Player Housing: A Deep Dive Into Interior Decoration Features

Welcome home, Adventurers!

In our previous Housing article, we shared a high-level overview of our plans and philosophies. This time around, we are getting concrete and discussing specifics for decoration systems. It allows us to not only show off some of what’s possible but also to answer some of the common questions and concerns we’ve seen come up from the community.

A couple disclaimers:

1. This article only focuses on interior decoration systems and only in a single room. There’s still plenty to cover beyond the basics of decoration, but that’s for another time.
2. We’re going to show you a lot of work-in-progress assets and UIs as well as using some terms that are not finalized, so please focus more on the functionality and less on the details of just how specific things look or sound just yet.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about decoration in Housing!

Getting Down to the Basics

Decoration has two primary modes, Basic and Advanced, and you can freely toggle between them at any time while decorating with a keypress.

Basic mode allows you to quickly place (or remove) objects and move them around while keeping their movements somewhat constrained to make putting something together quick and easy. It has a number of rules in place to help with this:

• Decor can be moved around on the ground and will move on top of things as it bumps into them or down to the ground as they reach the edge. This lets you move around and have them interact in the expected way .
• Decor can be rotated around its “up” axis with rotation snapping to 15 degree increments so objects don’t accidentally unalign with other objects as you rotate them.

• Decor has collision with other pieces of decor as well as the floor, wall, and ceilings and players are unable to move decor through other things. No losing things in the walls!
• Decor will align to the floor, wall, or ceiling depending on what sort of decor it is (e.g. a rug will align with the floor, while a painting will align with the wall). If you move it around a corner, it will continue to align properly. This also means decor will snap to the ground if you move it off something.

• Certain types of smaller decor will “parent” to certain types of larger decor when placed on top of them. This means when you move the larger decor, the smaller decor moves along with it. This allows you to, for example, place books on a bookshelf and then move the whole shelf instead of having to move everything individually.

• Players can show a grid and enable “snapping” which will snap decorations to the points on the grid, helping you keep everything neat and tidy. It will even shrink down when you’re placing something on a smaller surface like a table.

Advanced Interior Design

“But that’s so restrictive!” we hear you saying. Don’t worry, just switch to Advanced mode and feel the true power at your fingertips! Advanced mode effectively turns off a lot of the rules of Basic mode but also offers up additional tools of its own as well.

• Decor has no collision in Advanced mode. Want to push a chair into the wall? Enjoy!

• You can enable gimbals (little 3d controls on objects) which will let you move objects on all three axis, including floating them up into the air without having to jump through hoops.

A gimbal is a pivoted support that permits rotation of an object about an axis.

• A different gimbal can be used to rotate an object freely on ANY axis as well.

• Finally, a third gimbal can scale an object’s size up and down (within some generous limits), making something smaller or giant.

Advanced mode lets you interact and design things with very specific controls to make whatever your heart may desire. Internally using this, employees have taken bushes and made them into garland for their fireplaces, constructed a boat’s prow from a bed, or made paint buckets into small spice racks for their kitchens.

We’ve been DYEING for Housing

In addition to the decoration modes, we wanted to call out some other functionalities and choices we’ve made, some because they’re cool and worth sharing, and others because they directly answer some of the questions we’ve seen since the first article went up.

For newly created assets (as opposed to legacy ones from existing art), we’re allowing players to dye them a variety of colors, so if you find a chair but wish the upholstery was blue instead of grey, you can make that change. But what if the blue doesn’t match the stain of the wood or color of the metal now? Well, you can fix that as well!

But that’s not all!

It’s not just decorations you use to customize your space, but the wallpaper, ceiling and flooring as well.  You can mix and match these to elicit various cultures and vibes or just make up your own. You can take things a step further too and use “partition” objects to build walls where none were before, letting you make rooms with arbitrary interiors.

House Layout from above. (All UI shown is subject to change.)

Speaking of mixing and matching, we saw a lot of questions around what would be allowed in terms of decor. Inside your home, you can decorate however you want, so if you want Blood Elf wallpaper with a stone roof and wooden floor, go for it.

Before we go (outside)

While we’re not really talking about exteriors in this article, it’s worth mentioning that the outside size of your house has no bearing on how big the interior is. If you want a huge mansion outside with just one room inside or a tiny shack on the outside but a dozen rooms inside, you do you.

We’ll share more about the exteriors for your home later though!

There’s so much more to discuss with decorations (“Where do we get stuff?”, “How do I show off my collection of transmogs, pets, and mounts?”, “How do Professions fit in?”, and more) never mind Neighborhoods, and we can’t wait to share more. Please keep sending us your feedback and we’ll keep building, but in the meantime here’s another screenshot a team member made mixing some various styles.

We look forward to sharing more with you as we continue to give you more insights on the new Housing system.