[Poll] Furniture Snapping

hexentb16_ESO

Hey everyone. Do you ever spend hours adjusting furniture or structure pieces in your home so they're perfectly aligned? Does it make you want to bash your head into your desk too? Do you think it would be a heck of a lot faster and easier if the player home decorator had object snapping like fallout 4? If you don't know what I'm talking about Fallout 4 has a base building mechanic similar to ESO's player housing editor. Except in fallout 4 you can "snap" placable game objects to other game objects for perfect alignment. Look it up, its really handy.

Anyways, ESO REALLY needs this feature for the player housing editor. Combined with the precision edit feature player home enthusiasts with OCD will finally be at peace.

If you think the game needs this vote down below. If you don't...go try building a house from scratch in ESO with structure pieces and come back.

Edit: I know there are mods that do this but not all of us can use mods and I honestly think this should have been a feature from the beginning.

Araneae6537

Yes, the ability to snap or not (just like we can toggle align to surface) and the ability to make fine adjustments should be part of the base game. I am grateful to EHT for adding this, but it should be available to everyone!

Raideen

I NEED this to save my sanity.

I cant not understand for the life of me why:

• Snapping has not already been implemented. It should have been done before homestead was released. Its building 101.
• Why roll/dodge is enabled when a player is in edit house mode. It serves no purpose other than to be frustrating.
• Why the XYZ axis is not centered to all furniture props.
• Why there is not a "free look" mode that allows the player to move their camera on the vertical axis so that they can adjust furniture from a central pov.
• Why lighting shines through furniture. Nothing looks worse than placing a candle or lamp on a night stand only to see the glow shining through the top onto the shelves.
• Why armoires and chests do not function as furniture slots. Armoires should be useful and hold armor/costumes only.

Minyassa

I NEED this to save my sanity.

I will amend my yes vote to say that what I really wish they'd do is square up all housing zones so that right angles are on the xz axes so I don't have to sit there and painstakingly find an edge to line up and then copy-paste that angle to everything for the rest of the decoration process, only to find out I was a hair off and everything looks wonky. A couple of the houses ARE perfectly aligned; Coldharbour Surreal Estate is zeroed, and there is one other I can't remember right now but they were a JOY to work with because I could just zero furnishings and they'd be lined up with pavement, and no having to remember that the front wall is at -137 degrees but not numerical -137 because it's probably more like -137.327255876. >___< Maybe stop letting Sheogorath plop down models on the ground plane.

katanagirl1

I NEED this to save my sanity.

This would not be a feature that I would use every time I place things in my houses, but it would be a huge timesaver for the times I do use it.

AdamBourke

I don't want this feature to be added.

One of my favourite things about this housing editor is that its not the fallout 4 one. If it was optional, I wouldn't mind it, I guess, but i would never use it.

I said no because I image it would take a long time to implement and I would much rather them work on other things (Like npcs and improved character pathing...) Even the current align and straighten options dont work that well (e.g. on anything that should be wall mounted, or some items that have weird origin points...)

AdamBourke

I don't want this feature to be added.

Raideen wrote: »

• Why lighting shines through furniture. Nothing looks worse than placing a candle or lamp on a night stand only to see the glow shining through the top onto the shelves.

@Raideen I can answer this one. Real time lighting is performance heavy, but real-time shadow casting is even more performance heavy. You can get around it with pre-calculated lighting maps, but thats very difficult to do when you can move the items around at will.

They _could_ add it to the game, but they would need to drop the furnishing limit by an huge amount. I dont think that its a price worth paying!

hexentb16_ESO

I NEED this to save my sanity.

AdamBourke wrote: »

One of my favourite things about this housing editor is that its not the fallout 4 one. If it was optional, I wouldn't mind it, I guess, but i would never use it.

I said no because I image it would take a long time to implement and I would much rather them work on other things (Like npcs and improved character pathing...) Even the current align and straighten options dont work that well (e.g. on anything that should be wall mounted, or some items that have weird origin points...)

It would probably be a toggle if it was added.

PrimusNephilim

it would need to be an option, if its anything like the FO games...then no

Draevik

I NEED this to save my sanity.

I would love this feature. Building basic structures is time consuming unless you plan it out very well and stack all items in the same spot then use the limited 100 move. Why don't they have larger increments up to 1000 or even 10000 for building large structures?

Raideen

I NEED this to save my sanity.

AdamBourke wrote: »

Raideen wrote: »

• Why lighting shines through furniture. Nothing looks worse than placing a candle or lamp on a night stand only to see the glow shining through the top onto the shelves.

@Raideen I can answer this one. Real time lighting is performance heavy, but real-time shadow casting is even more performance heavy. You can get around it with pre-calculated lighting maps, but thats very difficult to do when you can move the items around at will.

They _could_ add it to the game, but they would need to drop the furnishing limit by an huge amount. I dont think that its a price worth paying!

They would not need to drop furnishing limits, just add a slider because everyone has different hardware.

AdamBourke

I don't want this feature to be added.

It wouldn't be a slider, the intensity of the shadows doesn't matter, only the number, it would be an on/off thing, and having it on would devastate the item count.

Consider the number of calculations done for lighting in the current system. You need one calculation per piece of furniture (number of items = F), for each light in the house (number of lights = L). (Actually you need it per polygon in the furniture model, but we can ignore it for this comparison if we assume the furniture is the same in both scenarios).

Total Calculations (no shadows) = F x L

However, for shadows, you also need to check if you have any objects in between, so then you need to multiply that again by the number of furniture items.

Total Calculations (shadows) = F x F x L.

Therefore, to get the same performance in a 700 furnishing house, you would need to have an item limit of... 27.

To demonstrate how crazy the scale change could be, this is a super-super-simplified calculation - there are a whole bunch of things that could be done to make it less intensive (a limit of how many objects cast shadows, only consider nearby objects, etc) but also other factors that I've ignored that make it more intensive (there are actually a huge number of items in the houses that we can't edit, but would still need to contribute to this).

Raideen

I NEED this to save my sanity.

A slider with the last option being turn on better shadows, this is how many creative games do it.

There would be no reason to lower item count in houses. Item count has more to do with ZOS data than it does rendering an environment.

In Landmark (RIP) in 2015, a voxel based creative game I had builds with 3000 props (on that older computer) and 3 million+ voxels and I could still get 40-60 FPS. Those props blocked light if I remember correctly.

60 FPS in a house setting in ESO is more than enough and many PC's today can hit 200 FPS. I maintain a solid 60 at all times (mine is capped at 60).

Gilvoth

I don't want this feature to be added.

would remove my creativity.
although, i would vote "yes" only as long as we can have it as a toggle on off ability,
"why"? = because i enjoy being able to put items and furniture and e\anything and everything in strange places, if you force us to "snap" to certain positions then we would loose the ability to do that, it would remove my ability to have freedom of design that is different from whats common, or popular.

Raideen

I NEED this to save my sanity.

Gilvoth wrote: »

would remove my creativity.

although, i would vote "yes" only as long as we can have it as a toggle on off ability,
"why"? = because i enjoy being able to put items and furniture and e\anything and everything in strange places, if you force us to "snap" to certain positions then we would loose the ability to do that, it would remove my ability to have freedom of design that is different from whats common, or popular.

I did not get the impression that the OP's goal was to reduce creative freedom. I think their point is that it takes a long time/effort to align things. Some things should be perfectly aligned like using multiple platforms for floors, or walls when there is a doorway in between. This is where snapping can be handy. If we could also set (which I assume we would) the increment at which something would snap (like we can set increments now), then this would simply place things more exactly.

I don't think you would lose any creative freedom at all, in fact it could let loose your creative desires.

katanagirl1

I NEED this to save my sanity.

Gilvoth wrote: »

would remove my creativity.
although, i would vote "yes" only as long as we can have it as a toggle on off ability,
"why"? = because i enjoy being able to put items and furniture and e\anything and everything in strange places, if you force us to "snap" to certain positions then we would loose the ability to do that, it would remove my ability to have freedom of design that is different from whats common, or popular.

I am assuming that the snap-to would be an option and not applied to all items that are placed in the home.

There are always times when you want to overlap items to achieve a seamless look or cobble something together from multiple items.