off line - plot design tool

Too bad no one has designed an off-line out of game design tool so you could work on designing your plot out of game. Then once you had it all designed, you just go in game and build it according to what you planned. This way all the design planning could be done without you having to be standing at your plot in-game.

The design tool would work by you putting in the size of plot deminsions, SML, R,C,I type and then it would know from those specs pretty close what you could or could not build. This would really help those of us that have never designed a plot before. Something similar to this was done for UO when housing was first put in so that people could play with designs out of game to get an idea on how/where they wanted to build what on their plots.

Hope this all made sense.

unfortunatly I am a network admin and not a programmer so not a chance in %$# of me being able to make this tool myself.

Now this is an excellent idea:) UO offered something similar to play with when they put in the new customizable housing so you could get a feel for using it.:) I would imagine that AE could do something similar and help cut down on some of the frustrations that seem to come with designing a plot area.:)

Aeryal

Great idea, Gymlie. Think of all the time and energy that would be saved with all the disconnects and having to start the planning all over again.

That type of tool is something many of us desire and would save hours of frustration. At present if we make a mistake in placement of structure or just choose the wrong structure we must delete it and start all over again.

All those manhours of real-time effort wasted when resources are deleted. It would be most helpful if the plot marker could be a storage hold for resources dedicated to that plot. Resource can check in but never check out. We could apply it to any structure on the plot. When a structure is deleted then the resource goes back into the plot marker for use in a new structure.

Perhaps the resources could be converted to higher level resource somehow as well.

Anyway that is my two cents worth of comment.

Sounds nice and helpful. Vote me in.

:o Too bad your post is way out here... try putting the idea in the chatter, suggestions area. Alot of ideas get put there.

Already got one, I can share with you I made it myself.
You do the following:
1) Open Microsoft Excel
2) press grey tab in top left corner of sheet left of "A" and above "1"
3) then right click on any highlighted column at the top on the "letters" and then click format column width set it to 1.5
4) now do the same with row width and set it to 12

This should give you a spreadsheet that has almostperfect square, squares as it were.
If youcount one square as 1mx1m, you can easily highlight and area 51x51 for your plot, then use the "square" border option to box in the area and hey presto you have your plot of land
As mostmajor game structure size can either be found on this forum or the community site main page, you can plan out your plot.

Just to help all you lazy people out there here is a link to a blank template of the above mentioned way:

http://www.shiningspear.nu/igoo/oor/...ngtemplate.zip

First page is a blank template for building on 105x105 in size.
Other pages are split in type of Building ie RCI or other stuff. Just copy and paste over. Plz note have not done several things such as walls, roads etc as you can place them yourself. Also there are 2 versions of certain building (H) and (V), basically where a building isn't square ie 25x25, it can be placed either Horzionally or Vertically.
The final page is a demo of what you can place on a 100x100 plot. Key for it is as follows:
yelloware stone walkways
orange of harvest fall pumpkins (I think they just rock[:P])
and red is red stone tiles.

After trying the old fashioned graph paper technique (you know, cutting out the size of each building and laying them out on paper), I saw this post. Thanks for the planning tool Kaze! [:)]

Thought I would give this a go (cause theres no point inventing the wheel if its already been done) but it asks for a password [:(]

Bleri -- how frustrating. I downloaded it the other day, and it was fine, but now it asks for a password. Maybe send a PM to Kaze and try to get it directly.

You can type /setpref endgameonlinkdeath false
and you can stay in game to plan your plot even if you disconnect from the Internet. Of course your plan won't be saved when you log back online, but you can take a screenshot of the planning window and the plot's landscape, and you'll have a reference like with the Excel method.

[sort of off topic]

Neat. Good thing for me I do not use m$ Excel -- I use Lotus 123, and it imported perfectly.
At first I used M$ Works, but it allowed one sheet at a time. I have M$ Office on my PC,
but it's a Teacher/Student 2003 60 day trial. Never activated, never need to. I loves IBM/Lotus SmartSuite

Does anyone have a copy of the excel spreadsheet they can host ? I get the following message from the link :

This domain name, "shiningspear.nu", may still be available for registration!

I'd be very grateful if someone who has the file can host it, or if you would like me to host it then get in touch and I'll put it on my site and give the link here [:)]

A big thankyou to C'gan for sending me the file, if anyone else needs it you can obtain it from http://www.blue-technologies.org/blu...d2template.zip[:)]

Just a note, it does not have walls, which seem to be 1.5 meter thick (the excel blocks are 1 m, so it doesn't exactly work out the same, unless you set up 2m thick and allow for the gap). Also, the new libraries are not in there yet.

Exact footprints are not there either since Excel does not handle multi-width sets in single blocks. So, the tier 3+ guildhalls, the old human medium house, and silos are square or rectangular sets that do allow for more items to be put on the plot than what the template shows.