In October I got bitten by the UO bug and celebrated by customizing and decorating a house. This one I was able to document from start to finish, so I've included that video at the bottom. This picture is my favorite of the design because it shows the multilevel roofing I did. I'm no stranger to it, but something about this particular design makes me super happy!
The top corner, just for completion's sake.
Floor 1 - Entryway. Here you can see the outdoor walkway I'd had, as well as the 'spooky' themed decor I went with. If you look at the walls of the design as well you can see that I'd gone with the broken walls to add to the Halloween theme. In the top left you can see the beginning of my trademark runebook library, though I've yet to actually set it up. Somehow it's not as rewarding, since I know nobody will use it.
Here you can see my soulforge/crafting corner. I still love using benches to act as a shelf above my forge. Let's not pay attention to the fact that in the real world, storage above a forge would be very impractical. :)
Here you can see the library I set up for the 2nd floor, as well as the second story of the runebook library and what is intended as a vendor room and public service area, complete with portals and dye tubs.
Finally you have the master bedroom with a little reading nook outside. At this point I still use reading nooks to fill otherwise empty spaces. Outside you can see my little cooking setup. The bedroom is rather sparse, with just a bed and some chests of drawers, and the extra writing room isn't decorated very much either.
Most of the sparseness of this house is due to it not really being 'lived' in. In the screenshots of other designs, I'd fully used and decorated the house as I went about my daily business and had my adventures. Here, I don't think there will be much more to the house, so I went ahead and called it finished. As you can see there is plenty of space in front of the bed for me to add stuff, but at this point I'd reached a block in terms of decorating ideas. Part of it is the fact that it's been so long since I've done any customizing and decorating to this level. The rest is just that I know I won't really use this house. The world of UO is unfortunately dying, but I'll help it hold on until its last breath.
Here is an expected/easy way to design your L shaped houses. This works fine with pretty much any tileset besides the ceramic or oriental style.
Here is the same tileset with just a slightly different design. I suppose you could juxtapose the two archway designs... I'm just not that creative.
What does catch my eye and fuel my passion, however, is finding ways to make things that shouldn't work, work.
When I work with unnatural (ie: anything that's not an easy rectangle) shapes, I love finding ways for it to work with my roof style of choice. Here you can see that I made the little rectangle look like an addon to the house.
Here you can see I've extended the 'addon' roofset to meld with the 'main' roof. While up close it may look a little odd, in a full picture you would be none the wiser.
See? It may bug you if you look directly at it, but it's one of those things that adds to the whole design better than if you'd scrapped the roof and gone with a different type.
Anyways, this is a new tag I've made, so those looking for some inspiration for out of the norm roofing ideas have fun looking through here as I add on!
Have you ever wanted to customize your house, but had to deal with random stuff in the middle of your design that you really don't want to have to move around?
See this? Some of these boxes are too heavy to easily pick up and move around! Picking it up and running with it will only exhaust your character. If you have something on the first floor that you want on the third floor, but it's 30k+ stones, you have no choice but to accept that it's staying on the first floor or you'll take three and a half years to walk it tile by tile upstairs! Right?
WRONG.
See the first picture.
While we jokingly called it a forest and a masterpiece in this screenshot, it actually had a purpose. In committing a design that had a random item (say, a huge log) in every slot that we'd previously had items on, you move everything into the moving crate. For some, that makes it measures easier to then create your actual design and start fresh in decorating it.
This also saves you the trouble of having to try and grab that one silly plant or item that's floating in the middle of the air in your new design.
Don't look at me like that. You know exactly what I'm talking about, if you spend any measure of your UO life decorating/customizing.
