In eq1, we can tilt and flip our items in our house with no problem. we also have the option of free placement along with collision,etc. this makes it easier to set up the house the way we want it. Why can't we do this in eq2?? Why do we need a thrid party program to do the basic movements that eq1 has? the same people designed both games and eq1 housing came later than eq2. why not have the same easy to manipulate system in both games? would the added programming be so hard? in eq2, everything costs way more than in eq1 so it would seem that the amenities of eq1 would prevail here. could we please have free placement, tilt and flip in eq2 housing?
because they are very different games under the hood. The systems in EQ2 make these things buggy and these are things in the basic game engine which are not easy to change.
They're supposed to be working on (or at least looking into) tilt and flip. I'd love to hear an update on that.
EQ2's housing was implemented back when EQ2 first went live. It's built into the game, and they never thought they'd allow us to do the things we do now. EQ1's housing was created after they'd watched what we'd done in EQ2. They learned from it, and created a housing system that allowed for what we'd been using the layout editor to do in EQ2. To change EQ2's housing would take what's likely more work than they're willing to spend, especially since JesDyr has already created a workaround for the lack of actual pitch and roll options.
I don't care about having to use the housing editor, I'd still use it even if they implemented options in game. A lot of times using math to figure out where something should be is a lot more reliable than eyeballing it. I just wish they'd fix the stupid items that want to rotate and move around if you have them rolled or pitched a certain way. Like stone benches, if you stand them up long ways they are a pita to get in position because they seem to randomly choose which way they are going to rotate
never pitch by a round number (choose 89.95 instead of 90 for example) and don't have a rotation number higher than the pitch value and you'll avoid most of the problems. Jazabell explained very well the EQ2/EQ1 difference. The main problem with EQ2, in my opinion, is that items movements are relative (a wall and a floor item don't move the same when you rotate them).
JesDyr figures (and I agree with him) that the problem with pitch is probably EQ2's fix for an issue known as Gimbal Lock. Some rules for pitch: When pitch > roll, pitch + roll cannot = >90. So if pitch is 70, roll must be less than 20, or the item will start to rotate instead of roll. When pitch < roll, everything is fine and dandy. Pitch cannot equal 90 or 180 (or -90 or -180). Instead, add or subtract approximately 0.06 so for a "stable" item. If pitch is set to 90 or 180, it will spaz out.
When I was at SOE Live I was talking to one of the devs there and he said that it is a known issue, and they haven't been able to come up with a way to make things stable at a 90 or 180 degree because of the coding. He said some words ( which I assumed he knew what they meant, but they were jibberish to me ) which he later explained to me after I gave him a look of a lost puppy, to be that the way things are coded at the 90 and 180 degree, it wants to sit at a specific graphical look, so when its off by even just .0X, it stops trying to automatically correct it. ( Seriously, it was like Wil Wheaton in Eureka trying to tell Jack about what he was putting in his slug food.... and trust me ... I was Jack Carter! ) Basically, if that didn't make since, what he was trying to tell me, with a bunch of big words, was that the system is trying to automatically correct the image, but it can't, so it spazzes. Now whether there is actual truth in that statment, or he was just trying to get me to stop begging for unspazzy items, is of another matter.
See the link in Jazabelle's post about gimbal lock. This is the problem that code is attempting to correct. That video explains things fairly well (but I dont know what the code SOE is using to prevent it actually does).
