Cities And Housing Archive
Thread: Help looking for ideas for a CITY JAIL
Yeah, pretty standard stuff. Alot of them have been done, and we're a little limited with what we have to work with.
If you want horizontal bars use sword cores.
If you want vertical silver bars, use metal staffs. If you want something fancy, use reinforced staffs with the gold ends.
Using both might be a little much, but give it a try and see how it looks - I've never tried that.
You can use wall modules for thinner walls, which cover a good amount of area and look pretty good but require a bit extra work hiding the stepped edges and seams.
I've also tried the big grey cabinets which create thicker walls but are easier to set up. Double them up face-to-face overlapping them to cover the front handles.
Metal chairs can be used for toilets with anything round and a dark top for openings - like power resource containers. You can sink a grey chest or cabinet into the back for a water tank, but we're objectifying current tech into the future. Even saw one 'water closet' with the tank mounted on the wall and a pipe running down to the seat like the old, old style toilets.
Bunks can be made using small beds but might look a little fancy for a jail cell. You can just sink orange couches or futons into the walls to mount them and hide their backs.
Secutiry cams (armor reapair tool) sunk in the wall or mounted on arms from the wall or the ceiling covering critical areas.
Don't forget cell block panels. You can use ledgers mounted outside each cell. There are also a couple of items with lighted panels like the Droid Reconstruction C or D.
BH seeker droids (made by DE) make good surveilence or interrogation droids. They are items you can drop and they can be named anything when made.
Outside office with 'official' looking furniture like the silver faction desk, chairs, cabinets, etc. and data terminals on the wall or desk. Wish we could sink those big tech displays further into a wall so we could have a big display and control panel mounted flat againt the wall.
In some of my offices I've sunk organic resource containers (grain, berries, etc) into desks for intercom panels.
You could have a weapons rack of some type. You can just line up a few pistols and hang them on the wall. If we could tilt items instead of just spinning them around, those droid storage units would make excellent racks. But one of the book cases (elegant I think?) looks like it has a lip around the back and makes a pretty good flat rack. So turn it around, sink it into the wall, and mount weapons against the back. It's a little large though.
You can drop vendors for guards or prisoners, dress them up, and give them some appropriate text to bark.
As a DE I just have to say Droids! Droids! Droids! This is Star Wars damn it! EVERYone has a droid! Most droids have a chassis item that can be named and colored when made and you can drop like any other item. No MSE darn it, and no WED which would make the most excellent interrogation droid.
Some general decorating tips to make stuff look more natural.....
(I'm compiling a general Deco FAQ, humor me)
Alignment: Unless you have stuff mounted on walls, or a large furniture group arrangement (coffee table with chairs/couches), you can leave stuff that you would normally move around every day - like chairs and clutter - randomly turned off center a little.
Clutter: Leave a few items laying around on desks and tables like data disks (the flat type unless you have a disk box, and if you do tell me what you used to make it 
), decoders, datapads, etc. DE have 3 modules that make excellent 'data disk readers' - detontaion module, barker module, um...and another one - red, blue and grey.
Moderation: Make it look good. Make it look real. Don't over do it. Ever look at a pic or walk into a room and go WTH because the place is so jam packed full of junk? Does YOUR house or business look like that in RL?
Naming decorating item: Unless you want to draw attention to an item or explain an item (like those DE made data readers) just name common items with a dot or dash or something. When you walk into a room in RL do you start catalogingevery item in the room (chair, wall, desk, cup, chest, lamp, bed)????? Then WHY do we do it in SWG? Yeah, that's a wall. I know it's a wall. I can SEE it's a wall. Why are you TELLING me it's a wall? DERRRR!
Architectural details: One of my trademarks is to stick just a few (only 1 or 2 or 3) nonsensical or meaningless or useless items into the design where someone might see it and chuckle or say "What?" or "Cool!". But you can also use details to add flavor. Like the basic ranged weapon coupler (black, round, flat on one side) stuck backwards into a wall near the floor and labeled "Droid Interface". Or the DE redundant power supply has fins on the back of it, so I stuck a few up high on a wall and labeled them "System Cooling Vent". Or randomly placing a survey device in the wall in a hallway (gas or solar I think) and labeling it "Control Panel" or something similar. Or a few launcher tubes running across the ceiling of a room. Doesn't need to mean anything in particular, but you might be walking through a structure and see something and go "Hmmm". You never saw THAT in any of the thousands of other structures that all looked EXACTLY alike.
Message Edited by progman63 on 08-22-2005 02:22 AM
Wow! Thanks for all the great ideas. If anyone thinks of anything else, please do not hesitate to comment.
). I also had a torture room in there as well. The heavy duty clasps I think it is..make good straps for the walls to chain up the prisoner. And everything else other people said can be used in varying ways. Bit of a pet subject this...I've done all manner of jails, Imp and Reb, big and small, from pa halls packed with vendors behind bars (smugglers and 'jedi' vendors look great in an imp themed building behind bars...) to small generic single 'holding cells' for BH stations...
Most of the ideas above are bang on - I found that the simplest are often the best with the simple plain (rusty) looking bookcases/wardrobes doubled and facing each other make for excellent walls - and contrary to the 'just name it . or - ' school of thought I love the renamed furnishings - Simply have an archi knock up 8 or 16 of them, and build 2 'walls' at right angles to an existing wall in the building (best you use the second room, making the first the guard room, like an old western jailhouse...),As my last undertaking was a 'BH station' I decoed the area at ceiling height between the two'walls' with the half sized plain(rusty) looking cupboards...and commissioned an archi to name them all 'Cortosis Lined cell' - again, adding that air of mystery (for those that don't know, cortosis is a material mentioned in the EU star wars novels that l'sabres couldn't cut through...). 20 or 30 of the reinforced combat staffs renamed 'cell bar' stacked two high, and about '50' apart in a row and your cell's built...a spartan small bed renamed 'bunk' or 'pallet' and your good to go cell wise. One of the tricks when renaming crafted items is to keep the tone and theme of the names the same...think where the logical place would be for a 'keypad' and craft up a Gas or flora survey tool called 'Security Code Lock' and sink it at chest height into a forward facing of the 'wall'...it's ok to leave the cell like that...keep it barren, and remember the deco-artists motto - K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid!)
Now...the devil's in the details...I gotta back the above posters point about droids...this is Star Wars!...Get a DE to craft up a couple of Arakyd Probe droids and call them something menacing - 'Fugitive Retreival Unit Alpha' and 'Beta' or some such - and position one to the left and right of the front of the cell...these droids/deeds add some much needed movement and a cool sound to the place...or why not substitute a Kusak 'Guard Dog'?...bury a couple of red or blue streetlamps in the walls (and call them 'Rayshield projector') and half the time the place will have an added air of something a bit different...
Drop a rug or two in the guard room...add a few data terminals, and a couple of ballot box 'Security Terminals' or 'Metal Detectors' on either side of the entrance doorway...some austere faction furniture... (an imp desk is a MUST have) and then adorn the walls with wanted posters! And then think about the minutiae - again to reinforce the previous poster's points, one or two well thought out items from a bazaar - a datadisk, radio or comlink, and preferably a desk lamp at the jailor's desk are must haves, and a few data terminals (without screens!) make excellent bases to mount a hologram on - ships or people preferably...
Lastly, if a merchant yourself (or you have some vending buddies who are inscrutable smuggler types, or vend jedi loot) why not populate your cell! Put a vendor inside - and call them 'Force weilder', stick em in a beige deco vest/pants combo or a hood up cloak selling holos or crystals, or maybe 'Correlian Smuggler' in a black waistcoat and pants who beckons you over to buy some slicing parts...Again their movement and bark will add some much needed character...failing that some wookiee world loots that most folks treat as junk are great too...the adventurer's remains clothing which can be dropped in a pile with a kerritimba skull looks great in the middle of a cell, specially with a few acklay bones if you feel like laying on that 'no escape' vibe...
Deco is about consistancy, and having fun...a balance between the eyecatching and novel, while avoiding the garish and cluttered...Be it a jail, beauty salon or imperial HQ be patient...befriend and archi (and send a lot of business their way - they're often glad of a novel order for a renamed item or two!)...and just a smidge of imagination will be met with admiring comments and a richer game environment for you, your guild and the server you play on...
Have fun!
Milas
progman63 wrote:
Yeah, pretty standard stuff. Alot of them have been done, and we're a little limited with what we have to work with.
If you want horizontal bars use sword cores.
If you want vertical silver bars, use metal staffs. If you want something fancy, use reinforced staffs with the gold ends.
Using both might be a little much, but give it a try and see how it looks - I've never tried that.
You can use wall modules for thinner walls, which cover a good amount of area and look pretty good but require a bit extra work hiding the stepped edges and seams.
I've also tried the big grey cabinets which create thicker walls but are easier to set up. Double them up face-to-face overlapping them to cover the front handles.
Metal chairs can be used for toilets with anything round and a dark top for openings - like power resource containers. You can sink a grey chest or cabinet into the back for a water tank, but we're objectifying current tech into the future. Even saw one 'water closet' with the tank mounted on the wall and a pipe running down to the seat like the old, old style toilets.
Bunks can be made using small beds but might look a little fancy for a jail cell. You can just sink orange couches or futons into the walls to mount them and hide their backs.
Secutiry cams (armor reapair tool) sunk in the wall or mounted on arms from the wall or the ceiling covering critical areas.
Don't forget cell block panels. You can use ledgers mounted outside each cell. There are also a couple of items with lighted panels like the Droid Reconstruction C or D.
BH seeker droids (made by DE) make good surveilence or interrogation droids. They are items you can drop and they can be named anything when made.
Outside office with 'official' looking furniture like the silver faction desk, chairs, cabinets, etc. and data terminals on the wall or desk. Wish we could sink those big tech displays further into a wall so we could have a big display and control panel mounted flat againt the wall.
In some of my offices I've sunk organic resource containers (grain, berries, etc) into desks for intercom panels.
You could have a weapons rack of some type. You can just line up a few pistols and hang them on the wall. If we could tilt items instead of just spinning them around, those droid storage units would make excellent racks. But one of the book cases (elegant I think?) looks like it has a lip around the back and makes a pretty good flat rack. So turn it around, sink it into the wall, and mount weapons against the back. It's a little large though.
You can drop vendors for guards or prisoners, dress them up, and give them some appropriate text to bark.
As a DE I just have to say Droids! Droids! Droids! This is Star Wars damn it! EVERYone has a droid! Most droids have a chassis item that can be named and colored when made and you can drop like any other item. No MSE darn it, and no WED which would make the most excellent interrogation droid.
Some general decorating tips to make stuff look more natural.....
(I'm compiling a general Deco FAQ, humor me)Alignment: Unless you have stuff mounted on walls, or a large furniture group arrangement (coffee table with chairs/couches), you can leave stuff that you would normally move around every day - like chairs and clutter - randomly turned off center a little.
Clutter: Leave a few items laying around on desks and tables like data disks (the flat type unless you have a disk box, and if you do tell me what you used to make it
Moderation: Make it look good. Make it look real. Don't over do it. Ever look at a pic or walk into a room and go WTH because the place is so jam packed full of junk? Does YOUR house or business look like that in RL?
Naming decorating item: Unless you want to draw attention to an item or explain an item (like those DE made data readers) just name common items with a dot or dash or something. When you walk into a room in RL do you start catalogingevery item in the room (chair, wall, desk, cup, chest, lamp, bed)????? Then WHY do we do it in SWG? Yeah, that's a wall. I know it's a wall. I can SEE it's a wall. Why are you TELLING me it's a wall? DERRRR!
Architectural details: One of my trademarks is to stick just a few (only 1 or 2 or 3) nonsensical or meaningless or useless items into the design where someone might see it and chuckle or say "What?" or "Cool!". But you can also use details to add flavor. Like the basic ranged weapon coupler (black, round, flat on one side) stuck backwards into a wall near the floor and labeled "Droid Interface". Or the DE redundant power supply has fins on the back of it, so I stuck a few up high on a wall and labeled them "System Cooling Vent". Or randomly placing a survey device in the wall in a hallway (gas or solar I think) and labeling it "Control Panel" or something similar. Or a few launcher tubes running across the ceiling of a room. Doesn't need to mean anything in particular, but you might be walking through a structure and see something and go "Hmmm". You never saw THAT in any of the thousands of other structures that all looked EXACTLY alike.
Message Edited by progman63 on 08-22-2005 02:22 AM
after reading that post......hurry up and make that FAQ!!
silentjunior wrote:
how you going to keep ppl in??
ever heard of RP???
this house is set up simply for that reason.....