House pack-up as explained at the top
http://swvault.ign.com/View.php?view=DevNotes.Detail&id=64
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Lazy design story - House pack-up the SWG way
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I remember when they added housing in Ultima Online. They weren't really monitoring the economy properly and everyone had huge amounts of cash in their banks. They didn't think houses would be quite so popular so they set the price fairly low - still way way more than I could afford :)
Within 24hours my well established paths through the countryside to my favourite spawn sites became trudges through maze like urban sprawl housing estates. There must have been hundreds if not thousands of houses everywhere near towns and popular dungeon entrances.
It's crazy stuff like that you remember though and it wasn't a big problem for the players, but it certainly caused the developers some headaches.
The idea you can pack a house away and move it at any time is fantastic, but I suppose it increases the chance of clumping. Maybe it isn't a problem though? In ultima they didn't initially put enough controls in on where houses could go and how close together they could be so it all got out of hand.
Housing do have a really big impact on the world. As houses were becoming more affordable in SWG, it dramatically changed the landscape with bit cities almost blocking access to certain areas (when they weren't just beside big spawns like the Krayts Dragons).
Packing up houses can certainly bring weird situations that will require to be looked at. Like someone popping a house in combat to hide inside it or trapping players in houses by packing-up the m up while they are inside. There's a lot of scenarios that will need to be handled.
I'm still not sure the command will be available to everyone but I wanted at least to give it to GMs and the admin so they can at least fix some problems that might occur.
But I remember in SWG, before they added the pack-up command (think I left before it was added), it was a real pain to move all your stuff from one place to another just because you wanted to join another city. It added to realism (moving in RL is also a pain) but wasn't really fun.
The /packup command is another good example of a command I know I need to have but still unsure if I will allow anyone to use it (or maybe it's use could be restricted).
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