Rebuilding Somborn

[Mary the Prophetess]

<p>I recently decided to rebuild a village where Somborn is located for my FreeBlood.</p><p>The first thing I did was wall off an area of solid ground using rough/crude stone benches.  There are five major buildings within the site and a cave complex as well. </p><p>I decided to save some money, so the walls are all Plain Elm Room Dividers, the floors are all Cobblestone Squares, and I believe I will make the roofs out of Hay Squares.</p><p>For the "Cathedral" space I will use Banded Sandlewood Room Dividers for the walls, and Cobblestone Squares for the floor.  I haven't decided on the roof, but think perhaps Plain Maplewood Room Dividers. (other suggestions are welcome)</p><p>I have encountered two problems:</p><p>The first, and least serious, is the uneven nature of the ground.  Raising all the walls to the same height, and then filling in the 'floating' effect with rough and crude stone benches (as if they were natural rock outcrops) seems to work ok, though any suggestions are most welcome.</p><p>The second problem is more serious, and I am at my wit's end trying to solve it.  While all of the buildings will take a cobblestone floor, (overlaying the holes in their floors), only some of them will hold that overlay after zoning out and then in again.  Most of the cobblestone floors simply disappear when zoning in and out.</p><p>I have tried putting an 'underlayer' of tiles down first, and placing the cobblestones on that, and have also tried raising the cobblestones up over the hole as well.  Nothing seems to be effective.</p><p>I need advice or a decorator that has some skill with this type of thing.  Can anyone help?</p>

[Farahn]

<p>bump</p><p>I too am eager to hear of possible solutions to working on the uneven grounds of breakouts.</p>

[LaeliaJS]

<p>I find that one of the best ways to build on uneven terrain in breakout homes is to use several of the large ash dining table sized to max, with the legs sunk into the ground until the table is flush with the terrain in all places.  If you leave some of the legs showing it looks like a nice stilted beach house, and if you don't, it doesn't look unnatural from either the outside or the inside.  Other tables work but that one's slightly rounded at the edges so it doesn't get the scrambly effect when several are placed next together.  The Gnome simple table also works well for this, though it's slightly smaller.</p><p>I'll post some screenshots in a bit once I get a chance to head over to the manor I've been building in.</p>

[Erithe]

<p>One of the things I"ve done in the past is to use a square or a rug on the flattest or tallest portion of whatever uneven terrain I'm build on, then I put rough stone benches or tables, or some other solid stone or wooden object, around hte base to hide the unevenness.</p>

[Jazabelle]

<p>The best way to work around the uneven ground of a breakout house is to create a foundation. This is what homes are built on in real life, after all.</p><p>As I suggested to Mary, for a stone foundation, one can use the crude stone blocks. If you flip them upside down and make them as large as they go, you can then lower or raise them as much as you need to, without having them look uneven. And the large size means you need fewer of them than you would of most other item.</p><p>Another solution is to place two dividers in the same location. One, leave rightside up as a wall. The other, flip upside down. That will cause it to sink into the ground, giving you a solid wooden foundation that precisely mimics the house walls above.</p><p>For covering the holes in Somborn, pitching a divider 90.06 degrees and leaving the base of the divider on "solid" ground while letting the rest of the divider hover over the hole seems to work, at least for a quick zone in and out. We did not test zoning out for 10 minutes to let the zone reset, then zoning in to force it to repopulate.</p>

[LaeliaJS]

<p>Here's the little swamp/beach hut I made a while ago:</p><p><img src="http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k35/laeliajs/beachhut.jpg" /></p><p>Here's what the underside looks like:</p><p><img src="http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k35/laeliajs/beach2.jpg" /></p><p>And here's what it looks like inside:</p><p><img src="http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k35/laeliajs/beach3.jpg" /></p><p>The large ash dining tables won't sink all the way into the ground with the layout editor (you'll get about 2 feet worth of a gap), but crude stone blocks (as suggested above) or the handcrafted stone planters would both work well to fill in the gap.  They look fine being on stilts too.</p><p>Here's a gnome simple table, sunken all the way into the ground (you'd probably need 4-6 of these for a real house):</p><p><img src="http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k35/laeliajs/gnometable.jpg" /></p><p>If you're more concerned with recreating a new somborn than having it at the actual village location, I suggest building it at the top of the ramp.  Either way, try to find the flattest bit of land possible to make your foundation on.</p>

[Mary the Prophetess]

<p>Thanks to Jazabelle's advice, the village is slowly reforming.  She took the time to come visit personally and offer some very useful suggestions, and to check back on my progress. </p><p>I still have issues with things seemingly popping in and out of the moving crate and some issues about objects rendering, but I am making progress.</p><p>These are the nuts and bolts topics that I believe are very helpful to those decorators like myself that do not have the 'touch' of the more experienced decorators out there.</p><p>Thank you again.</p>

[Mary the Prophetess]

<p>I can't understand why items that are there when I save the layout are not rendering when I log out and back in.  I know they are still there, because I can walk over them, but I just can't see them.  What could be causing that?</p>

[Barx]

<p>The game does some odd things with housing... in order to keep lag down it doesn't render things you shouldn't be able to see (thats why if you 'break out' of a T3 guild hall everything will render bit by bit when you port out and do the same when you port back).</p><p>Because you're building out in an area that isn't normally accessable those rules about when an item should be rendered can start acting up. Other problems that can cause that is if the zero-point for the item (the origin, the point around which the object rotates) is behind some zone geometry -- in that case the appearance might not be shown but the collision still applied or vice versa.</p>

[Pantera]

<p>I liked using the scratching posts as my foundation posts.   worked out well.  plus they make the lil stairs usefull too. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p><p>like dis...</p><p><img src="http://i898.photobucket.com/albums/ac183/guttwrench/Bartertown/EQ2_000006.jpg" width="1024" height="608" /></p>

[Nole]

<p>Speaking of breaking out: I'm thinking of making some sort of small harbor, any suggestions for an area that might be made to look vaguely tropical? (Also no guild halls, I don't have access to one of those to decorate.)  Alternatively, there's no water tiles right? Just pools with borders?</p>

[Kamimura]

<p><cite>Aiya@Lucan DLere wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Speaking of breaking out: I'm thinking of making some sort of small harbor, any suggestions for an area that might be made to look vaguely tropical? (Also no guild halls, I don't have access to one of those to decorate.)  Alternatively, there's no water tiles right? Just pools with borders?</p></blockquote><p>TD can look pretty tropical, there's even water/beach front land there already.No water tiles, but you can use the Tapestry of the Steamlord and tip it with the editor to look like water - so long as you can hide the top part of the tapestry, anyway...</p>