Furniture Slots Limits Are Not The Problem. We Need More Complete Structures That Use Only 1 Slot.

Woefulmonkey

First, I agree that with all the extrema customization people are doing with the limited materials available to them, a 700 items limit runs out really fast. However, a solution that seem reasonable in the ‘real’ world does not always work in a ‘virtual’ world. So, to solve this problem you have to stat by thinking about the ‘system’ and it’s limitations.

I have seen many posts recently wanting to double, triple and some even requesting 10X the current furniture slots allotment for houses.

Saying ‘GIVE US INFINITE SLOTS’ is never going to happen. Not because ESO does not want to, they make money on selling us virtual furniture, so they would love to sell us a million stone blocks for a 1$ a piece.

So… Why don’t they?

BECAUE THEY CAN’T!

People need to remember this is a ‘game’ in a ‘virtual’ environment. Your ESO house is not a ‘real’ place where you can shove as many things in it as will fit in it’s ‘real’ physical space.

A ‘game’ has limitation based on memory, cpu, and gpu requirements and they have not set the slot limitation based on the $10K gaming PC ‘YOU’ have that can actually load 7000 objects into a zone, but rather the low end barely runs this game PC that meets the minimum requirements which starts over heating with just 300 objects in a zone.

So, lets try to solve this problem based on the knowledge that PC’s have limitations and ESO must ensure that ‘Low End’ systems can still function when a player uses ‘All’ furniture slots.

An interesting thing about ‘game’ objects is that they take up ‘space’ not based on their virtual size and appearance, but rather the number of polygons they require and the textures maps that cover them.

What that means is that a small burlap sack or a intricate candle can take up way more ‘space’ than a massive structure like a complete Stone Tower or a Stable that have exterior an interior areas.

So, what is the ‘solution’ to the issue of ‘not enough slots’?

It is not ‘more slots’ it is better and more complete environment objects that only take up 1 slot.

We need more objects that are self contains and do not require placing items on top of each other to make them look realistic.

For instance instead of making you buy a ‘shelf’ then buy 10 small items to place on that shelf, sell a variety of ‘pre populated’ shelves that already have items place on them. This is similar to how they sell empty boxes but also sell a set of 4 boxes that have various food items in them already. That 4 box set is counts as 1 object takes up 1 furniture slot, but it you tried to make it with individual objects it would require at least 8 slots.
(Why does this work… because in a game when you combine objects this way they have a single collision box and can have less polygons by strategic use of texture maps, which require much less CPU and GPU resources to manage)

We also need more structural objects like complete stone walls instead of medium size stone blocks. This way you can segment you rooms in a house using 2 or 3 ‘wall’ objects instead of 50 to 100 blocks.

Finally they need to provide more fee standing external structures like Barns, Stables, Barracks, and Towers. Theses structure can be very cheep in terms of CPU/GPU resource requirements since they would have much fewer collision boxes and can use less textures to generate.

SisterGoat

They could increase the limits a bit more. Huge homes are barren. But agree we need more structures like stairs, walls, fences, ovens, fireplaces, etc.

MLGProPlayer

I agree. But even if they did this, they would still need to increase the cap. The only items where this would be useful are bookshelves (already available) and tables.

And they absolutely can increase furniture limits with optimization.

patrick_smyth

I agree with the OP that we need more structures like (modular) walls, filled boxes and even outbuildings (why no mention of a privy?), but we need much more slots for "detailing" otherwise everyone's Humblemud looks almost the same.

An intelligent container for purchased books would be nice.

Woefulmonkey

So, again increasing the cap is a tricky thing partially because of 'How' ESO has set the caps.

Basically they say you can have 700 items... but they can be 'any' item (except specials) regardless of how much PC resources they cost to display.

So, they not only have to ensure 700 items can load on a low end PC with min specs, they also have to ensure they can load 700 of the most 'expensive' items in terms of system resources used.

This puts them in a bad situation when looking to increase a object cap.

Halo 'solved' this dilemma for their level builder by not using object caps. What they did was assign 'values' to each object type's resource cost then they gave you a 'budget' for max resource dollars you could 'spend' to populate a level.

So, they would start you off with a budget of say $70,000 resource dollars.

Then they would assign a basic stone block a value of $50. So you could place 1400 blocks if that was the only object type you placed.

However a complex object type like a 'Tank' which is high res, animated and intractable has a resource cost of say $15,000. So you could only place 4 tanks on a map and that was only if you decided to basically place nothing else.

So, can ESO increased the object cap by say 50 items...
maybe,...
but it is highly unlikely they could double it (safely).

It is much easier for them to add new object like 'Walls', 'Floors', and 'Complete Structure' that reduce the amount of custom building you need to do to 'populate' your house.

This make designing your house easier and it does not require ESO to figure out how to get more objects to load on min spec machines. (Which can be a very difficult development problem to solve in games)

That is good for us and easier for them to implement and maintain.

SisterGoat

Perhaps more categories for certain furnishings then. 700 lights as opposed to 700 sweetrolls would be a huge difference in performance. Maybe lights should have their own category.

Zypheran

I continue to be baffled by the absence of these additions with each new patch. You have a "luxury" vendor wasting away selling garbage these last few weeks. They could use that resource to release some 1pc structural items.
As I have said on other threads, it can take a dozen pieces to make stairs, 20-30 pieces to make a wall, dozens more for floors and ceilings. At this stage it feels more like negligence than oversight that these basic items have not been made available almost a year later. Especially when the assets already exist in game.