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Dojo improvements ideas; alternate tilesets for rooms, quality of life stuff, NPCs, music etc etc.


KriLL3
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I've really enjoyed dojos in WF since they were added and I've recently been re-working my dojo in preparations for the drydock and it needed an overhaul anyway, I've taken some notes on quality of life things, features and assets I'd really like to see added, some of these seem pretty easy to do, some are very ambitious, some are interconnected and some a bit more free standing, hopefully this will spark some ideas and discussion in the community and DE, for all I know some of these might be already in the works I imagine I'm not the first person with these ideas, this is a pretty long list and to ease TL;DR I've made each item a "headline" for easier scanning.

Feedback and discussion welcome.

Grid
A visible 3d floating photoshop style "grid" with a fainter/dotted sub-grid lines (configurable size and sub-lines per major line?) projected in 3d space, would immensely help making symmetrical setups and making things line up. Should have a keybind to toggle on/off in decoration mode.

Dojo re-start
Provide an option to destroy the entire dojo and start over, I've personally needed this several times, if the dojo design has gone down a bad route or DE have added something important that you want to re-design the dojo around, destroying a big elaborate dojo can take days and requires you to manually push it along every 2 hours. Probably should have a "type in a phrase if you're sure" feature. Maybe require more than half of architect role players to agree in some kind of vote etc? To avoid malicious use. Would obviously refund all materials etc to the vault.

Raise the room limit
100 might sound like plenty but that number is very easy to reach especially if you use connectors or want multiple floors.

Canceling rooms under construction
I can cancel decorations, why not rooms? Having to rush a room to destroy it feels pretty silly, similarly the ability to cancel polychrome from polychrome's base menu instead of inside "fund construction" would be nice.

Destroy all decorations in a room
Sometimes you just want to start over and have a ton of decorations in a room, destroying and re-building the room is an option but if it's a one of the sequential halls and not at the end or has rooms after it you want to keep you can't do that. Probably should have a "type in a phrase if you're sure" feature.

Donate to all decorations in a room
Would allow you contribute to all decorations at the same time, saves time having to manually contribute to each one. Could be added to the room console.

Preview decorations
Let (architect role only?) players see a room as if all the decorations inside are complete for a short time like the color/lighting preview. Would save a lot of time when making complicated designs. Should also preview polychrome stuff at the same time.

Rename transporters
Pretty silly that I need to build another one if I just want to change the name. And what's with the super restrictive characters allowed in the name? : is nice for things like "Floor 1: stuff" etc.

Don't block decoration placement near doors etc
I want to put it there for a reason, if I block the door on purpose or by mistake that's on me, let me worry about these things.

Less restrictive decoration overlap
Decorations have a pretty arbitrary "root point" that can't intersect room geometry or decorations, even if the actual mesh of the decoration doesn't intersect anything, this makes placement sometimes a real hassle, especially of rings and pillars.

Cull decorations intruding into nearby rooms
Should be possible to make parts of decorations outside of the parent room invisible in other rooms. And turn off the collisions to not make them invisible walls.

Swap like for like rooms
Let me swap rooms with the same footprint and used doors without demolishing everything after it. Refunding all decorations in the process. (Like swap a long straight connector for a small garden or vice versa as long as none of the removed doors are in use).

Color coded map
Color rooms on the map based on construction status, blue for constructing, yellow for needs resources and red for being destroyed.

Grouping decorations, save group as template
Grouping decorations into constructs you can move as one, copy, and save as a preset to re-use in a different room or later. Maybe let people share them using steamworks? Though might be a bit too ambitious. Could assign a group to move in different ways as well like making a moving platform that moves back and forth like in a platforming game, or spin a certain direction and amount at a certain speed then back etc for "animatronics" or just spin at a specific speed in one axis to make fans, drills etc. If extended to the concept of being able to trigger these animations (using buttons, timers, floor switches etc) could be used for traps, opening hidden doors and other really cool stuff.

Saving a room and it's decorations as a template
For later re-use or to move it. (Could also be a steamworks thing, let you share rooms designs). Basically would let you build the room including all the decorations it contained in the same spots as one build process, obviously costing the same as the room + all the included decorations.

Themes for rooms "Tilesets"
Would also be nice to have a "theme" option for most of the "plain" rooms like connectors and halls, like if I pick an Orokin theme for a hall make it looks like an orokin tileset, colors can be done with polychrome atm but patterns, geometry etc can't, beyond covering the entire interior in decorations to hide all of the walls and pillars etc. Which yeah we can do, but would be nicer and easier to have a starting point with 0 decorations that looks a particular way you can build on instead of totally hide. And some areas like near doors can't have decorations.

Could gradually roll out more "themes" for the plainer rooms and architectural pieces. Some suggested themes: a theme for each style of "natural" geometry blocks like interior of asteroid (looks like a cave with asteroid rock on all surfaces), interior of lua (same idea except lua stone) martian rock, normal rock, venusian rock, ice, themes based on current tilesets/locations like; fortuna, cetus, orokin tower, infested orokin tower, lua orokin tower and the other tilesets from corpus and grineer and I guess in the future sentients, should be pretty easy to make from existing tileset assets. Could also be an option to pick what "theme" to put on the walls and roof of gardens etc.

Customizable theme for architectural decorations
Similar idea to the above one, when placing something like a pillar or wall it could automatically match the current room's theme, but also let you pick a different one, allowing you to pick a version of each basic piece of architectural decorations would let you customize rooms of every theme, but not clog up the decorations list with 10+ versions of "short pillar" etc.

Blank rooms
Most dojo rooms aren't a great blank canvas, there are effects (fog, swirly things), decorations, lights (both visible light cones and aspects of the illumination that can't be changed through polychrome) etc. (I'm not opposed to there being "pre-made" rooms but please provide a more blank version) like the configurable obstacle course, maybe let us pick a specific size (width, depth and height), door count/positions etc. Could base the cost and other stats on its total volume etc. The current rooms are a hassle for anyone wanting to design something elaborate because you kind of have to start by hiding all of the existing room behind decorations, and some of those bits can be pretty far into the room. Inspiration Hall is a good example, it claims to be a blank slate but it has a lot of big light cones that intrude pretty far into the room, you have to block off a lot of interior wall depth to get rid of them.

Pre-decorated rooms
Ties into the previous suggestion and the "themes" one, would be neat to have the option to pick between one or more pre-decorated versions of rooms made by DE (or via steamworks, mentioned elsewhere) would also serve as a neat fix for the problem of some rooms currently having existing decorations already added even if you don't want them (a bunch of rooms have banners, gardens have various amounts of pre-existing decorations etc), could supply the current decoration setups as one option along with others and a "blank" one. Could add the decoration's cost to the overall cost of building the room, or just place the decorations inside once the room is built and let you fund them yourself, adjust them etc. Could be a neat way to show what's possible to make using the existing decorations and as a shortcut to a nice looking dojo for clans that don't have anyone interested in micro-managing the dojo. Could also be used to make the pillars and walkways in halls optional, and provide more than the 2 current layouts, or let you design your own by placing those elements as decorations yourself.

Customizable colors for decorations
Some decorations currently are just different color versions of the same thing, instead of needing one unique decorations for each color it would make more sense to me to let players change the color of one or several things about a decoration, like pick the color of the grass, pick the color of the leaves on trees, pick the color of leaves in the falling leaves atmospheric, and color of most atmospherics in general.

Versions of decorations
Some decorations are just different versions of the same thing, could bundle them up into "pipe" that has sub-types of specific angle/length etc.

Ditch the sequential hall requirements
Never really made sense to me that you're required to build the halls in order and can only have one of each, I don't see how the halls would require the existence of only one of the prior tier, requirements like this makes any dojo re-work a nightmare since you have to destroy the halls in a specific order it also means if you want the maximum capacity you can get you're forced to have one of each hall even if some of the halls don't fit your design and you're left having to hide it somewhere. Would be very liberating if we were allowed to build halls however we want, maybe with some total cap? Currently there are 5 halls + 3 inspirational halls for a total of 8, could have a cap on total halls of 8 or 10 but let us decide what specific halls we want to use. Maybe let us upgrade the starting hall for a bigger one if there is room and you have enough power? Costing the difference in materials.

More colors
Our current selection of colors is very sparse, more colors would be nice, please don't make 'em as difficult to get this time?

Additional gardens
Would be cool to get some additional garden designs and decorations with elements from Plains of Eidolon and Orb Vallis. Maybe let us place PoE and OB conservation animals and fish into gardens based on PoE and OB?

3D Map
Map with floor controls, 3d version of the map to let you see vertical clearance and how elevators line up between floors etc

Planning mode
Either in-game or on the map let you try/plan different layouts rapidly and see if they work and don't have intersection issues vertically or otherwise.

NPCs
Same kind of "neutral NPC" population like relays, companions moving around, sentinels performing maintenance, specters of other clan members to make it feel more lived in if you're the only one in there at the time etc. Could "auto populate" based on POIs etc or just be manually placed "decorations".

Music
Let us play collected somachord tunes, octavia songs, shawzin songs, record and play back drum performances etc. (NPC playing the drums, shawzin?).

Rank/Role specific navigation
Transporters, elevators, doors, placeable decoration "forcefields" only passable by certain ranks/roles.
Useful for "special rooms" and behind the scenes access for architects to modify the dojo using backstage access.

Automatic transporters
A separate kind of transporter that automatically on stepping on it teleports you to another pre-determined transporter with options to make it one way etc, for labyrinths, non-menu based quick navigation etc.

Ground decoration pieces
Upside-down gardens are inefficient, we need big pieces of "ground", dynamic terrain tools would be awesome, barring that different base tiles that interconnect would work, like could have multiple tiling patterns of terrain ranging from flat to really bumpy with different material options like sand, dirt, grass (the existing grass is nice, but looking straight down at it you can see the floor, would be nice to have a bottom surface) etc, could use the earlier mentioned color system to assign material to the same base pieces.

Water and other liquids decoration pieces
Would be nice if we could place a scalable flat "sheet" of water and other liquid (lava, slime?) surface as a decoration, similar to the layer of water on the bottom of some gardens. To make our own pools, ponds, streams etc. Could have options for how still the water is, if it has movement sideways for use in a stream etc. Some different shapes would be useful, like a long thing piece for streams, a square one for general use, a round one for making a pool etc, would go nicely with the ground pieces just mentioned. Color options to let you make anything from dog days looking inviting water to something that looks like the water pooling in the bottom of an infested tileset would be nice.

Treasury room
Would be nice to have an actual big room where representations of the clan's stored materials and credits would appear as physical objects in volumes based on stored amounts, would also serve as a way for clan members to see what materials are low and in need of donation.

Decoration lights
None of the current decorations are actual lights as far as I can tell? Would be nice to have real lights, just blanket global illumination doesn't look nearly as nice. Would be nice to be able to either pick if decorations that should emit light do and give it different properties like color, radius etc or let us place lights as an "atmospherics" thing separately.

More options for room's lighting
I'm not sure how the polychrome's lighting part works but it seems limited, no matter what I do rooms still have reflections in shiny surface that look like there are bright lights, would be nice to be able to configure things like that, and volumetric lighting effects, flickering lights etc.

Option to switch between ceiling lights and windows
Add an option to pick between lights and windows in the ceilings of rooms. Could even make it modular I guess to pick different ceiling designs like the cross shaped one in the bigger square halls or the single line version common in the bigger gardens etc.

Pick dojo location in starmap
Option to pick what skybox your dojo has outside the windows, observatory, and drydock would be nice.

Window decorations
Basically just a decoration that's a window to the skybox, could have different shapes and sizes, with our without a frame of some kind etc, could be used along with other decorations to make convincing looking windows to space on the floor/ceiling/walls, a really big version would be nice to be able to basically turn one entire wall of a hall into a view of space.

Orokin transcendence interface decoration
Preview has blue holograms on it, but the item once placed doesn't, should match each other, not sure which version is correct, or maybe have both?

K-drive skate park
Adding one or more big rooms (probably about customizable obstacle course sized?) to your dojo designed for k-drive races and or k-drive stunts either as a pre-made thing like the old obstacle course or something more "free form" like the new configurable obstacle course. (Or why not both?) Archwing would also be cool but I can't see fitting a room big enough to let you fly straight for more than a couple seconds into a dojo sadly.

2x2 reactor
A bigger version of the reactor, could make it 4x the materials and energy output of a normal one or 8x if you're feeling generous, would be useful to cut down on the need for a floor with massive amounts of cross connectors and reactors hidden away somewhere eating into your room limit. To further aid this would be nice if they weren't dead ends so you could build them without connectors.

Taller elevators
Make elevators taller and faster to make vertially big rooms not intersect when one floor apart, effectively increasing the floor spacing to match worst case scenario requirements to not make rooms clip, increasing the speed of the elevator to make you arrive in the same amount of time would avoid increased travel times form the additional height would seem prudent.

Multi-floor elevators
Give the ability to extend elevators straight down/up to the next floor and give the player a menu to pick what floor to go to. Names of the floors could be written by the architect when extended, or changed later.

Open the orokin lab shutters, you said you would.
*taps foot*

Better integration of orbiter decorations
Would be nice if we could just browse and buy orbiter decorations in the dojo same as in orbiter to reduce the number of steps of adding orbiter decorations to the dojo. Buying an orbiter decoration in dojo would automatically donate it and let you place it instantly.

Rename "Bio", "Chem" & "Energy" labs
Pretty please, other 2 is tenno and orokin, why not do infested, grineer and corpus? Would fit the other 2, would fit the contents.

White orokin data cables/tentacles decorations
Very key aspect of orokin tech, weirdly absent from our decorations, could be set up like the pipes of the corpus and grineer sets with 2 or more variants that end up in the same end-points, one "simple" that just goes there fairly straight and sensibly and one "kinked" that does a loop or U turn while still starting and ending at the same points in space to make more organic looking runs than just the perfectly straight pipes, a couple variants per shape to allow for variations combined with rotation to obfuscate re-use.

List of wanted decorations Rapid fire list of decorations I'd like added that don't need any/much explanation.

  • Lanterns on the water in one of the gardens.
  • Lanterns hanging from the wooden arches in the same garden.
  • Orb Vallis and Plains of Eidolon flora, fauna, fungi, rocks, eidolon bones, etc, I know some PoE assets are already in but I'd argue a fair amount of assets that would work nicely as decorations still out there untapped, and almost nothing from OV in dojos.
  • Fish tanks to put your fish in like in your orbiter. Could have different sizes, different contents like rocks, plants, etc
  • Terrariums for conservation fauna. Same idea as the fish tank, could have different interior terrain and objects like rocks and plants. (a "slice" of PoE/OV) Could use the conservation tags as proxy to use for putting into the inventory of the terrarium like you put fish in tanks.
  • Flowing lava similar to the waterfall along with other liquids that makes sense, color option perhaps?
  • Lilypads, fish, wooden walkways etc for placing on/in water like the garden ones but made decorations you can use yourself.
  • Orokin's big kinetic sculptures, not ayatans, the much bigger ones in orokin tilesets, one has big spinning rings, one has long pointy elements that spin in a circle/sphere etc.
  • Bunch of architectural elements from orokin tower tileset, metal domes made from 4 sections, white domes with gold trim, curved walls, gold poles attached to stairs with a light on top, thin gold rod shaped like the pointy half of an onion, round pillars, big complex round "dishes" used as big center pieces on walls, or for big white trees etc.
Edited by KriLL3
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I intended on going through these point by point, but then I saw how many points there were. You've provided a lot of good feedback, and I don't want to see yet another dojo thread get lost in the abyss of nobody responding to it. (Made a thread on some of these points myself yesterday, that's already slid down into page 2 without a single reply, people just don't seem to care all that much about dojos)

I can only say I agree with most, if not all of your points. The only thing I'm skeptical about is the 100-room limit. Maybe that's simply there for a reason, and I'm not quite sure if it would be manageable to even increase that further. Maybe server load won't allow it, or it could increase dojo load times to insane amounts, I don't know, but this is the only limitation I'm guessing is there for a reason.

I'm not entirely sure, but maybe the lack of responses to these types of threads is simply indicative of the relatively low interest in dojo content as a whole, so maybe it's just not worthwhile for DE to invest too much time into any of this. Having said that, if there's anything I'd like most it would be for what you called "sheets of water". I've thought about this as well, a lot, in fact, as me trying to make any part of my dojo to appear as being "water" has been the greatest hurdle I've faced so far. I've been dabbling with various sizes and arrays of "gentle waterfalls" to achieve this effect, but to be honest, that is completely and utterly ineffective, and once you do manage to make something look semi-decent you'll often need about 40 or so of these waterfalls to achieve anything that looks even remotely decent. 

I don't think, however, renaming the energy lab etc. to Corpus, Grineer & infested would make sense. It's not a grineer, corpus, or infested lab, it's a Tenno lab replicating their technology, so calling it "infested" would be akin to saying it's a lab made by, and belonging to, the infested. Doesn't make sense. 

Opting for a different skybox was something I've never thought about though; that's a really interesting suggestion that might just spice things up a bit.

All in all, great thread. Thanks for taking the effort you put into writing that all up.

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1 hour ago, Salenzar said:

I intended on going through these point by point, but then I saw how many points there were. You've provided a lot of good feedback, and I don't want to see yet another dojo thread get lost in the abyss of nobody responding to it. (Made a thread on some of these points myself yesterday, that's already slid down into page 2 without a single reply, people just don't seem to care all that much about dojos)

I think the main problem is that dojo doesn't have it's own sub-forum, thus gets buried in "general" I think people enjoy dojos but the number of people that actively work on them isn't that high, so other threads in general will quickly bury dojo stuff.

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I can only say I agree with most, if not all of your points. The only thing I'm skeptical about is the 100-room limit. Maybe that's simply there for a reason, and I'm not quite sure if it would be manageable to even increase that further. Maybe server load won't allow it, or it could increase dojo load times to insane amounts, I don't know, but this is the only limitation I'm guessing is there for a reason.

I think ultimately the real reason for the room limit is to limit the total number of entities to keep track of in each dojo which requires database resources to store and process, however I think maybe DE could do something like give us rooms with no or almost no decoration capacity that don't count towards the 100 cap, or only counts as 1/10:th of a room or something as a compromise. Some of my mentioned ideas like "themes" / "tile-sets" for dojo rooms could reduce the needed amount of decorations by a lot if you want to theme your dojo and could free up some of those entities, ie instead of having a "tenno" cross connector you bury in orokin decorations to make it orokin having a orokin cross connector you'd not need to decorate it at all really to fit your orokin theme you want.

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I'm not entirely sure, but maybe the lack of responses to these types of threads is simply indicative of the relatively low interest in dojo content as a whole, so maybe it's just not worthwhile for DE to invest too much time into any of this. Having said that, if there's anything I'd like most it would be for what you called "sheets of water". I've thought about this as well, a lot, in fact, as me trying to make any part of my dojo to appear as being "water" has been the greatest hurdle I've faced so far. I've been dabbling with various sizes and arrays of "gentle waterfalls" to achieve this effect, but to be honest, that is completely and utterly ineffective, and once you do manage to make something look semi-decent you'll often need about 40 or so of these waterfalls to achieve anything that looks even remotely decent.

Yeah terrain and water are 2 big ones for making nice looking "natural" spaces without having to conform to working with/around one of the existing gardens, the ultimate would be some kind of sophisticated terrain tool where you can raise/lower the terrain, add water etc like in sim city/the sims/etc but barring that I think a square, round and long rectangle of "water" would work pretty nicely, round specifically to make round pools without having to hide the corners of a square sheet.

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I don't think, however, renaming the energy lab etc. to Corpus, Grineer & infested would make sense. It's not a grineer, corpus, or infested lab, it's a Tenno lab replicating their technology, so calling it "infested" would be akin to saying it's a lab made by, and belonging to, the infested. Doesn't make sense.

I mean the orokin lab is called the orokin lab, I think it makes sense to call the labs after what the source of the technology is, but that's my 2 cents.

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Opting for a different skybox was something I've never thought about though; that's a really interesting suggestion that might just spice things up a bit.

It just struck me was I left my orbiter around lua and entered my dojo and I think the current dojo skybox is mars? Doesn't look very nice compared imo, I'd prefer to "move" my dojo to Lua and have that big cool thing outside, also hence why I'm suggesting the ability to swap the ceiling lights for windows and the ability to place windows like decorations.

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All in all, great thread. Thanks for taking the effort you put into writing that all up.

No problem, been collecting these thoughts in my head for a long time and finally decided to write it down, tried to edit it some for clarity and joined and split some parts but it's still quite a brain dump.

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Everything in this post! I can think of a few to add to as well... The unused doors. They show up grey and ugly, hard to hide. It would be fantastic if, once there is not chance of putting something behind a door, the door just could be hidden to match the walls and open up the ability to build infront of them.

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