Lair room ideas

[Guaran]

Here's some ideas I've had.

1) 45 degree bend elbow. essentially half the current 90% turn elbow corridor. This I know could be useful in fitting odd shaped rooms into leftover space, as well as maybe making better use of space.

2) a room that is like an art gallery. something for displaying murals. could be a round room or maybe various sized rectangles.. with lots of door openings close together. or even a long hallway-ish thing. Could be a 1 unit tall level version, and a 2 story version with a ramp to the upper level.

3) T2 silo variant, that lays flat (only 1 level tall) instead of the current 1 wide, 1 deep, 2 tall one. I have lots of places in my lair where a t2 silo would be perfect if it was 1 wide, 2 deep, 1 tall.

4) do some murals that look like doorways or windows looking "into" scenery from around Istaria complete with plants and such and a screenshot as a background.

5) ideas for some decorative chambers: A bathing chamber with a small pool, and a sunning chamber with light appearing to come in from above.

[Tondargaet_Glit]

Love these ideas, especially the "art gallery"...I'm using a lot of 4-way intersections just to have places to put murals. Also love the decorative chamber ideas.

I'd love to also be able to have something similar to the entrances to NPC lairs for players...make our lair entrances a bit more personal, rather than just another hole in the side of a mountain

Here's some ideas I've had.

1) 45 degree bend elbow. essentially half the current 90% turn elbow corridor. This I know could be useful in fitting odd shaped rooms into leftover space, as well as maybe making better use of space.

2) a room that is like an art gallery. something for displaying murals. could be a round room or maybe various sized rectangles.. with lots of door openings close together. or even a long hallway-ish thing. Could be a 1 unit tall level version, and a 2 story version with a ramp to the upper level.

3) T2 silo variant, that lays flat (only 1 level tall) instead of the current 1 wide, 1 deep, 2 tall one. I have lots of places in my lair where a t2 silo would be perfect if it was 1 wide, 2 deep, 1 tall.

4) do some murals that look like doorways or windows looking "into" scenery from around Istaria complete with plants and such and a screenshot as a background.

5) ideas for some decorative chambers: A bathing chamber with a small pool, and a sunning chamber with light appearing to come in from above.

[Pharaxes]

2) a room that is like an art gallery. something for displaying murals. could be a round room or maybe various sized rectangles.. with lots of door openings close together. or even a long hallway-ish thing. Could be a 1 unit tall level version, and a 2 story version with a ramp to the upper level.

if they implement this I can tear down my lair because I put two long galleries for murals in there *smirks some* and as we still cannot build a lair without worrying to break the connectivity I would need to tear down looots of things. Like whole floors... still a nice idea

[awdz]

a sunning chamber with light appearing to come in from above.

I'm not sure how sunlight would get underground, but I do like the idea of overhead light with beams coming down, perhaps from an essence source or special crystal in the ceiling.

[Solitaire]

1) 45 degree bend elbow. essentially half the current 90% turn elbow corridor. This I know could be useful in fitting odd shaped rooms into leftover space, as well as maybe making better use of space.

That actually won't work very good. When you attach a lair chamber to a 45 degree corridor, it will rotate that chamber 45 degrees. Since most of the chambers are roughly squarish in shape, it would be easy for corners to protrude outside of the lair boundaries or the lines of the 5x5 "grid" (for most lairs) that the system was designed for thus you have high chances that they will collide with other chambers and the system will not allow you to place the chamber. For most placements you would lose much more space with 45 degree corridors than you would gain. Keeping all of the entrances at 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees is best for making the most out of what space you have.

There are also system issues. If I remember correctly, each chamber is designed within a 20x20x20 meter box (to which you add more boxes for larger chambers). The lair room/corridor must be contained within that volume. Normally, the attach points that the system uses to attach one chamber to another is at the 10 meter mark along one or more walls. To make a true 45 degree corridor, you need to put the locator at one of the corners and turn the opening of the actual model 45 degrees with that locator dead center of the opening. Now if you can picture it in your mind, the walls of the corridor will have to extend outside of the boundaries of the volume and that violates a system rule. The system actually does not actually know about that volume because it just looks at the model itself. But the collision detection when placing chambers would probably throw a fit.

Also, having the locator at anywhere other than the 10 meter point along a wall creates alignment issues. Instead of each new chamber shifting 20 meters up, down, left or right it would only move 10. Now chambers in that row or column would not align with the next row or column. I learned that when I designed Helian's Tomb. I had 30, 45, 60, 90 and Y shaped corridors with the Y's being basically two 45's going in opposite directions. I used a modified client and the lairshaping system to place the models to save time. I tried a few times to branch off then bring two corridors back together at another place. That was difficult to do and I gave up on it. Fortunately, I had a whole sector to work with so that is one reason why Helian's Tomb sprawls out so much. And I think it was worth it. After being used to the rigid 90 degree turns of lairs the tomb can be disorientating. It used to mess with my head even though I ran back and forth through it hundreds of times and should have had it memorized.

But anyway, that was a rather lengthy and long winded explanation of "it won't work". There are other difficulties that I didn't discuss as well. I don't really work on the game anymore but I still remember most of the ins an outs of the lair system.

[Guaran]

Hehe.

I was thinking it would be handy in the case of some of the rounded rooms. The vault comes to mind. Its rounded, has alot of space left around it, but tends to be blocked from some situations where it really should fit. Chances are its because there's some invisible larger square around it as you describe. Maybe that is what blocks it. Or do the rooms really only indicate collision when there's an actual collision?

[Sindala]

and a MAP.
I avoid making/using Lairs like the plague, just because I always get lost in them and have to recall out.

[Racktor]

The devs have said a lot of times in the past that there's no plans to add any new lair rooms, but considering the recent mural additions and crystal mural additions, I'm not so sure if they're sticking to that still.

[AmonGwareth]

Murals are easy (since its not a chamber, but a facade you apply a texture to), but as Solitaire posted Lair chambers are hard and thus rare.

[Solitaire]

I was thinking it would be handy in the case of some of the rounded rooms. The vault comes to mind. Its rounded, has alot of space left around it, but tends to be blocked from some situations where it really should fit. Chances are its because there's some invisible larger square around it as you describe. Maybe that is what blocks it. Or do the rooms really only indicate collision when there's an actual collision?

When you think about lair chambers, you really need to think of them as a solid cube with a room carved out of inside of it with doorways precisely centered on one or more walls. Those cubes need to fit within the grid defined by the lair's borders. The lair system can automatically rotate those cubes to attach to corridor such as a 45 and they can be placed and built. But they will collide with other chambers.

The one exception to that are the murals. They are built on an outside wall of the cube then the cube is not exported. Because they physically do not touch the chamber they are inside of (except at the 16 or so points of the doorway) the system lets you get away with it. I had a pair of models that never made it into the game that I attempted to attach the same was as the murals. They were memorial altars to Helian and Lunus. But they had geometry that needed to intersect with the rooms that contained them to account for all the floor and ceiling variations of the different chambers. Because the geometry collided I was never able to get them to work and eventually abandoned the concept.

If I were to design the lair system today knowing what I do now after learning how it worked a few years ago, I would have made the volumes octagonal cylinders instead of cubes. That would have allowed up to 8 doorways per chamber. It would have been a much more complex system of interlocking chambers but the lair building system in the client as it exists could handle chambers of that shape (including 45 degree corridors) with little or no modification. The drawback is that chambers would have wound up smaller and roundish in shape. To compensate the chamber volume size would probably have had to been increased in the X,Y by 5 or 10 meters. Which would have resulted in the total X,Y size of the lair plot to be increased so that might have caused issues with placing lair plots where the landscape was tight.

[Guaran]

Yeah, sounds like you can scratch the 45 degree elbow then.

Thanks for listening to the ideas. I really think we need more 'Decorative' lair rooms. And the ones I posted are just a sample.

Start with a "room template" for a 2x2x1 room and a 2x2x2 room (such as the shape of the t6 pawn chamber). Take out the vendor, and just modify it some, change colors of the crystals... add openings if its to be a mural room, make a hoard chamber (that requires say 10 million worth of actual hoard as construction components, in addition to the normal components), etc. That way you do not have to make the room from scratch and save some time and difficulty (hopefully).

Once you have a template room created, just copy-paste that, and make various modifications to create some variety of decorative chambers.

[Solitaire]

I always have been fond of the idea of a bathing and sunning chamber. I thought of both of them at one time or another.

I did a rough sketch of the bathing chamber idea I had a long while back. When you come in you see a curtain waterfall in front of you, path goes to the right rimmed with stalagmites and stalactites until about 1/3 of the way around where the water ends and the ground slopes down into the water. The ground continues to slope in 3 stages so that hatchie, adult and ancient could sit and submerge with just the head out of the water. It would be nice to make 2 versions. A 2x2 and a 2x3 in case the lair owner likes a larger room that could fit more dragons.

The sun chamber would be a brightly lit chamber, high domed with a cluster of glowing crystals focusing beams of light on a light sandy surface. Other veins of crystals would spiderweb through the walls emitting a light glow.

As for using screenshots for murals. They are actually ugly cause they look like screen shots. I've done them. They don't work. In fact, I think there was a mural that was a screen shot and it got bashed because of how obvious it was.

It might be possible to do a view that has a 3D effect. Even have a bit of animation in it. Use the picture type of mural and build up 3 or 4 layers within it like an animation cell. I have no idea if it would work, though. But it could be neat. Think a general landscape. The far back layer would be sky with clouds moving, the next would be hills, the next would have a lake with a sparkling texture that looks like the water reflecting then finally the closest layer would have some vegetation that would frame the view.

I might try tinkering with a couple of ideas. I have not done any 3D work for a couple of years or more. Maybe it could inspire me to make a few models again. Thinking about this has tweaked my interest which is something that has long been missing. But please remember this, I'm not working for the game right now. This is entirely on my own so don't yell at Virtrium if I just give up on it. Ok?

[Guaran]

Those sound like great ideas

[Aaelefein]

I'd also like to see a vault with the opposite curve it has now. I can get over the fact it has an odd shape with no other attachment points; yet it's inability to flip '180' or mirror - whatever you want to call it - means it can't fit where it should all because of the connection point. The same could be said for a few other structures - a 'mirror' of what is currently available which would allow filling in those otherwise useless spaces. I would think with the art already done for these it would or should be a simple process of telling the rendering program to 'Mirror' it - an option that is available even in 'cheap' programs like Photoshop Elements and even MS Publisher.

[Solitaire]

Guaran I want to thank you. For the first time in a couple of years I've had the desire to work in Maya. Been thinking of it and recreated the sketch I made of what a bathing chamber would look like and the attached image is what the outline of it turned out to be. Since the lair floors are already close to the bottom limits of the volume they can occupy (which you can see the outside edges in the image) I'm going to make the corridor on the left slope upwards until about the bend then it will dip down into the water. The "kiddie pool" is on the left. Adults on the right. And ancients at the top. Looks like it would be able to fit a crowd.

Again, I MUST stress that I'm doing this entirely on my own without direction from Virtrium.

And if it ever does make it in you will have to train your hatchies that there is no peeing allowed in the pool!

[Solitaire]

Oh, I just thought up another chamber that you might like. Similar to a sunning chamber with bright light shining down from crystals, this one would have a Koi pond in it and a sandy overlook where a dragon could watch and toss tidbits to the fish. Or make a quick snap into the water for a snack if such is the desire. I don't like fish so I don't know if that should be considered a tasty treat or not.

[Satturn]

I like the waterfall,sunning chamber,art gallery ideas Would really like if they made new lair rooms but like Amon and Solitaire said lair rooms are hard and i can see why.

[Guaran]

That looks great Solitaire.

Don't forget some subtle sound effects

If all this stuff happens I'm probably going to have to tear mine all down to make room.

[Zarkela]

Another idea to add to the list:
Lair murials that have the number of the level they are placed on,

[Azath]

Another idea to add to the list:
Lair murials that have the number of the level they are placed on,

*can imagine a dragon-park (as opposed to a car park)*