions show that every metric space is isometrically isomorphic to a closed subset of some normed vector space and that every complete metric space is isometrically isomorphic to a closed subset of some Banach space.

An isometric surjective linear operator on a Hilbert space is called a unitary operator.


And i am still lost.....

 

Games with Isometric View

 

So basically games like Ultima 8 and Ultima Online's view.

 

Yep! To use more confusing technical words they were all bidimensional games. XD

 

"Isometric view" is much more comprehensible than "isometry":

It's basically a view so that square 'floor tiles' end up squished diamonds <> instead of square [ ]

 

There's a pretty big technological difference between UO and SotA.. it's just the view. UO was/is 2D with a static view. You were stacking sprites. Now we're stacking 3D meshes. Take that table stuck into the wall.. well the other half of that table will be sticking out the other side and everyone will be able to see it plain as day.

Speaking only for myself but the last thing I want to see while walking through towns is objects sticking through the outside walls of people's homes.

I suppose the point I'm getting at is there are also technical reasons for limitations here. Creativity that requires objects to stick through each other is probably not going to fly..

 

I actually wasn't talking about sticking through other objects, or walls. I'm talking about stacking/arranging on top of. Obviously, a la Fountain Tower, there need to be some general height restrictions lol...

 

I know I was referring to someone else's UO example. I'm not at all opposed to allowing as much creativity as possible. I'm only pointing out there are technical concerns as to why you can't do some things.

 

I know I definitely tried to abuse the decoration system because it wasn't clear to me what the "rules" were. I hope they fix all the problems I saw but don't make it so restrictive that it limits creativity.