Homestead Upgrades And Test Maps

[Rydian]

- Test Maps
So first off, Devcat made a couple of test maps for trying out different homestead concepts. These seem to mess around with object placement and textures, and these maps are still in the game files.


First homestead test map. The sign is a copy of a housing sign, which gives an error message as there's no actual house there. This seems to have been a test for "make an instance attached to a player" at first.


Second homestead test map. Actually puts decoration there.


Third homestead test map, actually using various objects and placing them in all sorts of almost free-form configurations. Wish we ended up with this much freedom in the final version.


Fourth map, messing around with the eventual grid system we ended up with. Of note is the house is from Emain.


Fifth homestead test map, messing around with different styles and ground textures. You can see the field exists at the last point this was touched, and they were adding production skill props.



- Alternate Homestead Maps
Now, as for the actual homestead maps, as you might guess there's actually multiple different maps (for the different regions and different sizes). However there's duplicate map names, and for some of them we use a newer version instead of the original. Digging up the originals and loading into them instead of the currently-used maps, we can see what some original plans were like for homestead growth. There's both unused ultimate forms that would unlock at 48x48, and alternate desert homesteads.

First, the unused desert homestead type.


"Farm_Desert_48" is neat, because it doesn't match the graphics of Connous. Seems this may have been for Muyu homesteads instead.


Zooming out, the surroundings are definitely less boring than the current one we use!


Wait wait wait. Is that a **** pirate ship?!


Ugh that's so cool. It's like a sand air pirate hideout base thing of awesomeness.



Second, alternate growth forms for Physis homesteads.


This is the backdrop for 24 or 32 IIRC, and shows how the surroundings were intended to get better over time instead of just your main platform expanding like in the final.


"Farm_snowyfields_48" definitely has a lot more interesting stuff going on outside the bounds of the homestead, it looks so much nicer than the one we use.


Zooming out... that's fantastic, and I'd say it's ~75% done too (from the intended inner view of course). Of note, this patch of snowy area is in the middle of a landmass of flat desert texture for some reason.



Intended desert maps for Connous now...


"Farm_Deaert_48_02" is your standard devcat typo. These versions actually look like they're in a desert, not just a slightly-rockier copy of crappy Uladh.


Zooming out... you get your own oasis too.



And finally the Uladh upgrade, quite a sur-


Oh. "Farm_Grassland_48" is this. They re-used it for bandit homesteads, the copy with the bandit stuff is "Farm_Grassland_48_criminal".



There's maps slated to be for 64x64 versions of various homesteads, but they're either broken or unused.

[sans]

I question Devcat's sanity for kicking out these fancy homesteads and putting in stale ones.

[Kapra]

I want them to reuse and expand on this for a non-square shaped linear dungeon/mission.

[Kenero]

I question Devcat's sanity for kicking out these fancy homesteads and putting in stale ones.

You're going to notice the trend with DevCat is that they design really elaborate and fully fleshed out contents, only to cap them upon live release such as homestead.

Another example is capped skills like Meditation and Cooking. The skill ranks, stats, cp, benefits, etc. are all mapped out all the way to rank 1 but never realized for many years.

[M]

Perhaps they scrapped the idea of fancy surroundings because they intended to continuously uncap and expand homesteads to an unforeseeable size. If that's the case, silly devcat assuming that they would bother to expand on their own content in the future.

[Rydian]

So I finally came back to this and my attempt at loading in an unused homestead map was successful... but it's off-center (different HS maps have different center coordinates the server sends you to as well) and the collision is wonky so I don't consider it usable unfortunately.

[M]

Dang, that's my favorite one too. It looks really nice; though I would also love to have a river or something. It's crazy that the "pond" used to be a lake and now it's this tiny puddle in your homestead. Furthermore, it's really such a shame they got rid of that free placement. That would have been so nice. You would see some really impressive homesteads with free placement.