Why not the entire island of Mare Estate ?

I did do the Tour, and I am about to redeem this prestige house.

In the tour, there is a large blank area of map... can't get to it.

Why ?

I would adore it if the island could be fully explored. And houses, etc. built there.

Or if no houses, just a place to put tables and chairs, for some picnic areas.

So, are there areas I can place things not noticable from the tour ?

Thanks !

I was going to correct the island spelling, but it wont let me.

I was hoping the tunnel by the waterfall would lead to the extra area like in the in game map of this island.

But alas, its another exit from the zone. I am sad.

However, I have lots of open spaces.

It is slightly decorated, set to Visitor. Some of the houses have external lights on them. Two spheres of light, with an object nearby, are placed in two places on the island. One blue and one yellow.

Skyfire, Qeynos, Mara Estate, Uthesthan character.

Even though it would have been nice to have that other area, I found the Mara Estate as it is to be more than suffient space for several projects. I actually published one of those houses for a little while, the first time I had ever done that. I'm on Thurgadin, and my characters Nicholl (Qeynos) and Teluria (Freeport) each have a Mara Estate more or less in final form (Nicholl's was the one I published). The two homes are both set to Visitor, and are connected by portal as well, for IC reasons. Folks are welcome to drop by; both houses look best at night. The portal between is under the bridge (but I forget in which house).

The story behind these builds is not self-explanatory, so I'll give a bit of background here. Nicholl's house is a settlement of Unseelie fae, located in Faerie. It has been battling a spreading corruption, which even the Unseelie that live there find undesirable.

Teluria is actually a creature from the Void. She has been experimenting with creating things, and bases her creations on things she has observed in other realms. Her home represents a little "pocket plane" containing some of her experimentation, which she modeled on the Unseelie village. The portal between is one she has placed to faciliate her research.

The corruption in the Unseelie village is in part due to Void influence seeping through that portal, although there are also other, more potent forces at work.

Second character completed 2017 and got the Mara estate. Whew. I'm worn out.

It would be nice to have that extra zone space I have the same complaint about the Isle of Refuge house and how it doesn't match the original zone layout

I've come to the conclusion that the prestige houses or lands we get are definitely NOT the same as the original zone; how could they be? If they were, they'd take up the same amount of room as the original zones/instances, and there would be even less room on the servers. :-/

Uwk

Is that a half-smilie ? Its ones and zeros. I think they don't match so as to not give away sections of the adventure areas to players going there for the first time.

Ah! Well, there's that, too, yeah; good point.

Uwk

Actually, I got the Isle of Refuge prestige with that in mind... maybe I could see where some of the paths went, since flying isn't allowed. Didn't work, the paths are somewhat different.

Took my lower level character up to Spire Island and got the Mara Estate and decorative items.

Have to see if that toon already has the other prestige house or not.

Not having that second area of the Mara Estate gives them another option of creating a new Prestige home that offers that second area, which is actually quite expansive as well. I think it is fine that they broke the two spaces apart, and hope they do eventually give us the second area, including the underwater ruins

simple answer: the larger the zone, the more lag is caused. Each item you place has it's own unique id tag and "address". place these items close to the entrance, and they'll load fairly quickly. The larger the zone, the larger the id catalogue has to become, and the more expansive it has to be to maintain a list of each location (remember, 3 "addresses" X, Y, and Z) each item is placed in. The further away from the door and floor the item is, the longer the list, and longer it takes to render. think of it as a sphere, where the entrance would be the immediate drawing area. everything is close and clear, and doesn't take long to draw. the further out you go, the longer the address from you gets, and it takes longer to get to. it's further down on the list of things that register. This is why houses built very far back from the entrance of a zone take a long time to render, or is the way I understand it to work. I believe it's also why we're limited on how many items can be placed, and the sizes of prestige homes.

Well, that's not my concern. My concern is 'Am I having fun ?'.

I believe some clipping occurs in instance housing on dynamic items (items placed by players). The further you are from an item it will not try to load/render. As you move closer to these items they start to appear. The size of the zone itself does not really impact this, other than putting you further away from some items.

It is the dynamic items and their quantity that causes such slow loading. The more items, the longer it takes. Makes sense. Perhaps they are loading meshes wrong or in a highly inefficient manner. Or maybe they are attaching too many properties to these dynamic items and it is latency causing horrid results on loading dynamic items. What I can say is that the way they do it really illustrates the limits on the number of items in a zone as memory crashes occur frequently in high item count zones with high graphics settings.

A better approach would be to have some automated mesh generator on the server that kicks in when a house is "published". The act of publishing by a player should then combine all of the dynamic meshes into a single mesh along with the base zone mesh. Think of this like a modified version of a zone file that contains all of the dynamic meshes attached to the main zone mesh into a single mesh.

Then this file can be pushed to players while zoning into a published house. This would make the zone a single mesh to load and would reduce all of the issues associated with slow rendering/clipping and memory issues.

It would require though that when a zone is unpublished you will have to zone back into the base zone and items are dynamically loaded again as is now. It would give housing a true "edit" mode and "published" mode. I mean we're not editing published houses anyways, so why not?

One word: Spreadsheets.

Uwk

Really?! Holy hat! Okay, that I never knew; back in the bad old days when I couldn't even get into a guild hall I belonged to or MY OWN HOUSE, I just presumed it was because of the exact opposite: that there were way too many items placed too close to the entry point, blocking my own entry. This was back when I had a Win98 machine (still seems to run just fine on Win7, thank the gods) and they insisted on trying to load everything else in before the toon. My old bugger never would've handled the new system, where with a "500 item slot house," for example, you now have 1000 slots that can be filled: 500 items, 500 Building Blocks. Whatever they're called, they still need to be loaded. :-/

Nowadays with the "load the toon first" system, the main drawback is being caught and stuck within/beneath reskins or items near the entrance... :-/

Uwk

And unless you have a huge prestige "land," like Mara or the Isle, the area should be small enough that you could see all items, even if fuzzy or blurry.

That's exactly what was happening in my "no, you can't come in, l00zr, get a real computer" situation. Didn't help that at the time for the longest time, we only had dial-up... :-/

So, even at the lowest graphics settings, I still wouldn't be able to get in. :-/

We can't edit a published house; we're not allowed to, not even the owner. One wonders why, if they're not actually doing it the way you suggest. But question: when you unpublish a house, like to move something or add something, would you have to zone out before it would take effect?

Uwk

Doing it the way I suggested, yes.

As you would be flipping back to a zone that contains its base mesh and then all the dynamic items would need to load up to while its unpublished for editing.

I understand that this could be frustrating for tweaking things, but personally I believe the frustration of a house loading poorly or it causing the games engine to fall on its face with "always dynamic" (published or unpublished) is greater.

OMG, yes. Hopefully, that would help folks with still somewhat clunky computers, and there are any number of "house items" that can be walked through, that have no collision detection (Ghorkaal "furniture," I'm looking at YOU). Since a lot of the bookshelves, bunk beds, "open crates," etc. are just solid rectangles with fancy artwork sides that we can't really put anything "into" them anyway, we might as well do our juggling act to put things into/onto permeable furniture. ;->

Uwk

I have Zee Spreadsheets ! Bwahahaha !

Uhm, yes, I use spreadsheets.

Finished 2018 weeks 1 thru 9 from Zun Yi.

Now looking around the Relic Tinker Prestige House. Flew up, and I can see thingies outside the house. And a large open area devoid of many things, but there are things Out There. No doors out though, not that I can find.