Wallpapers, carpeting, and modular Hidey homes

Ever visit a really nice looking hideout but it lags like stink and has hit the doodad cap before you're even halfway there?

Me: How did you get this wall-to-wall carpeting texture in the Haunted Hideout

THem: Oh I manually placed 15625 pieces of lunaris carpeting side-by-side, was a huge pain

And they don't have any room left to add any decoration. So it's a big ...ballroom.

Proposal: Instead of forcing hideout decorators to use dozens or hundreds of premade objects on the floor to create a ground texture, let us purchase, unlock, or craft texture files we can apply in a separate step of HO decoration.

This would be a small image file, maybe 256 x 256, that seamlessly tiles with all its neighbours to create a unified texture. IT doesn't even have to be bump-mapped although that would be real nice.

Examples that come to mind:

--The aforementioned carpeting. Stand in a room. Open decorations folder. Scroll down to the bottom - Wall and Floor Coverings - and pick a wallpaper and a carpeting/tiling design. Tick the box and it will now replace the background wallpaper of the room where you're standing; same with the carpet.

--Outdoors hideouts: Small swatches of texture that rotate and tile seamlessly with their fellows, in thematic sets: Forest roots, forest grass/ferns, forest spiderwebs, that could be one set. Another set might be snow, snowdrifts, icy patches, glassy blue ice, bare rock with snow scattered on it, and snow-encrusted underbrush.

--Wall treatment: a seamlessly tiling set of wallpaper textures that mix and match and can be applied to any bounding structure with the correct tags. Examples include Thicket trunks, Ornate Oriathan wall alcoves, Mossy overgrown stone wall, colourful Vaal murals, and barnacle/starfish/sponge encrusted sunken ship hull.

This opens up an important new realm of Design space: the Build-Your-Own Hideout.

Suppose instead of unlocking or buying a hideout whose barrier structures and zones have already been laid out and textured, fixed in place, etc. ... players could purchase building blocks to create their own layout?

Given an item limit and an idiot- and trap-proof minimum area size, players could build wireframe models of hideout spaces using partitions of standard sizes, and then apply wallpapers and textures to the wall and floor surfaces to create custom homes.

No longer would you be constrained to try cramming as many tree trunks into Undercity Hideout as you can wheedle out of Einhar's inventory. Now you could theoretically build your own framework for a real Thicket by buying (or crafting) and placing various curved and straight wall segments to create a winding glade and an eerily-lit clearing large enough to hold your LARGE map device, your stash, and the masters you invited.

Different shapes and layouts would give different effects. If you're cheap and simple, a single large room with all ur stuff with a little side area for the waypoint and stash. If you are ambitious, a space station with a central hub and a continuous outer ring lined with brassy steampunk greebles from the Syndicate Laboratory.

Players could create true mazes for other players to visit and solve, with a FAR LOWER entity density and GPU/CPU/Bandwidth load.

Hideouts could host some simple game mechanics based on placeable objects whose appearance could be linked to a cosmetic item, but have effects such as teleportation to a different part of the hideout, or a functional lever/barrier system for sharing strongboxes or recipes with party members. Imagine playing "The Floor is Lava" in your very own Caldera style hideout. Or Easter Egg Hunts using consumable terrain doodads that reveal or hide other terrain doodads and players can "see" or "hide" easter eggs.

Lastly, a pitch for Ambient Light as a separate doodad. Let players unlock or craft or purchase a lighting schema for their hideout that meets their needs.

--Light colour
--Intensity
--Ambient or reflected light level, colour, intensity
--Bloom and fog
--Azimuth and elevation of incoming primary light source. I want to see the Lush Hideout under a moonlit night, or the Desert at sunset, and am willing to pay to have more fine control over the lighting effects where I spend 70% of my time when not mapping.