[BUG] Housing "Editor" : Disappearing Items

Shadowshire · November 2017

So far, I have lost two crafted housing items while using the Housing Editor. In both cases, after I selected the item by using the Browse function, the item was never displayed. I suspect that the item was "inside" a wall of the room or otherwise concealed from view. However, I could not find any function that would cause it to appear in view. This is a very common flaw that manifests after I have selected an item to place.

When I eventually decided to "start over", I pressed the key to return the item to the character's bags. There was an odd sound, and the Housing Editor would not respond to any input except pressing the key to Exit.

Afterward, I could not find the item, neither in the character's bags (in any category), nor in the Bank (in any category). I also checked the Crafting Bag although housing items are never stored there, as far as I know. The items have simply vanished and evidently the ZOS host database software doesn't have a feature that would tell them what happened, so that they could return them to me. (That is what would happen if I were playing World of Warcraft, by the way.)

Frankly, the Housing Editor is the worst piece of [snip] software that I have used in many, many years. If Zenimax believes that having a dysfunctional and practically useless cobbled-together-quickly Housing Editor will encourage players to buy their Homesteads "furnished" with Crowns (which seems to be the point, doesn't it?), then they are wrong. What it inspires me to do is to use the Homestead feature very minimally, if at all. Indeed, what I am currently considering is playing another MMORPG or even a good solo game such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim instead. I am NOT getting anything from ZOS that is worth the aggravation, let alone paying $14.99/mo. for an ESO Plus subscription.

[Edited to remove profanity]

Pheefs · November 2017

The last tab on the housing editor will let you retrieve or modify the items you have lost in the walls or floor.
With me its always the rugs, I get it lined up perfectly & click it in place & it goes into the floor.

Nelson_Rebel · November 2017

Pheefs wrote: »

The last tab on the housing editor will let you retrieve or modify the items you have lost in the walls or floor.
With me its always the rugs, I get it lined up perfectly & click it in place & it goes into the floor.

This

You can automatically retreive anything in the house regardless where it is placed (even inside walls) with ZoS's housing functions. It even tells you how close or far away items of the same type are so you can pinpoint which item you want if they are the same

Shadowshire · November 2017

Pheefs wrote: »

The last tab on the housing editor will let you retrieve or modify the items you have lost in the walls or floor.
With me its always the rugs, I get it lined up perfectly & click it in place & it goes into the floor.

I have no idea by what you mean by "the last tab on the housing editor".

The only "tab" that I've ever seen on the Housing Editor is one that displays the Permissions for the homestead. Also, while an item is selected, the Permissions tab disappears from the UI, which is probably a good thing for it to do. But don't get me started about the foibles of the Permissions feature and its implementation. .....

Shadowshire · November 2017

One thing which the Housing Editor lacks is an "Undo" function. Any type of "editor" which does not have an "undo" function is not competently designed. Period. Then again, the UI for each of the Crafting Stations also does not have an "undo" feature, rather unfortunately.

That said, last night I lost a third item while using the Housing Editor -- an expensive Epic tapestry!

One of the more disturbing attributes of the Housing Editor is that the "reticule" can highlight an existing item as if it can be selected while another item is already currently selected. I have never tried to select the other item while it is highlighted, insofar as there's no particular reason of which I can conceive to do that, and it might not be possible to do so. Regardless, whether that behavior is intentional or it is an oversight, it is most likely the origin of the malfunction that I am about to describe.

While I was placing a lighting sconce that I had selected on a wall, suddenly -- without any input that I could subsequently recall or identify that might have caused the behavior -- the "highlight" switched 180-degrees to a tapestry which was already placed on a vertical surface some distance away from the wall on which I was placing the sconce. Of course, along with the switch to highlight the tapestry, my point-of-view also changed from looking at the lighting sconce to the now-highlighted tapestry.

This event was quite a surprise, and what I should -- or even could -- do next was not at all apparent. But I had to do something. Maybe I should have simply exited the game client and went shopping for another game to play instead of TESO.

Nonetheless, I returned my point-of-view to the lighting sconce, continued placing it, and de-selected it when I was satisfied with its position. Having that activity interrupted was bad enough, but afterward I discovered that the tapestry had vanished!

Note: I do not recall whether the tapestry was also "selected" when the point-of-view changed and it was displayed with the reticulous highlight. If it was, then both the tapestry and the lighting sconce were simultaneously "selected", because I did not have to re-select the lighting sconce in order to continue placing it.

What's the use? Zenimax so obviously does not want to make crafting furniture and using it to furnish Homesteads purchased with Gold Pieces a feasible activity while playing the game. Doing so is ridiculously expensive with regard to the items and resources which the player's character must obtain and use, and the flaws in the Housing Editor just make the endeavor more time-consuming as well as counter-productive.

Streega · December 2017

Have a snickers and stop being a drama queen. Here is a picture how to retrieve items:

Shadowshire · December 2017

Nelson_Rebel wrote: »

Pheefs wrote: »

The last tab on the housing editor will let you retrieve or modify the items you have lost in the walls or floor.
With me its always the rugs, I get it lined up perfectly & click it in place & it goes into the floor.

This

You can automatically retreive anything in the house regardless where it is placed (even inside walls) with ZoS's housing functions. It even tells you how close or far away items of the same type are so you can pinpoint which item you want if they are the same.

Your assertion is so different from my own experience and observation while using the Housing Editor, I must wonder whether we are playing the same game with the same software. The Housing Editor never displays any numeric data pertaining to the spatial location, the pitch, the yaw, or the tilt of any selected housing item.

Which leads me to ask: on which platform and megaserver do you play TESO?

As disclosed in my signature at the end of all of my forum messages, I play TESO with a PC on the NA megaserver.

By the way, when one for more items (of "the same type") are stacked, it is not possible to split the stack while using the Housing Editor. The player must exit the Housing Editor and split the stack in the character's bags via the Inventory UI. In my experience, if a stack of furnishing items is in the Bank, they should be transferred to the character's bags, because a stack might not remain split after the Bank UI closes. After the stack is split, the player should be able to select and place each item in a different location -- even in another Homestead -- as they choose, at their own convenience.

But that is not necessarily so. When I browsed the bags/bank for a painting, I chose one which had three copies in a stack. The Housing Editor "preview" displayed them as a single painting. After I chose to Place a painting in the stack, the Housing Editor kept it selected perchance that I wanted (I suppose) to place all three in a stack in the same place on the wall.

Now that might be okay for some items, such as a stack of books (which I have yet to attempt to place in a bookcase or on a shelf). Of course, I did not want to put all of the paintings in the stack in the same place on the wall, so I deselected the first painting after positioning it. When my character moved away, the painting -- suspended in mid-air -- followed him.

Go figure that one out.

Shadowshire · December 2017

@Streega: thank-you for your reply and for including the image, in particular.

Streega wrote: »

Have a snickers and stop being a drama queen. Here is a picture how to retrieve items:

Milky Way Midnight Dark, thank-you. And I am not a queen.

After an item vanishes into the void, the Put Away option is not displayed, probably because there is nothing remaining to Put Away (duh!).

That is, at least not with the TESO game software that runs on my computer. Your UI might be different. In fact, I don't recognize the display screen in the image. At least, I don't recall that I have ever seen either the Modify key-bind or the Set Destination key-bind, and I have no idea as to what either choice does.

May I ask what sequence of actions you took in order to obtain the display in the image?

After I launch the Housing Editor (which I have bound to the Home key), usually I want to transfer a furnishing item from my character's bags, or the Bank account, to the Homestead, i.e., to furnish it with that item. The key-binds shown on the initial display screen are for Select, Browse, Go to Entrance, and Exit. (I suppose that you changed the Exit key-bind from Control to Alt, I changed it to Backspace.)

The first thing that I learned while using the Housing Editor is to never press the Select key unless I want to completely re-do the placement of any item which is highlighted because the reticule is on it. That is, unless I want to completely re-do the item's placement if it doesn't simply vanish entirely upon selection.

On the face of it, there is no technical reason that Selecting an item must change anything about its current placement and/or of its display accordingly. The fact that simply selecting it is not only rather likely to alter an item's placement, but also alter it in entirely unpredictable and often user-hostile ways, rather clearly communicates that ZOS couldn't care less about getting it done right.

The four icons which follow the word "Retrieve" in the above image are also shown on the Housing UI after I use the Browse key-bind, then choose an item from the character's bags or Bank account, and elect to Place that item in the Homestead. In that context, the word that precedes the four icons is "Place".

Whether the first icon does anything after I put the mouse cursor on it and press the LMB, I cannot recall.
Selecting the "Crown" icon displays a catalog of furnishing items available for purchase with Crowns.
Selecting the third icon has yet to produce whatever it is supposed to display, or otherwise do -- i.e., I have been unable to determine what it does or is supposed to do.
The "Pair of Cogwheels" icon displays the UI to set Permissions for the Homestead, which has nothing in particular to do with using the Housing Editor to place furnishings on the Homestead premises. Doing that has no configuration options which I've ever found.

The only "preview" that I have seen the Housing Editor display is shown after I've selected an item (from the character's bags or Bank account), with the choice to either Place the item or End Preview. The preview per se often displays the item with odd angles and points-of-view, and the image can have a "cramped" appearance.

When I select an item which is already in place, the following key-bound options are displayed, in order from left to right across the bottom of the screen:

Cancel, which seems to have been added in the most recent patch (3.10), de-selects the item and returns to the previous UI screen.
Place
Put Away, which does not display a UI such as the one shown in your image. It simply removes the item and stores it (whether in the character's bags or in the Bank, I don't know).
Cursor Mode
Surface Drag On \ Surface Drag Off (toggle)
Align
Push
Pull
Exit

For what it is worth, after I choose to Place an item -- or choose Cursor Mode, or toggle Surface Drag, or use Align, Push, and/or Pull -- there is no consistency with regard to how the software evidently interprets my input, insofar as there is no consistency as to its displayed output. I can never confidently predict what the software will do while I use, or after I choose, one of those options.

Succinctly, the Housing Editor rarely does anything that I want to do with an item, and the effect of a function such as Surface Drag is not evident. Using it eats up a lot of time and effort regardless of whether the eventual outcome of placing an item is acceptable, let alone preferable. How anyone evidently has found the time to create some of the wonderful Homestead "guild halls" that I have seen is a mystery.

Give some people lemons, and they will make lemonade. I earnestly hope that few of them have surrendered to the expedience of buying furnishing items with Crown$, but it wouldn't surprise me if anyone has done so.

Note: the Align function has a nasty habit of "aligning" an item 90 degrees from vertical instead of either leveling it parallel to a floor, or attaching it correctly to a wall. Never use Align for a rug, carpet, painting, tapestry, or other "thin" object. This behavior appears to be a bug, but someone probably believes that it is "working as designed"*.

_____________
* The immortal public relations "spin" of Borland, Inc., a software developer and publisher which eventually went out of business because no one could trust their buggy software to do anything correctly, such as compile valid, correct source code into an executable program that actually produced valid output from valid input.

Streega · December 2017

This is the default Housing Editor (on PC), I haven't changed anything. And I used the "Retrieve" function to summon my lost carpets/tapestries/feather from the Void, so I'm sure it works.
Anyway, I'll try one more time: you enter your house, open the Editor (F5 by default), then Browse (R by default). What you have now is on the picture (with the Retrieve tab opened); look in the right upper corner, you have 4 tabs there: Place - Purchase (Crown Store) - Retrieve - Settings. In the Retrieve tab you have a list of items you can retrieve: "Modify" is for moving the selected item without putting it away; "Put Away" puts the item back into your inventory, duh; "Set Destination" shows where the selected item is currently placed (in theory, I have never used this option).
Now, if your lost item isn't on the list in the Retrieve tab, then it's indeed... lost and I cannot help you any further.

Shadowshire · December 2017

Streega wrote: »

This is the default Housing Editor (on PC), I haven't changed anything. And I used the "Retrieve" function to summon my lost carpets/tapestries/feather from the Void, so I'm sure it works.
....
Now, if your lost item isn't on the list in the Retrieve tab, then it's indeed... lost and I cannot help you any further.

So, the third icon signifies the "Retrieve" sub-feature on the Housing UI. After reading your reply, I checked it out. It listed each and every item that I had placed in that Homestead, including the missing tapestry but not the two other missing items.

So, I "retrieved" the tapestry, which is a much more expensive item than the others. Thank-you for your help. It seems that the Retrieve sub-feature could be a faster way to remove items from a Homestead than using Select, followed by Put Away, for each one. Regardless, it is nice to have an inventory of the placed items.

So far, I have not used Modify to see whether an item is treated as I described in Post #9 of this discussion when the Select key-bind is used to choose a highlighted item that is already in place.

It is curious that the Modify tool is on the Retrieve UI, which is rather obscure. If there is a significant difference between the respective Modify and Select tools, then Modify should be on the same page of the UI as the Select, Browse, and Go to Entrance options. However, I suspect that both key-binds result in execution of the same algorithim qua function(s), thus "Modify" would effectively be the same as "Select" with an different name.

Regardless, what should never happen is any change in the item's placement that occurs simply because the player used Select or has chosen Modify instead. There is no justification for what I have described in the OP and subsequently with respect to the items which literally vanished from sight.

Set Destination sounds interesting, and I will investigate it as soon as I have the time to make the effort.

Again, thank-you for your responses to my posts.