After seeing the 5 room houses freeport has too offer, (no room inthere too build atticks) i started thinking of building my own house. So, the idea is of:instead of renting a existing house, you rent a empty lot. The surrounding of this lot: Green grass. or Sky with clouds. or Sand. or (my favorite) a Curtain of snow. or Darkness of night. The items a carpenter can make can be used too build walls ans ceilings. (fir desks makes a beautifull stairway) The vault: as normal houses have vaults, it maybey is possible too have a (lose) one, like the harvesting chest. Sofar my idea. please let me know what you all think, any other ideas or corrections are verry welcome.
The idea in itself sounds fascinating. Ill toss in a little something here that I saw in another game, lord of the rings online, since it fits well with the subject: There were player cities, basically instances with actual houses you could rent, rather than instanced houses, which allowed for exterior decoration. This might be a fun thing to actually have along with this, selling plots of land with either a premade house or just an empty plot, allowing for actual exteriors, and allowing people to see much more of people´s places than you usually would.
Its an interesting idea, but somewhat difficult to do with the current instancing of houses in EQ2. Though, I suppose you could rent an "empty lot" accessable via bell or some widget in your home city. Have the lot surrounded by the walls of several other buildings. Default flooring should be "dirt". The floor should be broken up into 10x10 sections and you should be able to purchase other standard floors available in current player housing. Introducing a "grass" and a "overgrown" floor style would be good too. This way you could get the natural flora like your wandering antonica with flora turned on or a well groomed lawn. Maybe even have "snow" and/or "ice" as an available purchase in flooring. The sky should either follow the daily cycle or be purchaseable for "day", "twilight" or "night". I lean a bit more towards the natural cycle myself. Also being able to purchase weather would be great. Rain, snow, sunny, foggy. Sunny and clear should be the default. If you want dark and gloomy you have to pay. It also might be possible to purchase a few pre-made rooms that can be strung together. This would have the huge advantage of not taking item space. However, this would also neccesitate a lot more carpenter items being introduced. Doors, flooring, ceiling, and actual extierior walls would need to be developed. I'm sure many tallented carpentes already have ideas of what could be done to fake these items, but a makeshift door isn't nearly as nice as an actual in-game door. Especially for people not on the house's friends list. If this was developed, I'd also encourage the addition of a "country estate" that you can buy a pre-made 6 room house or optionally have as a blank lot to build your own house on. Also the addition of a purchaseable barn/shead would be grand.
This is something you can do in Vanguard, so it is possible. Carpenters make the basic components and you put them together to form a variety of housing types. All subject to neglect, the vagaries of war etc. I'd settle for more walls and floor options. Or maybe a shell of a house into which you can place said walls and floors, stairs etc. More feasible since it would use the existing instance setup.
Donilla@Antonia Bayle wrote: Oh my gods, what i would give for the houses we have now without any walls or stairs. Or add an instance based on current ones that is basically a totally blank canvas of the rectangle or square with high ceilings to completely build our own interior within. Can you imagine the possibilites !?!
WARNING, WALL OF TEXT APPROACHING TAKE EVASIVE ACTION. Ive been feedbacking this for years, my idea is you would first buy a small lot, wich would be an instance type zonne, that would have layers of invisible walls around that yyou could pay a mage to dispell, (a npc mage i mean), it would start out small, then it would get bigger and bigger till its about 3/4 the size of a t3 guild hall, ythe ground would be made of small selectable squares that you could choose the look of, there would be dirt, grass wood, stone, and many other, from a merchant ouytside the zone in you could buy walls, floors, doors, ceilings, and so on. you could enter the house in 3 modes, private building, public building, and normal, private building is when only you can come in and build with walls floors, and so on. public build mode would be the same except people could come in and look while your building, and trustees could help build, and normal is just like goiing into a house. /end WoT
UO has had build your own style of houses for years. I know .. cant really compare that to EQ2 I think an empty zone would work IF we had some new craftable building blocks added to the game. The amount of work needed would be HUGE
I loved building my house and planning the landscaping, etc. in Horizons (Istaria). Vanguard built upon that by letting us build the houses (no landscaping sadly), and then decorate inside. But both systems were too limited compared to EQ2 for me. You were permitted to own only ONE plot per ACCOUNT, and there was a fixed number of plots available in the entire game world. The "good" spots get purchased immediately and at some points there were absolutely no plots available at all for new players or people who hadn't been able to afford one in the beginning. And it is devastating to have to leave game for some reason and know that you will lose your precious house . I love the idea of somehow being able to pick a place and build your own house and choose which buildings, trees, sidewalks, gazebos! etc. that you want in your little piece of Norrath, but I think we are far better off with it being inside a separate instance. How sad would it be to only ever have one house to decorate... and that with a limit on space (even larger VG houses are VERY small compared to a one room EQ2 apartment) and undoubtedly a limited item count. It would be awesome if there could be more "door" options though, especially out in other zones. Even if it was exactly the same layout options we already have, it would be cool to be able to choose to live in say Thunderring Steppes or Mara or wherever! I also really like the idea of a huge "warehouse" option, where we could create our own spaces. Of course, we'd need some new divider/wall/door options and maybe windows.. and and... *laughs*
I would love to be able to purchase an instance that is an empty plot of land and build my own place. I'd like mine to be on an island, please!
I would love to see player designed houses as well. I am sure SOE isnt going to dedicate the resourses nessisary for what is termed "Persistant content." DAOC has this with houses as stated in another post here that show wear and tear and can even be destroyed if attacked or neglected long enough. Given their current mechanics and a little work it wouldnt be a large jump to a empty instance with no floor or cealings or stairs to adding in those things. Players could even do a Pay as you go and add in as they can afford it. It would take some structuring though to minimize rendering issues. Homes might be limited in the number of certain structured items such as walls and stairs. It would be a nice addition.
One thing Dark Age of Camelot had that I find very lacking in EQ2 is the ability to preview your house changes before you buy. It's so nice to be able to see what that wall would look like, or that ceiling, or railing and decide before hand if you liked it. Loved this feature in DAoC and pine for it in EQ2.
As someone already stated above, Vanguard has build your own house on a plot you buy. Some in deserts, mountainous areas, islands, etc etc. Yea, that VG everyone likes to slag off because of it's first 6 months Go try it, might be suprised.
One problem with games that allow you to build your own house is that the game tends to run out of lots. Additonally server mergers are much harder to do.
DavidSachs wrote: You can still do instancing with a build your own type of system. You just wouldnt able able to see the structure from outside of the zone.
Krooner wrote: Emphasis added. I'd love to have a open piece of land to build on, but if you want to get to the stage of something the size of a full Qeynos hall rendering is going to become just as much an issue as it is in the large guild halls, where things don't render right away. As it is now, the existing houses are set up so that only certain rooms are actually rendered based on where you are (see examples below). With a single space with no fixed walls, probably *everything* would have to be rendered in the current system (unless some large things like dividers already act as render-obstructors). So I love the idea, but we'd need some fixes or something to better optimze the rendering or every time you'd zone in you'd most likely wind up getting stuck in a wall or table as it rendered. (From above) Example of the rendering barrier: if you are standing in a qeynos 5-room's entry room, the room next door isn't fully rendered. There's an easy way to see this: take one of the flat-topped shelves, blow it up real big, and put it on that wall between the entry room and the small room with the stairs. Now try and walk up the shelf -- oops! The visual mesh is on your side of the wall, but the collision mesh (the shape that determines what part is 'solid') seems to stick into the wall just enough to be considered on the other side, which doesn't render). Another trick - hover a large carpet so that it sticks through the doorway, but is mostly in the entry room. Now walk through the doorway and look back as you move back away from the stairs down -- you'll see the carpet disappear once the game decides you can no longer see the entry room and stops rendering it.
