Art: Plinth and Container Props

Devlog Dev Art
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I apologise in advance that this is not quite as exciting as Claudio’s concept art. But some people might be interested anyway!

I have been making props for the past couple days, so I thought I’d share some pictures of how that’s going.

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Here are some plinths. You’ll place items on these to show them off for sale. The base is stone, the top is metal, and it has a nice rich cloth draped over it to make your goods look luxe and enticing ;D

When I make a model I spawn a whole ton of them into a room so I can see it from all angles and make sure it looks okay, but because they’re free-floating objects and we haven’t set up sensible collision on them yet they tend to float, bounce around and tilt at silly angles which makes them look untidy. So, just imagine these plinths standing straight and even!

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These things are chests, or at least item-containers(they remind me of Ikea shelves, personally). Unlike chests in other games you may have played, you’ll be able to tell what’s in a chest just by looking at it - each of those cubby-holes is intended to contain a representation of an item inside the chest, so you don’t need to spend ages rooting through your enormous room full of identical chests just to find that one emerald you stashed away ages ago. Like the plinths, these should be standing straight and even, aligned on the voxel grid. And you’ll be able to stack them!

So, that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s a good start, and I will be sharing many more things with you as we go on!

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These look fantastic! I think the next construction on my build list is going to have to be a shop now! :smile:

I love the idea of the containers with things being immediately visible, but does that mean that each container will only hold 4 different items?

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does that mean that each container will only hold 4 different items?

Currently, I believe this is the plan. We had a discussion the other day about how stacking containers or placing them next to each other could give you a combined inventory to interact with, so each one holds 4 items but if you have a stack of 4 containers on top of each other then opening one would show you the total 16 slots between all of them, but you’d want to ask Ben or Ollie for the details.

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That looks so damn awesome o.o

How about armor mannequins which display what wearables are on them and weapon racks where you can display multiple weapons? pretty please. this is such a good start for my want to be a crafting shopkeeper :smiley:

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That sounds like a very well thought out implementation - perfect not only for budding shopkeepers, but also for anyone wanting to keep their stuff well organised and easily accessible!

For the plinths, will these be for displaying single or multiple items and will the cloth draped over the top be available in different colours too? I’m guessing they will work in the same way as a standard container, wherein you will need to interact with the block to be able to place an item in its container slot(s).

I’m really looking forward to seeing both of these in game!

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I’m not sure exactly how these will work! You’d need to ask a designer about that.

Yes! Well, ish. There are two versions of the plinth atm; one in red and one in blue. Red is for selling, and blue is for buying; that’s all I know right now.

But believe me, pretty much whenever a question like ‘can we have this in lots of different colours?’ comes up, the answer I am almost always pushing for is YES - just bear in mind I don’t always get my way because of technical considerations and the like ;D

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Our general design goal with containers is that nothing is hidden. If something exists we’ll try to visualise it, so you can see all of your stuff.

Special items get displayed (or sold) on plinths, other stuff gets stored in the little cubby containers and wearables will be displayed on some form of mannequin. Since you can only wear one set of wearables at at time it’s important to have a good way to display them.

This is a bit of a pivot from the chest mentality, but we think it’s good more cool additions than negative limitations. Still working out exactly how the cubby chests will work, but it’ll probably be something like: interacting with it shows you the contents of it and all its neighbours.

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This, for me, is much better than the chest mentality that a lot of games adopt as it’s visually representative of where you store things and makes for much easier gameplay. It should also take away a lot of the frustration of “which chest did I put that item in” syndrome :wink:

Great things on the horizon it would seem!

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The only problem I can see with this very cool chest design is storage of stuff like stone and dirt, because if the amounts I collect is going to be anywhere close to that of minecraft, 4 spaces of storage per block is not going to be anywhere close enough.

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I’m also curious how locking shelves is going to work.

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But has anyone said how many items can be stacked in each slot?

Maybe we need a large volume storage solution as well?

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I’m hoping that has been taken into consideration and they’ll allow for [x] stacks of items of the same type, but only 4 different item types per container, otherwise things may get a little crowded!

Ok … @James just beat me to it lol

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Does this mean that you have to own an item before you can buy it? or… how?

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Will both props be exactly alligned to the voxel grid or does the plinth allow for diagonal placement for example? Because sometimes it just looks better to have something in a corner that is turn by 45 degrees^^

@Zouls I don’t quite get your last question.

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she said that the Red ones were for selling, and the blue ones were for buying, i assume you need to place an item on the red one, which is why it is weird for me if you had to do the same for the blue, so say i need 10 dragon scale, i need to have atleast 1 which i can place on the blue pedestal then.

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Ah that’s what you mean. Yes, that’s a good question.
Because if you could just display any item you would know every item there is.

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Eh… yeah, which is kinda good and bad, on one hand it removes the mystery, on the other hand it is kinda neccessary if you want to buy very specific items which you have none of.

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What I took from that was the person selling an item would see the cloth as red - potential buyers would see it as blue… I could be completely of the mark on that one though!

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Might be it, but there has to be some way of leaving a ‘‘want to buy order’’ wouldnt there? i assumed that was kinda the point.

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Maybe you’d have a journal of everything you’ve ever seen or heard of. So if you read in a player written book (hint hint^^) that you’d need dragon scales then you’d have them in your journal and could display them.

Mystery is still there but you can buy things you don’t possess.