Estate of Unrest Prestige House coming for NOTD!

Margaritas, that looks amazing!
When I get home tonight I'm going to craft one of each rug and try them on the walls!

very nice- i love that particular rug in that room. really brings the colors together

am i the only one getting duplicates of this thread in my email??? lol i just got a bunch of alerts- all of them for these posts that were posted earlier yesterday.

All's fine here, though I did have some threads that were fully read get marked unread last evening (and this was one of them, thinking about it). Not many, but a few. Maybe there was a database hiccup.

Blocked-off areas to the rescue! ;->

Uwk
who actually uses that quite a bit in the Mistmoore Crags Estates... ;->

Basically, it's the same layout file, so numbers will be dealt with anyway, but with Layout Editor, yeah, a lot of that stuff gets hidden "behind the scenes"; Notepad Method is very no-frills. I don't have issues with the numbers themselves; never have, but what I was finding out, issue-wise, was that when I was dealing (for the first time! Oy!) with HUGE numbers of the same sort of building blocks, it was crucial for me to know which one I was looking at, and silly Notepad arranges things...differently, shall we say. After wrestling around with juggling the lines indicating all the "Tall Divider of Rusty Metal," for example, that I needed to look at (there's only about, oh, say, 30+ in this one project...), I finally got the idea bashed over my head that yep, I need to learn Layout Editor...if nothing else, for the Grouping function. If I could've put all the Tall Dividers of RM together in one Group, I wouldn't need to manually shift the lines around so I could corral them all in one place to compare/contrast numbers. :-/

Number-crunching, no problem (and yeah, I've number-crunched to make every piece exactly the same size, place in a W/E or N/S line, etc., down to 8 digits after the decimal). Line herding, oy. X-P

Uwk
finally going over to the Layout Editor Side...hope they have cookies there :-/

It's awesome! And just the thing for alta-holics like me. ;->

Uwk
whose Horde now numbers up to 18 on EU servers (9 each on Splitpaw [UK] and Storms [Fr.]) and 11 on Test... ;->

Okay, question (and if there's an answer on a more Layout Editor-based thread, don't hesitate to point my muzzle in the right direction!): how does one add more items to an existing Group? Is it hard, easy, impossible...?

Uwk

one thing i really, really hate when going to view someone's house, is seeing blocked off areas. it gives a feeling of not being complete and of missed opportunity and potential

Heh, the Powers do it all the time; I remember the Haunted House in the cities that the gobbo at the door sells you tickets for... ;->

And Clan Mawr used it to brilliant effect with their T3 Guild Hall in Antonica. Gardenned off the rest of the grounds and the entire Hall (though I suppose folks with Trustee access could probably still get through "behind the scenes"; that's the way I'd like to think of it, as being behind the stage: there will always be things the audience won't be seeing) and pointed folks to their first Teleport Pad to the "hall" out in Antonica. Was very merciful for those of us without uber-computers! And yeah, they did pretty much max out their item allotment, but they were clever about it, using far-flung geography for "rooms" connected with 'Pads.

Uwk
who, if ever the Personal Grotto gets purchased, will definitely be using more blocking blocks...

blocking zones for quests is not the same. i know people do it, and in guild halls it is sometimes better, but i still really hate going to a house with blocked off rooms. i know we have a low item count, but it seems like they could have spared a few items to make the blocked area look lived in. it is like if i owned this beautiful house in real life, decorated it and invited people to an open house to view it, but they ran into blocked rooms and boarded up doors. there would always be a question of what is hidden behind the boarded up area and why i didn't include it in the house. so i never block part of anything i care enough about to decorate and create. to me, it feels unfinished. i also try to avoid going to a place that is blocked off. maybe it is an ocd or something, but it really bothers me to try to view it.

Well, okay, that's a point; the Clan Mawr folks did do their block really well by having it look like a naturally thick garden area (so thick, you couldn't get through it to the other side; I tried). There are curtains and tapestries and what-not that are solid and non-walk-through (thanks for the data on those, Lera!), but still look good. My blocked-off areas in my Maj'Dul are in the break-out areas, where it would be fatally dangerous for any character to go beyond, but I like to think that they do look logical, rather than, say, a big plank of driftwood (New Halas, I'm looking at you for your many decorating crimes) that somehow wound up several hundred feet in the air above a desert.

So, yeah, point, it can be done well, if need be. ;->

Come to think: there are folks out there (I don't necessarily count myself among them...yet! ;->) that can create lots more rooms than the basic default layout allowed; I imagine that a good block-off for the Maj'Dul place could end up looking like the side of another house, say, complete with wall, window, etc. In an interior situation, if the rest of the walls were tiled a certain way, as in the Mistmoore Estate if you tile up the main entry room in something else and just extend those tiles over the side wing entrances, if you weren't familiar with the original layout, you wouldn't necessarily know those were there, I guess. Especially if you put a window or something there...hmm!

Uwk
now pondering better things to do with the MMCEs the Horde has... ;->

again, your examples are not the same. i agree that you should put fences or something to keep people from falling off the world. and huge guild halls i totally get not using all of the hall because it is so huge and so few items allowed- one of the reasons i stay in my little hall.

but get this- you walk into a house. there is this nice map showing you all of the rooms and you are looking forward to seeing them. then you get met by - not a lovely room, but a wall. where one shouldn't be. blocking off as much as half of the house. yeah i have been in houses where they blocked of the entire house and used a teleport pad to get to the beach where the only building was. and my thought was, you bought this house because???

if you can't figure out a way to work the entire house into your environment, then what is the point of buying the big house? i can see in unrest that answer would be the yard. or the basement. but still - the feeling of missing something can be really overwhelming. and you run around looking for a way into what you are missing thinking that maybe there was a design scheme for hiding a room and letting you find it. only no- there is a big blank wall where the room should be. if i were going to block a room, i think i would have put a window there or something - not a blank wall. it makes the house seem unfinished.

and if i was going to totally reskin something, and block off half of it, then why not simply buy a little house like the snowy retreat to decorate instead of a big house that will feel incomplete and make you wonder if there are some secret hallways or something?

and speaking of hidden hallways, why not make a house of true mystery? you know with basements to fall into, secret hallways, places to hide and watch people in the other room, furniture with secret bottoms, etc. they did this in part, but not in full. there is a basement in the snowy retreat you can cover with a rug that people can fall through- i love that. and there is the door to the basement in the estate house which is a bookcase and the sides of the pit you can fall into . the house has a lot of potential. why board it off? why not work with it. also in the uncanny estate there is a hidden room beneath the stairs. but in the library, ceyarrecks created another room behind the picture like in the real haunted house. there is just so much potential and so many ways to not board up rooms

Honestly, with item counts being what they are, I have no objection to people blocking off part of a house. When I did my Kromzek Keep, I ran out of space for both building blocks and items and still had one room left to do, so I had to remove a few items, put up a divider, a door to the guild hall, and a sign and block off that last room. I was disappointed, but I wasn't about to undo anything I had already done, to add stuff to that last room. In fact, had I realized just how huge the place was when I began to decorate it, and that I would run out of space, I would probably have blocked a few more rooms off.

As for my Mistmoore Crags Estate, which is currently under construction...I did block off one of the entryways, but I completely re-skinned the doorway, and most of the room that it leads into, and created access to that particular area of the house using a teleporter, so I am actually decorating that section of the house...just with a different way to access it. I also completely blocked off the outside balcony area, but there is a reason for that too, which I can't really go into details about right now. Now, even as huge as the Mistmoore Crags Estate is, I have still created another room in that house (not in the foyer area either), which once I publish the house, you'll see my reason for doing so, and as this house comes together, I realize I'll be hitting close to my item count limit, but I think I will make it safely. I'm really excited about this house and how it's coming together, and I wanted to get it published before my surgery, but that's going to be impossible, since I need those Chipped Qeynos Celebration Cup's, and more Moonlight Enchantment items before I can finish it.

Personally, there are so many ways one can decorate a home, and take the Estate of Unrest, for instance...it's just way too huge to consider decorating the entire thing, exterior, interior, and the lower dungeons and caves. Not to mention you even have access to some of the zone outside the walls of the Estate. I haven't purchased this home, but I really would love to get a few of them (not going to happen, unfortunately, as I'll probably end up with just one as things are really tight at the moment, financially). What I really would like to do is to close off the entire interior of the house and decorate just the exterior of the Estate. Sure, I could just purchase a home that has no structures on it, but it just wouldn't be the same. I like the idea of having the structure on the property...this particular structure especially, and just decorate around it.

I would even go so far as to consider blocking off everything except two rooms of a prestige home, and just decorate those two rooms, simply because I like the design of those two rooms, and most likely it would be because I like the skin in the house as well. I know I love the skin in the Mistmoore Crags Estate, so I tried to keep a lot of the original skin throughout most of the house, with just some touch ups done here and there. This has been a work in progress for about three years now though, and the more I've done to the house, the more excited I have been about finishing it up. The majority of the work was done laying everything manually, so things are not going to line up perfectly in there, but I'm ok with that. I'll just use the layout editor to do some minor adjusting of items that may look really out of place.

merriel, the key lies in what you said. you didn't just put up a wall that didn't look like it belonged and nothing else. you worked with the design so it would actually fit into the scheme of things. i do wish they would stop and consider that we need more slots as they keep giving us bigger houses to work with. give us a 1000 slot expander or something.

speaking of, what do you need to finish? i have tons of stuff including some of those cups lying around in my dungeons. give me a list through a pm and i will gather stuff for you.

I really appreciate the offer, suka, but I'm not going to have time to finish the house now, before my surgery. I only have a few days and with NotD here, I don't want to pass up the little time I have to work on that. Thank you, though. I might take you up on the cups though, if I'm not able to participate at all in Heroes Festival...it all really depends on my tolerance for sitting at my desk at that time, during recovery. I just need 5 of those Qeynos cups.

i probably have those 5 - i am saving layouts all day today so i will be on the lookout for them.

Thank you suka! I really appreciate that.

I feel like I should already know the answer to this but I'm going to ask anyway. Is there an easy trick to placing tiles on the walls of a staircase?
My issue is I keep loosing the darn tiles somewhere in the wall.
Or if I try placing tiles at the top and the bottom, I can't seem to get them to line up where they meet in the middle.

sorry I did not read all the pages yet just could not help myself responding
the uncanny home is a indoor space only and there is just no comparing it to the Unrest estate that includes everything
the outside space and all the inside besides the dungeons not included
Needless to say this is the best house ever its true estate and none of the rooms are giant sized.