PaxLair Player Owned Town Scene Design and Test

mine has dragon bones

 

Who did the art of the Pax Lair and associated templates in this thread? Were they produced by Portalarium, or one of the community artists? If the latter, might I be put in touch with one of them? I have a template idea I submitted to Portalarium some months ago, but my artistic skills are limited.

 

That sounds appropriate.

 

Why Dragon Bones? Do we know (or think we know) what those might do?

 

Because they're cool?

 

What Rufus D'Asperdi said. Also it fits our storyline for that scene.

 

They are very cool sounding. I'm just not sure what they would do...perhaps they offer some kind of "protective" magic. After all serpent scales are linked to "defensive magic".

 

Also for those that have asked about how splitting the areas into lots works, as far as i know it works like this.


Roads and other objects can not be placed inside these areas.

 

Ashlyn did the main Paxlair scene, i did the others.

 

Ok, that's something I'm going to have a problem with. I think it's reasonable to expect that we could put ANYTHING in one of those spots so long as we have remove the lots entirely (forever).

For example, I plan to have just a single lot in my POT scene. I have absolutely no need or want for other lots. So if I'm not allowed to fill those areas with trees or roads or whatever I want, then these templates are going to really mess up what I'm trying to do. Of course, I can personally get around this by submitting a template that has nothing but a single lot on it. But perhaps I don't want the world to know where my lot is located on that single template. Perhaps other people have the same logic (just on a multi-lot basis).

Anyway, it seems like it would be "ok" if POT owners could "blank out" some of the lots that they will not be using, this would free up the ability to put whatever you wanted in that area, but you could never change it back to having a lot (unless you paid for changes, assuming that option is allowed by the devs in the future).

In summary, I need the option to remove "lots" entirely.

 

Interesting to watch these develop/smiles.... being at dev level gives you unity/am playing and learning.... The more I learn about SOTA the more excited I become, now to add a few gift pledges... and pick places to help/salute... and creating in 3d/giggles... its been along time since AutoCad!

 

The flattened areas for dividing into the lots are part of the template, which is why roads cant pass through them (as far as i know). Edits to topography (like removing those flattened areas) is something we likely won't have the option for. A template with a single lot on it is likely not going to get created since the entire point of a template is re-usability. A secret design that can only be used by yourself is not actually a template, it is a custom PoT which we have to pay extra for. Keep in mind i am just speaking from experience from the process of watching Paxlair come to life and have no actual guidelines or list of instructions, i know a few things that we can't do but don't have a full understanding on what we CAN do.

 

I understand what you're saying, but I think during this process we should challenge ourselves to think outside the box (figuratively and literally).

I see zero reasons why if a template has a lot "area" that area can't be removed and replaced with a flat surface. It seems to me that would require no real work at all. But of course I'm not an expert on the subject. But whatever the topology was with the lot, surly it would be the same without it. If that's true, then removing lot "areas" should allow POT owners more freedom and flexibility in overall construction of their POTs. For example, if you don't want lot area B12 (I just made that up) to exist...poof it goes away and you can now request some other asset to be there as you might with any other lot free spot of land.

Again, this just makes logical sense to me, if it doesn't work this way in practice I'd love to know why that is. But there's no need to have a "secret design" using this model, because everyone would be free to remove or use the templated lots without disrupting the process.

Oh and lastly, concerning the potential reuse of a 1 lot POT...I don't think it's your job to worry about that - although I totally understand your point of view. Since the odds of people reusing that template are zero if it doesn't exist, I'll just go ahead and submit a 1 lot template since I know that at least one person is interested in using it...me. (EDIT: Actually consider this my formal request for a template that allows for the removal of all lots but one.)

 

At this point the only options we actually have for PoTs is to pick a template, choose music, choose biome, divide the templates housing locations into the lot sizes we want and pick NPC buildings. Which is why we are trying to get people to collaborate on designing the templates themselves. If everybody works together at this early stage we have the chance to collectively get what we need to create the scenes we each have in mind. Failing that we make do with what we are given.

 

I can understand most of what we cannot do, but the second and third from left is something we should be able to do. The area is flat, we might have no use for city lot ,then we should be able to place village lot anywhre on the flat area as we need. It would be some extra work for devs but imho since the area is flat already it would be minimal work. I do not have full understanding of their behind the scene design, but the game is full of village or town lots not placed on city lots at all. It seems as something that the very basic customization of template should allow imho. I cannot see why we should pay $10k to be able to place village lot in the middle of the city area.

 

2nd from the left i am 100% sure we cant do, 3rd from the left there is room for doubt. I believe the division will work on a snap to grid process to save man hours but that will need to be confirmed by the devs.

 

I am not the person to be answering these questions, i was just trying to explain the rough guidelines i was working with.

 

I know you are not, I am giving feedback to devs. I cannot quote them, because they do not give us much info

 

It seems to me you could design a template with all the flat areas in places that don't get in the way of the rest of your design (like roads), and when you use it personally, you could just use the one, and the rest would be auto-filled with trees.. Alternatively, I was just thinking, if your personal design happens to have a lot of water, then the template could have no water and a lot of the flat areas placed where your water will be?

 

It seems like what we need as a basic template is something more like this....



There are 9 castle lots on this template. I feel like this would better serve a lot of people if we could slice and dice each castle lot to fit what we need, and remove the lots we don't need. So for example: Say you wanted 20 village lots? You could put those lots in ANY of the castle areas you wanted to, and remove any of the castle areas you didn't plan to use. This would give you slightly more freedom in placing lots within your POT. Roads, Rivers, Trees could then be added using existing assets. This assumes that everything on this map is flat, and yes of course you can't fit 9 castle lots in a holdfast, but it's the concept that is important.