In minecraft there are no chairs. People pretend by placing stairs with signs on their sides to simulate armrests.
Many find this obnoxious and wonder why the Minecraft developer company Mojang don't just add freaking chairs. I also agree. Give us freakin chairs! And stools, both of each wood type.
But their justification -- or the justification many fans guess about their absence -- is what I'll call the Chairs in Minecraft Principle;
"We want the player to have to work within some limits to solve problems and use their imagination a bit. Finding the balance is a game design challenge, but there's a sweet spot, we think, where overcoming the limits makes it extra fun and rewarding." -- me pretending to be a Mojang developer, but actually just me.
So that's what I want to do with the building system in #AgeOfSingularity. I don't want it to be like the Sims where there are infinite possiblities for how to make and texture a room. Instead, I want to do it like you do it if you edit ultima VI classic's map and chunk files. you have to assemble a new building out of existing pieces that PROBABLY weren't built to attach nicely. But when you can do it it's great. Of course, the ultima VI chunks are a bit TOO limiting, so I want to make a system that's in-between. Something that signals that you can be really creative, but also that this isn't a building game per se. "We're making an adventure game. If they compare our building system to The Sims, we're screwed." (Similar to a Warren Spector quote about Deus Ex.)
Yes, one of the real reasons is performance concerns - so we'll see how much instancing and mesh combining can help to make it more varied and still playable. In truth it'd be great to have Sims 4 level building and furniture system, but that's too high level in terms of tech for my skillset at the moment.
There are pre-made, pre-textured rooms, hallways, etc, with perhaps swappable windows, walls, doors, and you can attach them to create your buildings on land you own. The key if there are limited pieces, is -- like with classic Leogs -- is for the room pieces to be general enough that they can be used in many different ways, and the player can imagine their purpose and story, and allows room to add a head canon since all the components get more into a "cloud" of correct, rather than the devs just laying out "here's the alchemy room piece," "here's the throne room piece." The way the classic U6 chunks do this is unintionally - by having no furniture built into them by default, and by having only a few textures that fit together well.
The extra cool benefit of this is, now you can have rewards that are new rooms! perhaps you help a mage, so the reward is a cool alchemy room. - of course just the shapes and texctures of course, you could make it any kind of room you want.
It would be cool to start with the ones built into ultima VI by default, which can be viewed with the free U6Edit tool.
