Architect Archive

I've decided to post a few remarks concerning what I feel would help our profession out a great deal and give us an edge for selling houses.

The most difficult part of being a "complete" architect (designing a house and designing customized furniture sets for it) has to be the furniture placement. For a large house, placing an average of 40 or more items can take up so much time that frustration sets in.

The easiest way to fix this is to provide an overlay window like the one that is given when placing large structures. Implement a radial menu option that allows for xx degree facing (e.g. 20 degrees) when you right-click the mouse. Now when you select the degrees and double-click the furniture item you can easily turn and place it down in a neat and orderly fashion. You wouldn't have to use the cumbersome commands that do not work as well and as often as they should. Placing one furniture piece every 5 minutes is not my idea of a fun job, especially when it doesn't fit exactly the way it should. The worst ones have to be the crafting stations which rotate and shift on the end axis rather than from the center point axis.

Please implement an overlay drop menu like the ones for houses and structures, and give us a chance to put down furniture nice and neat in a shorter amount of time. If this were implemented or the other system fixed, it would allow architects like me to build the estates that I wanted to sell when creating this class. It would also give furniture a boost in the right direction.

Thanks.

In some other games (Natural Selection is the only one that comes to mind), the engines make it difficult for placing things on different levels. Most houses have a basement and 2nd floor. The Sims forced you to change the level you were on before you were able to place items on that floor. Not sure if that's possible with a FPS engine like SWG?

The best way to place furniture is through the /commands. Perhaps if the Devs made a tool for placing furniture that had sliders on it, to rotate or move forward/backwards, instead of using the radial menu.

Mitsudo - Ahazi


Takenoko - SWGCraft.com

The least that could be done is adding half step options to the move command, or lowering the distance that a move moves the item. Right now, when I try to move a couch next to the wall from 1-2 ft away, I usually end up with half of it in the wall. The other thing that would help me (minor, maybe others don't have this problem) is changing rotate left and right to rotate clockwise and counter-clockwise. I can never remember which direction is which, even though I've figured it out many times.

for those thatdont know, those: /commands, are:

/move (forward/backward) # ie. /move forward 10, /move backward 2

/rotate (left/right) # ie. /rotate right 90, /rotate left 180

this helps a great deal with placing furniture.

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Ozill wrote:

for those thatdont know, those: /commands, are:

/move (forward/backward) # ie. /move forward 10, /move backward 2

/rotate (left/right) # ie. /rotate right 90, /rotate left 180

this helps a great deal with placing furniture.

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Well thank you! I don't think many of us did know that. Now you can disregard my previous post! (Assuming this works well) I can even make macros to attach to my toolbar too.

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Aultra wrote:

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Ozill wrote:

for those thatdont know, those: /commands, are:

/move (forward/backward) # ie. /move forward 10, /move backward 2

/rotate (left/right) # ie. /rotate right 90, /rotate left 180

this helps a great deal with placing furniture.

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Well thank you! I don't think many of us did know that. Now you can disregard my previous post! (Assuming this works well) I can even make macros to attach to my toolbar too.

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There are a few who may or may not know those commands but they don't work well. My post was intended to flesh out a better way to place furniture not use the existing commands. Like I said previously, when you use the rotate command on some items the shift in axis is not from center but from the item's end length. This causes a lot of problems with /rotate.

Also when you use /move forward # and you previously rotated an item, the item shifts back to the normal first drop position and then moves forward. This causes you to have to rotate the item again. Rotate only works when you are finally done moving the item. Even then, the commands are cumbersome and even for an experienced architect like myself, it could take 5 to 6 minutes to place a furniture in exactly the right place. Now do that for 40 items and you just took 200 minutes minimum or 3 hours and 20 minutes just to place furniture. I do not have enough time to spend to waste it on that type of placement procedure. Placement for each furniture should take no longer than 30 seconds or less once you decide where you want it to go. Drop - place = done.

This is not the current case and the bulky commands that the devs implemented (mainly for testing scenarios in beta) need to be exchanged for lasting ones that work.

One thing that confuses me about using the /move command and the /rotate commands... is the "forward" and "back" relative to the current facing of the item or to your facing?

Thanks.

Forward/backward are relative to the direction your AVATAR is facing.

You can use /move forward and /move backward to move things left & right by turning yourself left or right.

They should probably rename them to "/move toward_me" and "/move away_from_me" because that's exactly what they do.