Increased radius of town

[Ashi]

I think we should have a third circle of houses in the town. Several players, such as Narchan, Toast, and myself, have full houses but cannot find more houses to buy. There seems to be only one or two large houses left, and I don't want to carry all my keys to the other end of the town to use them.
Since there are always a lot of new players, it would be a good idea to make room for them. Some of them are becoming high-level, and everyone should be able to have large houses to buy.

[Berendol]

Good idea. I also like the idea of very large ownable houses in the wilderness (*cough* shameless promo) except you have to actually find them...

[Domino]

The whole housing situation needs a lot of work.  We need:

• More small and medium sized houses close to town.
• Less funky houses (why are there some houses with doors inside leading to other small houses?).
• Berendol had a good point.. all moated houses and houses above 80 spaces should be ownable.
• 1x1 and 1x2 houses are kinda pointless.
• Larger town area.  Inner town should probably be extended 1 map area in all directions and outer town should probably be 1 or 2 map areas larger.
• Distance from town should translate to larger houses (to a certain point of course).
• Should be able to find large houses in the wilderness instead of only warehouses.
• Ability to create houses is essential to longterm game stability.  Eventually most if not all houses will be owned... There needs to be an outlet for this without having to resort to administrator intervention.

Now if house creation is implemented it would also need some rules:[/list][*]Shouldn't be able to build a house around another house.[*]Shouldn't be able to build a wall adjacent to the entrance to another house.[*]Shouldn't be able to build any house within the confines of inner or outer town.[*]Created houses and contents should be destroyed on player ghost death (would help regulate house clutter on the game).[*]Player created houses should be able to be demolished or remodeled by the creator.[*]Player created houses should be tied to the player not to a key (keyless houses).[*]Players should probably be able to build only a single house (if you can extend the house or demolish and build a new larger house why do you need 10?).[*]Players should be able to recall to thier house.  If the house is tied to the player you could inscribe a book/recall with @RHome (home being whatever variable the house is tied to) to take you, well, home.[*]House creation should be readily avaliable.  Whether it's a shop where you can input wilderness level, sector and size or scrolls that allow you to build so many feet of wall (ala ToME.net) it needs be realistically doable.  This doesn't mean it should be cheap, but if say the solution are house creation scrolls, you shouldn't have to hunt for them for several months to be able to create your dreamhouse.  This would provide an outlet for all the (otherwise useless) gold that high level players acquire.[/list]

[Berendol]

I like your ideas, both of you. House creation is *REALLY* complicated. It's got me perplexed.. been scratching my head for awhile. The problem is that house info is kept in a static-length array, which means adding more than a certain number is impossible. I have no idea how to go about real-time house creation logic, or anything like that either. Maybe it could work but the trouble is after a certain distance from town, the wild is unstatic. Burn down some trees, leave, and come back.. they'll be back. It could be staticed when you create a house but, eh, then we've got memory consumption issues. Pagefile? No thanks, we have enough problems with time-consuming code in the game causing lag. I really agree with you on the houses with one or both dimensions at 1. I sort of fixed this on my server but it's not a great fix and *really* large houses tend to crash the game, so my original fix (adding to the dimensions) didn't fix the problem but created more. My fix now is making all large houses ownable, and all houses have a better chance to be larger. Not really ideal, and I have yet to fix the "houses that can't be owned due to bad door placement" problem. I think that adding a one-space area around the houses would fix it, but the code currently adds houses onto each other as a kind of simple "home addition" thing, so it obviously wasn't intended to work that way. There isn't any true checking on whether door placement is particularly valid.

[Domino]

Well I can remember when houses didnt segue into each other as they do now.. that was actually an intentional addition.  I think there's a post about it somewhere back in the old mangband mail list on piper.net  If I get bored enough I just may look for it and post it.  Since you're doing your own thing Berendol, I would suggest taking a look at the ToME.net CVS.  It's open source and they have dealt with some nice additions like house creation, random quests, random artifacts (which I know you don't want to add but it still might help for your 'super egos'), and such.  Might give you some ideas as to how to tackle the problems.  At the least it'll show you a workable solution.

[Anyar]

maybe a seal/ unseal door spell / scroll that would be available to level 50 mages and priests that woud let them seal warhouse doors and dungeon doors(like spikes but they dont work) to use tham as houses
this would also mean level 50s and people who have foound a scroll would be stealing everyone elses stuff

[Fink]

Is house placement random or does the admin have some control over map generation?

hmm this whole issue with houses could possibly be fixed by illiminating houses altogether. The solution would be to have  bank(s) with holding boxes priced like houses and if you need another space then you pay to enlarge your box. Rather than taking up map space it could take up code space, eh? have a window screen like the store screen. The bank would have a name and account number that would have to be entered for access. All the space left by deleting houses could be taken by putting more banks or stores in. Banks would not have to have space to drop items but would only need to have a space like a store door would have. I am not sure how lag intensive it would be to have stuff stored out of site.

The one hang up I can think of is having to wait to deposit your cash or your items...  Though why not have several banks.

I have no skill in programing. What little I know was from computer class in highschool. I was very lost in that class.

(Houses should say who owns them when you bump into the door!)

(Owened by Ashiki!) Just informative I guess 

[Berendol]

We've considered putting Vanilla Angband style houses in the game. Sounds like a good idea until you realize how cool a moated castle full of DSMs looks when you cast a detection spell, and that multiple players can't visit a single space. And running a Nethack-style store is so much fun, too