I wonder how hard it would be for SE to create a grouping, layout, and blueprint system. A system where you can group things together, which will then be saved on your system as an easily readable file (I mean like you can open it on your PC even). Another system will allow you to save your house layout.
Together you could do something like make a custom made fireplace and group it under the name fire place. When you select it the game would move it as one unit as if it was a single object, rotations and all that acting as if it was all glued together. You could then also use these groupings to place more like it, if you had the items to do so- otherwise it'd just tell you or show them outlined in red (to be like "this is incomplete but can be placed as such").
Trying not to be too confusing you'd have:
Layout(s)- entire house state, that you can save, one of these layouts would always be current layout that the server sends us when we load the house (basically the engine's own auto save). The other manual ones could be loaded if you wish, and you could "find missing" that layout to see what you're missing.
Blueprint(s) / Grouping(s) - The ability to save a set of items into a file that could be shared, like a table with a grouping of items, or custom made objects (that are made of multiple objects). Ideally SE can store the groupings into a local file (or even on the server), so you can maintain groupings across multiple people. If SE can't store the groupings on their side (which is fine) it just means that only one person could easily store groupings, as SE would send you the current layout (as they do already) and then the game would compare it to your slots and once it finds a slot that is just like "current" it would then load the groupings from that saved local slot. Meaning you could login and out and store groupings of objects locally without SE having to do that for you .... but... if someone messes with the layout then your groupings would die without some sort of fairly smart checker or SE storing them.
Anyway, I think it would be interesting to see people share their creations, rooms, or even whole houses. It also might allow for some other features too if you were able to somehow upload your entire house setup, like if you wanted to replace all your lamps with a different lamp- a program or website could fairly easily go in and replace the instructions in the layout.
Keeping it simple would allow it to be more easily created (simple as in it just creates straightforward text documents the system can read and compare to). Copying whole houses seems less likely lol but I imagine rooms or smaller objects could be not too uncommon, and I think people would appreciate being able to save layouts and custom objects.



Reply With Quote




