Houses, Mansions, and Castles

[Shadeslayer]

Originally posted by Dregan Tepis
Well, what about someone starting to submit a \"serfs quaters\" style apartment building? Rent due per month. If your not online to pay in a certian number of days after rents due, you loose the stuff you store there. Instead of  \"portals\", how about a combo lock you can give out / change yourself. Kinda like loaning a friend a key.

Sounds kind of wierd...what\'s the apartment for anyway? You barely stay in it for Rping and fighting requires you to go elsewhere and just paying for not staying half the time makes you lose money fast. When you are not online, your char sort of disappears from server so there is no use for a hotel.

[Dregan Tepis]

Originally posted by Dregan Tepis
Well, what about someone starting to submit a \"serfs quaters\" style apartment building? Rent due per month. If your not online to pay in a certian number of days after rents due, you loose the stuff you store there. Instead of  \"portals\", how about a combo lock you can give out / change yourself. Kinda like loaning a friend a key.

Originally posted by Shadeslayer
Sounds kind of wierd...what\'s the apartment for anyway? You barely stay in it for Rping and fighting requires you to go elsewhere and just paying for not staying half the time makes you lose money fast. When you are not online, your char sort of disappears from server so there is no use for a hotel.

I should have clarified myself. This was in responce to having a place to store items, and as a way to keep the devs from having to place too many Houses, Mansions, and Castles. does that make more sence?

Sorry in advance, my spelling sucks an I\'m not on a computer with any thing to spell check with.

[Induane]

I know this is a strech, but the opensource game Cube and now Sauerbraten have one really neat feature.  That is multiplayer dynamic level editing.  YOu and a group of friends can model a map ingame and it is quite simple to make some really nice houses.  There are textures to use, etc... If we provided a similar system, guild leaders and their architects could simply get together \"on site\" pay for building materias \"dimensions of the house\" and go to work.  That game is opensource, so I\'d assume at the least it would be easy to look at the way that code is written to get an idea of how they did it - its one of the best features of cube.  Providing a set of textures based on the towns location would help keep things matching as well.

Edit: I also just thought of something else - people who get really good at modeling ingame could sell their skills to guild leaders to make them uber nice stuff.

[nattuo]

it would certainly help the whole rpg element eg.
\"yo joe wanna come over my house\"
\"sure jim\"
\"alright lets get drunk and fall down the stairs and die!!!\"
\"yeah\"
plus you could come back to life in \"Your realm\" (i.e. your house)

[Karyuu]

Originally posted by nattuo
it would certainly help the whole rpg element eg.

That\'s the entire point :)

[nattuo]

I am one to state the obvious aren\'t I?
but I do know of games where owning a house is so you can have seiges and shoot arrows at newbs.

[Ecolem]

okie I\'ve read enough, i want houses!
But just extending on the idea why not have a time frame where you can attack other houses/guild houses but only with siege weapons and you gota protect it anyway you can...like throwing rocks down at them...that would be sooo fun  

[Nero da 2nd]

Pretty good idea, I think it would be a nice place to store your items, I only have a couple questions....

 1) Where would the houses/mansions/castles be built?
 2) Would there be a stat that goes along with it? How would they be built? Would you be able to put furniture in it? Could you have a stove in it?
 3) What would be the point, of having a house, or a mansion, or a castle?

[arcain]

you are missing the point.what is the point of having a house in rl?houses would be great.just because of the roleplay factor.

[Ecolem]

um Nero its quite simple really:

1.Houses can be built anywhere like out side Hydlaa or anywhere...who cares!
2. The point of having houses is to store stuff so if you could buy stoves then why cant we put a stove in  
3. This is a game. Anything can be done, stats, players being able to build your own house...you name it.

[PlaineSimple]

I\'m not sure has this been considered.

I think that the whole house/castle thing could be done so that there would be some huge buildings, like castles with \"apartments\" in them. Not necessarily talking about hotel kind of thing. But the castle itself would be placed in a chosen spot for example, there would be a few design choices. (Like 5-10 different kind)
And before the building would commence the people would buy their rooms. (The cost would be related to roomcount. For example there would be ready desings for 3, 4 and 5 room complexes.) Or you could buy an apartment from the tower of the castle or so.

But the main point is that you wouldn\'t need to have that much of land space or even designing in the first place. Only that 5-10 different models from which people could choose. Probably it would could be guild related, so that different guilds could buy their own castle or so. Probably convient that way.

As for the building process there could be an own guild for that. A builders\' guild or so. The amount of workers and workhours and materials would be calculated and lets say a big castle would take around a week to build or so.

As for the furniture, that could also be done by the players in a way. They would get the materials and then sell the furnitures to the people with their new \"homes\".
The same about materials would apply to building of a castle also. The builders\' guild would get the materials and would get paid for the work.

I\'m pretty sure that I for one would be happy to just have an own space to use for storage and decoration. It wouldn\'t have to so customized as suggested here by some. Probably others could settle for \"less\" aswell.

So to clarify this a bit:
1. First people would need to decide to buy/build a castle. Probably a good number of people (An entire guild perhaps)
2. Then choose I spot for the castle. (You couldn\'t build anywhere you like, but many different options though)
3. Choosing the design.
4. Given the contract to the builders\' guild.
5. Building the castle.
6. Decorating using the guild that would make the furniture.

Not necessarily in that particular order in all of those, but the base structure would look something like that.

______
Related thing.
If someone would have to need to own his/her own house it would cost a huge amount of money. It would be done the same way as the castle though.

This could be the case for important people aswell. Leaders etc.

Ps. This system would only work if the people in builders\' and/or \"furniture\" guilds would be players who are really committed to play this game. Because if not, well, those castles would never get ready.

[Kythag]

Since the devs have said that only guilds will own houses, I think this will  be the way it will work:

The guilds that own houses will share them with members and charge rent on non-members.

or

There will be guilds that use the houses to generate \"dues\".

I personally don\'t like the second idea unless the entire guild can benefit from a guild fund.  In Conquer Online, the guild fund could be used during the guild war to heal members and keep the guild pole alive(sorry thats a long story lol).

I would like to see a due system with guild housing that provides weapons, armor, etc to new members taht have come into the world so that everyone has a guild(or rents stuff from one), but my experience tells me that some greedy moneygrubbers will use it to scam new players out of hard earned money.  While these players are few, and so far non-existant here, they ruin the experience for others.

Now, an in character scammer is fine with me.  That would make this world more realistic and scammers tend to target the weak.  If this is the case, a disclaimer should be part of something readable to new players as their only warning.  Then when they joined a guild and got ripped off, the warning was there.  This would make people who don\'t read before they play pay for that faux pas.

Looking forward to guild housing.

Kythag

[ylikone]

I have an idea... a hotel/castle (as mentioned in previous posts)... BUT with unlimited floors and a magic elevator.  From the outside, it would like maybe a 4-floor appartment building... but it would have a magic elevator that could bring you to any floor # (from 1 to 1,000,000).  Every floor would have the same basic layout and design, but this way, EVERYBODY in the game could rent a room in the hotel to store their valuables in and sleep in, have parties, etc...
Oh, and definitely each room/appartment of the hotel would have a corresponding key for only the owner (maybe duplicates for live-in partners).

[Choren]

Why do you not add the idae of impartments.  These would be samle rooms that people could sleep in.  

Guilds can start these\'s up for there meberms to live in or a marnice can rent them out to people.

This would take a lot less room for a appratment then it would take for a house.  They could also be rented out to the players at a srtant rent of 1000 tries per month.

They would be easyer to desing and players will have somewhere to store there items and to sleep or cook.

This would be around whale house are devepoted and also give you more time and a bacsi desing for a room to go into futher houses, which are to be bitel.

[Induane]

I\'ve thought alot about the implementation of this.... its a tricky one to be certain. Even supposing that we program in teh ability to make houses, or even just to select and place them, we could run out of room, players would play for a while but then never play again leaving their abandoned houses with them.... that would lead to clutter.  

Uninhabited houses:
There would need to be ways of determining if a house is still inhabited and after thinking about it for a while I\'d say that the houses should be done in such a way that they require maintence.  Simple things, but if a house goes uninhabited for a long time it should collapse in disrepair.  It could disapear or whatever, or just leave rubble till someone decides to build a house in the same location.  Plots of land with abandoned or collapsed buildings could be cheaper to obtain since some cleanup work would be necessary.  

Hiring a House watcher/maintainer:
But say someone goes on a long journey.   They should also be able to \"hire\" either npc\'s or human characters to maintain their house in their absence.  This could involve giving someone your \"password/key/lock entererthingy\" and paying them - simple enough.  

Where to build:
That all considered, new areas will be necessary as well.  The good thing is that if we are building towns in terrain, its easy.  A simple heightmap/normalmap is really all that is needed to produce a large area of terrain. Connecting heightmaps would be a must but this procedure could even be automated with a script easily enough. When a particular area reaches its housing max a new area is created ajoining it.

There are obvioulsy many things to be considered.  Some have been considered already, others not as much - still its one of the most interesting aspects of the game to consider so this thread sure is fun!