Cross-platform Published Housing: more visibility and less worry

JHartEllis · January 7

I think there is a basic goal with housing that homes should be seen the way the home builder intended them to be seen. That’s part of why time and weather control devices were so important. There are still a few impediments to this goal though.

One big pain is worrying about the state of lights, doors, gates, etc. For example, I made a build with a door, and opening the door was part of the intended experience, so if people left it open, it wouldn’t be right for the next visitor. Also, if I’m ever touring homes, I try to leave things in the same state I find them in, but that can be difficult (especially facade doors opening into walls that then become impossible to close).

One thing that could help with this would be to allow for state defaults to be set–with furnishings reverting to their default states once all visitors leave.

A bigger thing could be to allow players to “publish” a home. This would basically just be saving all the furnishing data at that moment to the server, basically creating a backup. These backups could then be added to a special Published Homes section of Home Tours.

Visiting a Published Home would spin up an instance from the saved data. A local cache could be created for furnishing states so that visitors could still interact with furnishings. If this cache could be shared with others porting onto the originating visitor, this would potentially allow multiple people to be in the same Published Home. Any changes the visitors might make wouldn’t be saved after they leave since the caches would simply be deleted and nothing would affect the published data.

Such a system would have a LOT of benefits. Home owners could publish a home and then freely make changes without worrying about things being seen in a WIP state. This would be a liberating feeling to be able to tackle new projects.

Visitors would have a uniform experience, and builders wouldn’t have to worry about lights being left off or doors left open.

Since the saved data would be static, this could more readily be saved on a centralized server that each of the six megaservers could then pull from. This would be very appealing since player homes could be shared among the entire ESO playership instead of just limited to one server. This would also streamline things quite a lot for things like official ESO contests.

I think this is quite feasible and would be a great segue towards eventual cross-play.

LunaFlora · January 7

yes

MoonPile · January 8

Think I saw you mention Publishing in a chat somewhere and wasn't sure what that meant or entailed at first, but really like what you've described here. Seems like something like that could work!

In general it'd be great to see improvements to existing systems like Home Tours, Limited Visitor / interactivity, etc. that would, as you said, allow home "to be seen the way the home builder intended them to be seen"!

Some of these we (community) have discussed elsewhere, and I've recorded & explained here:
https://moonpile.tumblr.com/post/787994604272238592/eso-housing-wishlist-master-post

E.g.

Lock / unlock interactibles individually
- Ideally: 1. Lock all items (as currently implemented by Limited Visitor) then 2. manually unlock specific items that would be OK for guests to use.

katanagirl1 · January 8

Great ideas! I guess if you wanted to work on a listed home and make substantial changes you could unlist it and then relist, but I assume that you would lose any recommendations that you had previously.

live_mehve · January 14

JHartEllis wrote: »

I think there is a basic goal with housing that homes should be seen the way the home builder intended them to be seen. That’s part of why time and weather control devices were so important. There are still a few impediments to this goal though.

One big pain is worrying about the state of lights, doors, gates, etc. For example, I made a build with a door, and opening the door was part of the intended experience, so if people left it open, it wouldn’t be right for the next visitor. Also, if I’m ever touring homes, I try to leave things in the same state I find them in, but that can be difficult (especially facade doors opening into walls that then become impossible to close).

One thing that could help with this would be to allow for state defaults to be set–with furnishings reverting to their default states once all visitors leave.

A bigger thing could be to allow players to “publish” a home. This would basically just be saving all the furnishing data at that moment to the server, basically creating a backup. These backups could then be added to a special Published Homes section of Home Tours.

Visiting a Published Home would spin up an instance from the saved data. A local cache could be created for furnishing states so that visitors could still interact with furnishings. If this cache could be shared with others porting onto the originating visitor, this would potentially allow multiple people to be in the same Published Home. Any changes the visitors might make wouldn’t be saved after they leave since the caches would simply be deleted and nothing would affect the published data.

Such a system would have a LOT of benefits. Home owners could publish a home and then freely make changes without worrying about things being seen in a WIP state. This would be a liberating feeling to be able to tackle new projects.

Visitors would have a uniform experience, and builders wouldn’t have to worry about lights being left off or doors left open.

Since the saved data would be static, this could more readily be saved on a centralized server that each of the six megaservers could then pull from. This would be very appealing since player homes could be shared among the entire ESO playership instead of just limited to one server. This would also streamline things quite a lot for things like official ESO contests.

I think this is quite feasible and would be a great segue towards eventual cross-play.

Thanks for this!

Cross platform home tours were on the wish list for a number of us for a while. And, fwiw, it was among the list of suggestions/requests I sent to the systems team in that dev-team convo I won from the Welcome Home contest.
All platforms having the same furnishing items available, and the placement of items are “just” coordinates and rotational alignments associated with a user and their entitlements, right? It sounds reasonable to have that data housed in one place to push out to all the megaservers.

With regards to “publishing” a home… the “Best Builds” feature in Fallout76 that came out around Home Tours time frame allowed players to submit a build and that camp instance became part of the randomly placed camps on a server that players can visit and even be prompted to give a “thumbs up” after a few moments of wandering within its borders. Players were also allowed to update (including the photo previews) and re-submit a camp without losing the recommendation points. Basically, there exists a “publishing system” that works. Bethesda and ZOS should compare notes if they haven’t already.

Cheers!

~m