Housing upgrades

[+Colibri]

In a few days we are getting a completely new house placement & positioning system. It makes it simple for you to place, move or resize a house, while showing you which tiles on the ground are invalid and what is the cause of obstruction. In a few weeks we are starting public house drops (IDOC hunts) and soon after that a new housing facet will be open with all fresh land to put houses on. Here's a list of all upgrades and changes:

• The new design of the house placement menu, with the results shown on the ground:

house placement.png (447.26 KiB) Viewed 13167 times

• Improvements in placement rules: most of the validation code is rewritten. Basic rules remain (the ground must be level, nothing can point out from the foundation, adjacent tiles must be able to walk on, etc...). Certain common rocks are now ignored, and small patches of dirt are no longer considered to be roads and also ignored.
• Moving house fee remains similar: 10k for every tile that's moved, up to 200k tokens. So moving to a distant location remains 200k tokens. They also remember previous locations of the last 24 hours, so if you change your mind and move the house to where it was, it will be free, or as many tokens as it's away from a previous location.
• House slot deeds increase from 400ED to 500ED, after the update for a while they will be available for 375ED, or 3-pack for 1000ED (for about a month after this goes live, probably until the end of August).
• Resizing fee will be 10k tokens for every tile of difference in size, either in width or depth of the house.
• Mergers remain 50ED, and if you unmerge a house the merger will be credited to your account so you can use it on some house later.
• House storage can be increased with Bonus storage deeds (100ED for 500 items).
• Castle slot requirement: although we are getting a new housing land, we want to take measures against it becoming just a lot of investments into land. Since castles are 31x31 tiles (961 tiles), which roughly equals three 18x18s (324 tiles), or almost four 18x18s joined, castles will take 2 house slots. All existing castles placed until this system goes into effect will be grandfathered for the current owner, and in case of a transfer to a different owner, the seller will need 2 available slots.
• Houses will display their decay status, so that you know where to look at the IDOC event.
• (still in the works, can't promise if it will go in: friends and co-owners ability to secure or release items, up to their level).

Also an idea for some other time, for the next upgrade: Buying or renting land that's just for housing, either as rectangular areas in green acres or parts of Malas (there are already two housing instances that were sold at grand auctions). When this goes in, housing in regular public land will be limited to 10 houses per player.

If all goes well, this should go live on Wednesday. The first IDOC event will probably be on August 3rd.

Update July 24th - The house positioning system is now Active!
The coding gods are on our side, there were no complications that would delay this too much and so the new house system is now fully operational. To place a new house just doubleclick a house placement tool, or if you want to move or resize your existing house, doubleclick the sign and click on the "Ownership" tab.

A fresh new facet for testing has also just opened up. To enter this facet, go through the Violet gate at the Town Center (next to the entrance to the auciton hall). Read the book carefully - this facet is just temporary and intended for testing house placement. If you place a house there and actually move in, it will be deleted and you will lost the items in the house, long with the value of the house.

A few things that are yet to be added:
• Bonus storage deeds
• A help section on the new placement interface

Here's a few things that would be nice to improve, but I can't say how many of them i'll be able to finish. There's other projects around the corner...
• Co-owners & friends ability to secure or release items in the house, up to their level.
• If an impassable item is next to the foundation, it can be ignored if it's a stand-alone thing that can easily be walked around
• Right now, while in this positioning mode, the houses are hidden from view but you still bump into them, so it would be nice if it were possible to run through your houses as if they aren't there (handy for when you have more than 2 houses in a cluster)
• When you close the interface, so that it bumps you up to the base floor in the house, and not leave you stuck inside the floor.

Also, suggestions are welcome


Update August 20th - Out of beta!
We've ironed out a lot of various glitches, and although there's still a few minor issues that need to be fixed, it's safe to say that this feature of the shard has now reached maturity - and is out of beta. Therefor the legacy house placement menu is no longer available.

[Animol]

• House storage can be increased with Bonus storage deeds (100ED for 500 items).

YEAH!!!

[Muolke]

Very cool! Thanks for putting in the time to do this.

[culichi]

• Mergers remain 50ED, and if you unmerge a house the merger will be credited to your account so you can use it on some house later.
• House storage can be increased with Bonus storage deeds (100ED for 500 items).


Also an idea for some other time, for the next upgrade: Buying or renting land that's just for housing, either as rectangular areas in green acres or parts of Malas (there are already two housing instances that were sold at grand auctions). When this goes in, housing in regular public land will be limited to 10 houses per player.

If all goes well, this should go live on Wednesday. The first IDOC event will probably be on August 3rd.

1. will house sinks also be credited to our account if we decide to drop an existing house?

2. will house storage deeds be credited to our account if we drop a house or decide wed like to use the storage on a different house?

3. when will the 10 house limit for regular public lands go live? it sounds to me like you are saying that will happen when and if you implement the option to buy or rent housing real estate on green acres.

4. when/if the 10 house limit to public lands does happen will current 11-40 house people be grandfathered in or will they have to move some houses to green acres?

i love the new castle rule !

[Alamiester]

im glad to see a limit on houses per person.
lol, 11-40. nuff said.

[zoras]

I am excited about these changes, really excited about IDOC!!!!!

I do have questions about the "IDOC events" does this mean houses are only going to fall on certain days/time? Could you explain a little on these "idoc events"

I like the idea of being able to ad more storage to houses

[Sintent]

Will Automatically Refreshed homes be set to fall, for this event? Or just ones that have been inactive..? Or excess of housing?

[+Colibri]

Bump for today's update - the system is now active. More info written in the first post.

- EDIT (clarification): house sinks will be lost (and not refunded) to your account if you demolish a house. But since it's now possible to resize them, you can keep them. Only thing that's missing here is that if you move a 2-floor-sinkable to parts of malas that allow jsut 1 floor or just foundation, it won't work, that's something that could still be improved.

- Un-merging existing houses: yes, if you demolish a house that's currently merged, or move it away so that it's no longer merged, a merging credit will be added to your account, even if all of the houses are built before this upgrade.

- Will bonus storage get saved to your account if you demolish the house? Probably yes.

- The 10-house-limit is planned for when we have working house instances that can be bought or rented with a few clicks. Until then, "public land" will have no restriction about the number of housing. I don't want to give any promises when this will be available, since there's a lot of other things to tend to it will definitely not be this year, maybe next summer, i hope?

- The 10-house-limit and existing houses - now, this won't go into effect yet. Though, once it does, there will be no deleting of old houses that would break this rule, basically they will all be grandfathered. But after that ugprade, if a player who already has 10 houses in public space, won't be able to place new ones (unless if they demolish something first, or rent/buy a housing instance and place the house there).

- The IDOC event is not yet finalized, but will look something like this: at the time of the event, probably going on for 1 or 2 hours, all houses that are "in danger of collapsing" will be falling probably one per minute. I don't plan for there to be a gate from let's say the town center or britain bank, there will however be an announcement for every house, about where it fell. It's a good idea to go out and scout the houses, so you can prepare for the best scavange spots.

- Which houses will fall? Those houses, owned by players, who haven't logged in for at least 3 months (or more than that, if they have a lot of gametime on their account). More info about times here: http://www.uoex.net/codex/accounting
Btw, there are also accounts which are already past due, but since they have entered their email into their account, their house remains safe until they get an email notification, plus an additional week after that. There's a backlog in sending out these notification emails, so some of these houses will fall in the future house drop events.

[Wil]

First let me say the new placement system is awesome. Great job!

You mentioned it would be possible to upgrade house storage? How does that work?

Thanks,
Wil

[Wil]

Whoops, found a bug. I resized a house with foundation sink. It unsunk. So I opened up the customize menu and clicked unsink. Now it's floating in the air.

[Highroller]

Hey not what was just done but the green acres thing. And 10 houses per account. IS that a limit of 10 and you have to buy the ones past 2 with ED or what? Ie you dont just mean everyone can buy 10 houses for standard house rates do you?

[Animol]

Hey not what was just done but the green acres thing. And 10 houses per account. IS that a limit of 10 and you have to buy the ones past 2 with ED or what? Ie you dont just mean everyone can buy 10 houses for standard house rates do you?

2 base + 8 additional (for EDs) = 10 total.

[fixxer1963]

To resize a house... do you have to empty it first? Or can you just resize it and get more floor space?

[Animol]

To resize a house... do you have to empty it first? Or can you just resize it and get more floor space?

As far as I can tell after playing around in the test facet for a bit, you can resize the plot with a house built on it and it will stay there (the structure). However, one guy yesterday said in chat he lost everything (items) from his house after resizing.

[Wil]

To resize a house... do you have to empty it first? Or can you just resize it and get more floor space?

As far as I can tell after playing around in the test facet for a bit, you can resize the plot with a house built on it and it will stay there (the structure). However, one guy yesterday said in chat he lost everything (items) from his house after resizing.

The items are relocated to the moving crate. You have to place the crate with the house menu; then you can get the items back.