Alright, here you go Vreg:
First and foremost, personal housing:
As Da Leeb has stated above, SLO will eventually fill up with a large amount of players, and the need for personal housing will grow with that. To combat this, personal houses will need to be in their own, unique instance. In doing so, each different house can be different dependent on the instance used. This will allow you to use something like tiers I suppose? For instance, if player A is more poor than player B and they can only afford say, an apartment of say tier 1 (We will address tiers in a second), then their personal housing instance/phase is that of an apartment.
Let's switch over to player B now. Player B purchases a full on house for a much larger amount, maybe because he has a family... Or is a pimping ass G with money to spare. Either way, he now has a house of say, tier 2 just for variety in tiers. Obviously, his house is larger than player A's apartment, and he has more freedom and space to edit said home. Cool.
Now that we've established their residents, it is time to talk about tiers. This one is simple yea, you have variations of a house/home someone can buy, obviously. These are whatever Vreg deems fit to have in the game, but the obvious ones will be apartments, houses, org. buildings, etc. Well, for these individual homes, they each have tiers. Tiers 1- whatever, the higher number being a better, larger, sexier version. For now, there are only 3 tiers, tier 3 being pretty large and open and sexy. Give the players access to edit how their homes look, and you can even lock tier 2 and 3 for premium members if you allow regular members to purchase homes.
Onto what the instances are. You can first break the instances down into how many variations of homes will be created, later breaking them down so that everyone has their -own- instance... In a sense. What this means is simple enough. For example, you have two players who have purchased an apartment in the same building. As soon as they get to the door leading to the stairs and choose to go to their room, they are moved to their "own" instance. They are somewhat in their own "realm" and can only be seen by other players who are on that very same "realm". This means that if you allow it, other players would be allowed into your home, transferring them into that phase/instance allowing you to see each other. This idea comes directly from World of Warcraft, and it's a great one for housing.
For everything else, housing wise:
By everything else, I mean just that. Clans, Rogue Orgs, Regular Orgs, etc. The same principles work for these other housing environments, and their large buildings. I think that there can be designated sections in villages, or right outside villages or whatever for clans where, when in a clan, walking beyond that point transfers you to a different phase and into your clans purchased land.
Regular/Rogue Orgs: I'm not sure where regular orgs would buy their base of operations, but the same principle applies for it all. As far as rogue orgs, I am thinking just have purchasable areas, like caves, spread across the SLO Word and add an instance trigger line. When you cross the line, you disappear to everyone outside the line as you're transferred into the instance for your base of operations.
I think that this will be the best system for housing, as well as add to the possibilities for editing. Yea. If there's anything unclear about my post I will gladly clarify.
Thanks for the clarification
@Xendrus... , while most of what you said I already had in mind, I didn't think of categorizing houses in tiers which might be an interesting thing to do.
For everyone else wondering about the issue of running out of unique houses for players, that is an issue which cannot be resolved directly in the type of world SLO will take place in. There has not been a single game in history that has managed to have an existing city that could provide unique houses for each of its players. The reason being that game worlds are simply a lot smaller than the real world, a game city does not even come close to a real city in size. If we didn't work with a pre-defined village system and allowed players to completely populate and build the SLO's world on their own, then unique houses for individual players would become a possibility.
Indirectly, you can deal with this issue by letting players own instances of houses, that way a village with say 300+ buildings can provide housing for millions of players. As Xendrus... described (and as I've told him in a private conversation), your house only becomes unique the moment you enter it. So one visible house from the outside can literally be owned by thousands of players, where each player has its own unique copy of it.
Additionally, we can limit owning real estate to a specific world where buying a house only makes you own it in the world you bought it in. The very wealthy can of course purchase of a copy of their house in every world if that's what they want. That way, if a village has 300 buildings, and there are 300 worlds, you can literally have unique buildings for 90 000 players in one village. The more unique buildings possible in this way, the lower a village's average building cluster would be. The building cluster would be the amount of players that own a specific building in a specific world. We want to keep the building cluster as low as possible for a more realistic experience.
Earlier I mentioned an interesting point, why not start with an empty world and let the players build it into villages and what not. I will summarize the pros and contras that I see in this approach and I'd like to get your opinions about it too.
Pros:
- - Highly diverse and unique world, where every player can own a unique house they built or bought.
- - Organizations can literally build a stronghold.
- - Players can build hidden village type villages.
- - Conquering a village instantly becomes much more interesting, where you can take it over or completely destroy it.
- - And just so many more possibilities I'm not bothered to mention.
Contras:
- - No standard village system, most of what's already planned won't work with this.
- - The world starts out empty and boring without any organization.
- - Villages and what not will not nearly look as beautiful as they would if they were designed by professional artists.
- - A complex system is required to manage all of this.
- - I'll mention this again because it's important, you won't start out as a village shinobi, and won't be able to do everything that comes with this.
- - I don't really know what you would start out as.
Now feel free to discuss.
Follow @SLO_MMORPG