Of Dusk and Dawn - Day 3!

Day 3! I've put in about 5 hours of work on the dungeon fixing a couple of things and working on the gardeny rooms. I've got this area to finish up with walls, one more and then to decide on whether or not I want to cover the hallways! Then all the walls will be finished and I can do the actual decorating and then spread mobs... everywhere!

So today, I spent most of the time working on creating a roundish room to make into a dual garden. I know the palace HAS a garden, I should use that right? not this time! The garden provided is just not what I want for this particular dungeon, so I'm building my own room!

First I want to show off this:



Ceiling in my garden room. When you stare at it,t he clouds move and create some pretty damn cool images!

For my project though, I'm going for a duel theme, so a cloudy sky just won't do. That's why I went with this:



Here's the rest of the room so far.









I'll have to do some funny things soon to create small hallways from the hallway to the garden room. Right now I have a giant pole where my doorway needs to go and I can't really move the structure due to some other issues. I haven't fully decided, but I might put a small square room just off the garden.

Of Dusk and Dawn - Day 2!

Day Two into Dungeon Making! I didn't take as many screenshots along the way due to being buried in math and calculations for circles! But I think I am onto a very good start. Have a look at my second room!

First thing I did was take my blue ceiling in the front room and...changed it! I played with a couple of colors and finally ended up deciding on this:



I played around with the middle floor, but I ended up in the top room with the two smaller rooms. I couldn't decide where a chessboard would fit in here, but I decided it was best up in this area as this area was not big enough for the other two rooms I have decided to create.



I did all the walls up in white first and then swapped out one side for black.



After getting those in place I got the floors and ceilings up!





The chessboard where was a lot of the math came into play. If you do it right, it's rather easy to duplicate and replace items to make the chessboard. I started with setting 4 blue azure tiles at size 5 in the area I wanted the chessboard to be in.



After that it was a matter of laying out the smaller tiles to get the right spacing between them. After some long calculations and a headache, I settled on keeping the chessboard tiles at size 1. I removed the azure tiles once I was done, because I felt it just through things off too much.



Here's the room mostly finished now! I did up the doorways, but probably going to add and fix a couple of issues with them, so far they are big and easy to move around.







The two side rooms are going to play a heavy role in the "quest" for this dungeon! Both have domed ceilings!





I just love making domed ceilings out of stained glass tiles!



So that's today's work. Today took me around...10-12 hours worth of work with breaks and naps of course, but it still took a very long time. Tomorrow I will tackle the middle floor and then I just have the garden floor for wall coverings! Enjoy!

Of Dusk and Dawn - Adventure Into Dungeon-Making!

So with SoE starting up a dungeon maker challenege, I decided that it would be a good excuse to do some experimenting. Fore details on the contest check out here: Poet’s Palace Dungeon Maker Forum ChallengeContest ends June 10th. Not a lot of time, but enough to get something going! Let's see how I do!

I spent the weekend gathering dungeon maker tokens and having a peak at dungeons to get a basic idea of how mobs will work. I've learned a lot of What Not To Do with mobs and decorating through this little adventure. I got a ton of tokens and used those to buy up the Poet's Palace layout along with the other layouts I didn't have and a bunch of mob spawners! I won't be using a lot of the items that come as part of kits, I will be using house items, because I like house items and well let's face it, I have a ton laying around atm!

But this contest is not entirely just about decorating. It's about creating an adventure, a dungeon that's not just pretty and cool to look at, but makes you want to come back and see more and more. So I will be adding a little bit of flare and flavor text and I promise you it'll be an adventure. I'll get more into the story behind the dungeon later, but first, let's take a look at what we have to work with.

Poet's Palace 1 - Dungeon Maker Dungeon Layout



Hallway!


Biiiig Rooms for placing mobs all over the place.






Top Room with two small side rooms






A nice little gardeny area!


So that's what I've got to work with, but for this project, I'm gonna be covering the walls and floors so that you cannot tell it is in the poet's palace dungeon. You might be asking why, but...well there's a lot of space and I honestly don't want to use the layout given to me for this project. Since there's no blank island, I settle for doing my own thing this way!

Working with the dungeon maker is a bit of a pain, but once you get used to doing certain things it won't be so bad. You can use the layout editor to move things around, but there can be a couple of problems with that. note that I am working off an older version of the layout editor and this may have been fixed recently. be sure to check for an updated layout editor if you plan to use it!

For this project, my theme is Night and Day/Light and Darkness/Sun and Moon, which is why I have named it Of Dusk and Dawn. I am going to blend a lot of colors and ideas to create the vision I want to do this theme. I've already got the story/quest in mind for this place, but I'll reveal that later!

So when you go into the dungeon there will be some items already placed. You can leave these there, move them or even pack them away. They do count against your items count, but they do not appear in your inventory when picked up.

Let's go over a couple of things first.

How To Access/Create a Dungeon of your own:
Go into your character window. There is a Dungeons tab. Click it. There is a Create Dungeon button. Click that! It will pop up with a window where you can select your layout. You get a preview of the layout first. You have to name it before creating it, so get a good one!

Once you've selected your layout design and typed in the dungeon name, simply hit Create! And viola under your dungeon tab you will now see a dungeon listed! It is not published yet, you will have to enter it and then you can publish it.



To enter your dungeon just select it from the dungeon tab and hit Edit. This will zone you into the dungeon!

When you enter you can use /house and hit the pack all button. This will remove all objects currently in the dungeon into your dungeon toolbox. You'll still be able to access them, just they are put away!

Your toolbox will have all your mobs, bosses and dungeon furniture including house items that may be in your inventory as well. You can sort them, search for things, place things and pretty much do whatever you want with it! You can save layouts, load layout and edit them with the layout editor.



Note that you cannot enter a dungeon from inside a house. You cannot zone into a guild hall from your dungeon. You cannot use marketboards or your house vault while inside a dungeon. You will have to exit/leave the dungeon before you can do any of that! I have not tried it, but am pretty sure guild hall doors will not work inside a dungeon.

There are two objects, one of which you may wish to place before you start. In your toolbox there is a dungeon entrance and exit. I like to place my Dungeon entrance after I get a few things up and going. It works like a house entrance but you will have to right click to leave the dungeon. /house will bring up this window as well.

So for my own project I started with getting some walls and floors going in the first room, to play with, experiment and get my dungeon going.





The floors were a bit tricky. The layout editor doesn't like dungeons completely, so sometimes it takes a few tries to get things how you want them. note that there is and is not a moving box. You can pack things int he moving box with the editor, but there is no physical box to get them from. To get lost items back, you'll have to find them in your toolbox and hopefully select the right one. I recommend working with a small amount of items to start and watching your /loc to get an idea of where your items are located.





For my dungeon, I decided to add in a front room that won't have any mobs so that players can get oriented before diving right in. One of my main complaints is that people seem to pile mobs right at the beginning, giving players no room to get settled and have a "safe spot". I put this spot in an area where the floor is actually above a circular space, so when you first zone in you end up under my floor. Ooops!



I fixed that by placing my dungeon entrance on a place where my floor and the actual dungeon floor meet, which allows people to zone in without being under my floor, so if you do floor coverings, just be sure the entrance of your dungeon is on solid ground.





The room after this I did up in half black, half white and currently with a dome ceiling in blue.





I'm not sure what I am going to do with the hallways yet, but I left them mostly open for the time being, creating a doorway that hides most of the original decor, but meshes well with my decor.



Those two rooms took me about 4 hours to do up with a couple of mishaps. I found out you cannot craft inside a dungeon, so you'll have to zone in and out unfortunately. Park yourself outside a storage home or guild hall you usually craft inside and it won't be much of a problem!

Well, that's one room covered, I'll post more as I go along. Enjoy!

Soulfire's Finale

Name: Soulfireclub
Location: 7 Integrity Road, North Freeport
Server: Antonia Bayle
Decorator(s): Neversea and Lalayla Crimsonblade
Housing Leader Board: N/A

All good things must eventually come to an end. It is just a natural progression that things, even the ones we love so dearly, come to an end. Eventually the Soulfire will too end as things do, for whatever reason. It may not be today or tomorrow, it could be years from now, but the fact is, it will end, eventually.

Many many years ago, I meet Euryale. And I couldn't understand a damn word she said. Damn thexians. But that's not what this is about. This is about Soulfire. Anyway, when I met Euryale, I was just getting into RP and I had no idea who she was let alone that she ran a bar. A lot has changed since that day. And Soulfire has seen it's share of revamps since I took over decorating.

I'm still not sure why i did it, but I took up the task of taking over the decorating for Euryale late one night when she was having trouble with it. I don't remember much of that night except that I got to boss Eury around and involve her in the decorating process. It was a fun and yet sad time, but eventually I got something good going for Soulfire.

Soulfire has seen so many revamps. I was never really truly happy about a single one. I liked this and that, but not other bits and pieces and my god the walls of Freeport were horrible. The venue was small and hard to work with and when you got something good, there was always some sort of problem or issue. It was a nightmare, but I kept trying this and that, searching for what would work best. I even revamped for holidays! Someone people would just visit Soulfire to see what was new!

As I said though, all good things must come to an end. It saddens me, but I fear there is just no way around it. I cannot continue to revamp and rework the Soulfire, so this pirate must hang up his hat and call it finished--once and for all. I may add some things here and there, take out this and that, but for the majority, the main location of Soulfire is not going to be touched anymore. It was hard to make this decision. I love the Soulfire and I love surprising Euryale and the crew with something new and spectacular, but I can no longer do so.

With the introduction of prestige homes and the ability to own up to 20 homes, there's not really much of a reason to revamp the main location. Now, I can decorate at my own pace if I want to, drop in a portal when the place is finished, or even before! So even though I won't be redecorating the main location, you can probably expect to see some new decor in other locations, for as long as I am able to anyway.

I think I have gone on long enough, it's time to unveil the revamp! I thought about waiting on this and letting Eury see it first, but I figure she will see it tomorrow night. I do not know when they will use the main location, but it is there and ready for use. Enjoy!

Entrance









The Portaling room,where you can find all the portals to Soulfire locations.







Private Sitting Room





Management Office





The stage with balcony seating accessible by telepad!









The Midnight Garden



And lastly, but certainly not least, the Bar and kitchen.









Well, I hope you enjoyed the tour! Come by one Monday and see it in action!