A Challenge for all you home makers.

[MalagAste]

These are the designs I used previously I was playing with building it in EQ Landmark using the blocks they have it's rather rudimentary but I think you can get the idea. Anyway this was the redesign I did of the Keep... Since I can't put doors in you have to assume that it would have doors in most all the openings:

This would be the front entry, note putting in a double entry and two side rooms.... Also I didn't put in the current stairs which would remain exactly where they are on the upper part of the large center room. However I removed the two useless side walls on each side and expanded the center room to each side and in the back I put in a wall between the two rooms in the center of that large blank area in the back making those two rooms more functional..... also I removed the stairs from both front towers as they were redundant and this makes the front part of the keep far more functional and spacious.

This was my proposal for the second floor. Note I expanded the center all the way back... this means on the roof you would have the two towers in the back and the entire center section as one large rooftop area. Remember also the stairs come up somewhere in the center of this area and of course you'd have a banister around the opening... But I think it gives you a good idea of how this could look. Granted you have to use your imagination some... I suppose now that we have doors and things in EQ Landmark now I could try building these again... But I'm hoping you can get the idea.

I would put doors on all these openings as well. Gives the owner more options to set security levels throughout making it more user friendly.

 

[MalagAste]

As for the castle what I'd do with it is merely to slide the entire center structure back to the back of the castle.... remove the door and wall at the bottom there along the North wall to make the downstairs room one very large room... Here is a very sloppy retool of the castle how I was thinking just the first floor:

On the second floor I'd kick that room all the way back across the back so it's much larger.... I'd have the sides still going out so it's like a large balcony on both sides.... then one long bridge going to the center of the front overlooking the courtyard. I really don't feel like taking the hours and hours to photoshop some more..... but I think you get the jist of what I'm talking about. This doubles the usable courtyard space and makes the castle far more friendly... I'd lose the stairs in the center though and keep the stair on that one side tower. I'd also put doors in all around. Those openings in the top need doors..... also I'd close off both the East and West hall entrances with doors from the bottom floor. This would make the castle far more usable and secure again allowing folk to actually set security to actually allow folk into the inner keep without having to allow them access to the whole building. If you could lock doors on the wings off then it would be FAR more user friendly. You could actually extend that entire inner keep all the way to the back walls of the halls. Probably would be more useful making the center room more of a T shape. Anyway just a thought.... I really miss that thing that we had before to actually build something. IMO it's totally difficult to try to do something of this nature without some sort of program like we had before for doing it. Trying to use Paint or even Photoshop is seriously frustrating and time consuming.

My proposal would be to have a DEV whip up some sort of simple building program where we could actually design something...... Or open some sort of Test Server to interested parties and allow the customization of Castles and Keeps or give us 31x31 and keep size plots to work with... If you did it that way you could copy them right off of that and I think it would be FAR easier to then put the winning designs right into the game. I personally like the stone of the current castles and keeps. But I think more of an Oriental type castle and maybe an Elven and Gargish designs might be really nice as well. I'd be even more happy if you put the tiles into game for all designers to use to make the ramparts of the castle. As is currently those tiles the 1/3 and 1/2 wall pieces are NOT in the currently available wall tile sets in the house custom tool. Makes building such a thing IMPOSSIBLE as it is. Also would like the walls and tiles used in Blackthorns and Umbra to be added to the tile sets we can use. I still to this day have no idea what you all have against us using the black walls. The cheap thin black tiles we were given with the shadow collection stuff is a poor substitute. It's also missing a few pieces to make it really useful. Anyway those are my thoughts on the subject.

 

[Viquire]

I swear by Odin's beard I'm going to come up with something. Probably after the expansion, just to be told I'm too late.