A seventh Prestige Housing portal has appeared on Test and EQ2Wire went to check it out.

The new Enchanted Kromzek manor joins the largest Prestige Houses including the sprawling Mistmoore Estate.

There are going to be a lot of questions about how the new Multi-Housing works in EQ2, so I suggest reading the extensive FAQ posted on EverQuest2.com about it.

South Qeynos Prestige Home Access

One concern about the Neriak Opera House prestige house on Test was that the stage did not have any stairs to reach it, requiring feather fall or other floating to reach it. Also, the seats of the theater were oddly shaped, possibly trapping players. Haohmaru has checked in a fix (and provided a screenshot):

We have added stairs to each end of the stage. Hopefully we can update your homes before GU60, if possible.

We also fixed an odd issue with the lips on each seating rung. You could get stuck under the small overhang for no apparent reason.

Today’s update includes just a couple of bugs caught on Test:

HOUSING

• Prestige Home deeds are now Heirloom.
• Fixed a bug that would cause a guild to lose refund status when moving guildhalls.
• Fixed a crash bug.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

Hey, folks,

We left the HEIRLOOM tag off the prestige homes. (It’ll be added to them tomorrow.)

So for today, if you were planning to buy a bunch of one type of house and then transfer it to all your different alts, please don’t do it that way. Or if you do, please realize that the HEIRLOOM tag won’t be present until tomorrow.

For today, please just realize that each character can only own one of each type of Prestige Home. If you buy more than that, you won’t be able to use them.

As of tomorrow’s hotfix, you’ll be able to transfer any duplicates to other alts, if you so desire.

What’s a Prestige Home? After the jump…

Fr0m Zoltaroth on Twitter:

Servers should start opening shortly just finishing up internal smoke testing.

Naturally this would be the first batch of servers which were updated.

SmokeJumper has been providing frequent updates on today’s installation of Multihousing into EQ2:

Hi, folks,

Today’s housing feature has to do a lot of massaging of the house database elements. This takes a considerable amount of time (a bit like a world merge, actually).

This means that when we take servers down, they will be down for 2 or 3 hours while we do that process. We should have all the servers up by mid-afternoon sometime (Pacific time).

The servers that are currently running are Antonia Bayle, Barren Sky, Harla Dar, Guk, Everfrost, Unrest, and Crushbone.

The next batch will be Splitpaw, Butcherblock, Nagafen, Freeport, Permafrost, Oasis, Crushbone, Valor, Storms, Sebilis, The Bazaar and Vox.

So be patient with us a bit. Multiple House Ownership and Prestige Homes will be here today!

As to the question of exactly when the servers will be up (with +hours corrected):

Mid-afternoon sometime (Pacific time)

Add +8 hours in the UK and +9 in Germany to any Pacific Time estimate we give. So mid-afternoon our time is something like midnight or later in Europe.

Update as of 9:00PM GMT+1 (noon PDT):

Crushbone is one of the servers that will come up in the first batch in an hour or two from now.

Here are your update notes for today, April 28, 2011. They include the introduction of Multi-housing. Thanks to Cyliena over at EQ2 ZAM for the formatting:

HOUSING UPDATES

• Each character can now own up to 10 houses of any combination (as long as he or she meets the house prerequisites).
• House purchases are now based on alignment rather than citizenship.
• The marketplace house item limit increasers now only apply to a single house. Additionally, the marketplace house item limit increaser will no longer stick with your house as you move from house to house, but it still stacks with the tradeskilled house item limit increaser.

More information and FAQ can be found here on the Official Forums.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

Hi, folks,

Today’s housing feature has to do a lot of massaging of the house database elements. This takes a considerable amount of time (a bit like a world merge, actually).

This means that when we take servers down, they will be down for 2 or 3 hours while we do that process. We should have all the servers up by mid-afternoon sometime (Pacific time).

Let’s see…

ReItemization

It seems we’ve finally made our voices heard on the problems introduced by the extreme stat consolidation with the introduction of Velious, namely that not only all dungeon-dropped (Legendary, Fabled) gear from level 1-89 has completely ineffective stats, but that even the Mastercrafted gear from 22, 32, 42, 52, 62, 72, 77, and 82 are almost nonsensical in their setups given the changes.

Multihousing

Multihousing has been on Test and Test Copy for a couple of days now and feedback has been flooding in from players who are testing it out. Zoltaroth has been slaying the housing code demons and responding quickly to the bug reports.

Prestige Houses

Those prestige houses we’ve been hearing about have been unveiled, leaving no surprises. The Qeynos Dojo from Elddar Grove makes an appearance. It’s cozy, which is real-estate lingo for TINY. Hopefully in a later update, some kind of outdoor area can be added. The Neriak Opera House is much bigger, although again there’s no outdoor area, as these prestige houses were actually produced in 2007 before houses were opened up to ‘outside’ areas. Rounding out the new Prestige houses are the Maj’dul Library which will be awfully familiar for those who have completed their Tradeskill Epic (no sign of weighty tomes or menacing djinn librarians though). We haven’t seen the Maj’dul Bottle house just yet, although we’re guessing that it’s not unlike the bottle found on the shores of the Sinking Sands.

If there’s one thing that SmokeJumper wants us to know about the EQ2 team right now, it’s that they are more motivated and focused than they have been for some time now.

There are some truly ambitious plans (public and rumored) to bring us new raid and group content in the next two major Game Updates. If they launch in a solid condition it could go a long way to working on the sustainability of the playerbase who have traditionally moved on to other things a few months after each expansion, only to return when raids are added, for holiday events, or for the subsequent expansion.

In any programming, scope creep will kill ya, and as we’ve discussed in the past the original plan for Shaders (a graphical bump for high-end cards) evolved into something entirely different (a rewrite of the entire shader pipeline to revamp Shader 1 AND add Shader 3). It did not help that art assets continued to be turned in long after Shaders 3 had been adopted which were only Shader 1-ready, leading to hours of chasing bugs and very public hotfixes. Time that could have been spent polishing up Shaders 3 in older zones, including numerous house items which displayed poorly. Shader 3 has many advantages when it works well, but there are just too many problems for it to be a realistic option for many players.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

The passion to develop this game and make it even better is at an all-time high right now and SOE is supporting this game strongly. We have one of the largest dev teams in the company, and our product slate for the year is going to be tremendous. I know it’s easy to be negative, because that way you can never be disappointed, but sheesh folks, really. You’ve got a really solid dev team here and every single one of us wants the game to get better and better.

Regarding Shader 3.0, we’re shifting some resources around to start tackling it again, but there are many issues still left to address. It’s going to take some time. Just a warning that it won’t get fixed tomorrow or anything.

Such an involved change as rewriting the underlying housing code of EQ2 will no doubt lead to many questions about what has changed, what hasn’t changed, and what additional functionality we might first see in the future. In any programming project, just recreating existing functionality can often eat up most of your time, leaving little left to add new features.

An extensive Multiple House Ownership & Prestige Homes FAQ has been posted on the EQ2 Forums by SmokeJumper yesterday.

In brief, each character can have up to 10 houses. This can be any combination of regular houses within the cities (betrayal  and citizenship quests, which will be streamlined at a future date, will allow simultaneously owning houses in multiple cities), as well as ‘prestige houses’. Some of these prestige houses have been revealed (Freeblood manor, Everfrost summer house) and others have been hinted (Neriak Opera House, Qeynos Dojo, Maj’dul Library, Maj’dul Bottle). Within your 10 house limit, you may have 1 of each house type per character.

Players can now link their regular houses to prestige houses, and port directly to friend’s houses from their own house or even guild hall. This brings us a step closer to Guild Alliances, linking guild halls to facilitate grouping and raiding, but will still require an intermediate step of zoning to a regular or prestige home.

We provide the entire Multi-housing FAQ here for reference purposes:

Test and Test Copy will be brought down shortly in order to receive the new Multi-housing code which EQ2 code guru Zoltaroth has been beating on for the last several months. This is a substantial rewrite of the underlying housing code which will allow players to own up to 10 homes in different cities, jump from house to house, and also port to houses where they have been explicitly granted friend or trustee access.

Because there would be no way to reconcile the Live house data vs. the reorganized Test Copy house data, when doing a /testcopy of a character on Live to the Test Copy server, your house will not be copied over. Fortunately, vendors are being added to inexpensively buy houses just to allow testing.

Multihousing Feedback @ EQ2 Forums | Multihousing Bug Reports @ EQ2 Forums

From Zoltaroth:

Test-Copy will get the code the same time as test. However copied characters will not retain their houses from live. You will be free to purchase as many hosues as you want and play with the feature on Test-Copy though.

All of the underlying DB data has changed so there is no way for the houses to copy over when Live and Test are out of sync on the housing code. Once Live is updated the copy script will again copy houses (after some updates).

When exactly?

We are shooting to update test around 3-4pm pacific.

erm…

Some parts of the process are taking longer than anticipated. This will likely cause the update to be closer to 6pm than 4pm.

A lot of us have been putting 2 and 2 together and getting that Multi-housing would be included in the forthcoming Game Update 60.

So many of us were sent into a tizzy when the Game Update 60 preview omitted multi-housing and today when Zoltaroth, wrangler of multi-housing code, posted this:

Housing will likely not be released as part of a GU. It will be a seperate update with its own set of notes etc.

Fortunately, our interpretations that multi-housing was now far off in the distance were unfounded. Multi-housing is something we’ll get when it’s ready, and it’s not tied to Game Update 60. It could appear on Test as soon as this week!

I think people are misreading what I am saying. It is not part of a GU. If it is ready before GU-60 it will go before GU-60. Right now we are in the final internal testing stages and are hoping to get it to test this week. If any critical bugs are found then it obviously will not be pushed.

For level 86~90 characters, the introduction of Flying Mounts had a not unexpected result — the vast majority of ground-based mounts have been retired to player stables. Even mounts that grant persistent buffs have been eschewed in favor of the convenience and freedom of flight.

While some players have hotbarred different mounts to be able to choose from their desired mounts on the ground, airborne players have limited options. We can choose one of the 8 gryphon mounts available from adventuring, crafting, the collector’s edition, or raiding. At this time, the only other option for flight is the Enterprise-like tinkered C.R.A.S.H. pad available in the Velious launch days event and subsequently available during City Festivals in the first week of each month.

What a lot of players would like to know is:

• When will we see other flying mounts introduced?

• Will existing flying type mounts be upgradeable for use as appearance flying mounts?

GameInformer has landed an exclusive video EQ2 character artist Christopher Atkins.

This time lapse video condenses 6 days of work down to 7 minutes of video showing Yelinak being built from the ground up to full bump map and textures.

Time Lapse Video: Creating An Everquest II Boss @ GameInformer

Anobabylon from Oasis posted some questions about multi-housing coming in Game Update 60 and SmokeJumper provided some answers:

Q: While you are putting in the ability to own more than one home, could you please also add in the ability to share homes with other characters?

A: Prestige Homes allow this already. Add each character to the others’ trustee lists, then link the homes together via portals. Voila! Now your homes are linked and you can edit them freely.

Q: Change *Guild Port Doors* to be heirloom/attunable (heirloom selfishly because my main character buys all the doors for my other girls) rather than no-trade and let the location of our attuned guild port door be where the “Guild Portal to Player Housing” sends us to. This would allow us to use the “Guild Portal to Player Housing” to load in to whichever of our multiple housings we choose, or even into a home where we are trustee if that is what we desire.

A: More good news. This already works! You can place your Prestige Home portals in your Guild Hall directly, *and* the current “Member Housing” amenity now allows you to travel to any house that is linked in your home network. This can be a large amount of houses if you have lots of links and friends.

As always, this is subject to change based on any number of code issues, delays, etc. but we now have a soft timeframe for when Game Update 60, or at least the Multi-housing (the ability of 1 character to have multiple houses) will be hitting the Test server. It sounds like it may be on Test for several weeks for players to test everything out and make sure there are no problems with houses and guild halls. Undoubtedly a change like this requires major alterations to the database.  We haven’t got anything concrete how what changes will be made Teleport to Player House guild hall amenity, but we’ve heard good things.

From SmokeJumper:

It’ll probably hit testing next week or the week after. It’s a LOT of code changes, so we’ll probably let it stew on the Test server for a while until we’re confident we kill all the major issues and then release it thereafter.

Soon!

In the run up towards Game Update 60, there are several things of note regarding Player Housing and Graphics that we’ve been meaning to cover. These include House Item Limit Expanders, Prestige Houses, the Network Status Page, and also a tip of the hat to Ryan “Imago-Quem” F. who has moved on to PlanetSide 2 and incoming graphics guru Alex “GermInUSA” who continues to polish up the EQ2 graphics engine while adding new features.

Are you a dedicated decorator that likes to play with house layouts?  If so, check out Gracey’s course in EQ2 Layout Editor being held this Thursday, March 17, on the Test server:

This Week’s Topic:  New to the layout editor?  We can help!!

Time:   THURSDAY @ 5pm PST, 8pm EST, (Friday @ 01:00 GMT)

Where:  Test Copy server – Gracey’s 1 Room Gorowyn house

What to bring:  yourself and maybe some paper and a pen for notes

What level do I need to be:  You can make a level 1 char on Test Copy if you don’t already have a char copied over.

Chat:  If you come to Gracey’s house or let us know in either Antonia_Bayle.Homeshow or Test.Test we will get you a guild invite and we are using Norrathian Decorator Academy guild for chatting. Sending a tell to me around class time will get you an invite into the guild as well.

Fun stuff to come:  Tiling displays are set up in the guild hall to help you work through some of the most common problems – it’s in Halas if you would like to visit.

Reports on previous classes have been very positive.   Beginners are welcome! For instructions on how to access the Test server,  see page two of the original thread.  For an introduction to the EQ2 Layout Editor,  EQ2 Designers.com has a good tutorial.

So not everyone is enamored with the Flying Gryphons. Shock!

There has been discussion on the EQ2 Forums about the appearance of Flying Mounts, their origin, and when we might see either our existing flying-type mounts (carpets, hovering clouds, discs, and a selection of flying horses) become flyable as appearance flying mounts, or new flying mounts added as quests. At least on that last question, it appears it is only a matter of time. I’ve personally enjoyed flying on my 2 gryphons (I’m also working on the tradeskill one — although it seems we must repeat the 5 day training of our tradeskill mounts even after getting our adventure mount), as well as the  NCC1701A flying saucer pod racer C.R.A.S.H. Pad tinkered flying appearance mount.

Tom “ttobey” Tobey is asking for feedback on what emotes players would like to see added to the game.  Head over to the official forums and let him know your ideas.

Pretend I got sitting working…

What 5 emotes would you want to see?

Roleplaying type emotes I mean….

After seeing a few suggestions, he added the following:

i thinking more on the lines of /sit /sleep etc… /read is a good one.

From covic on  the EQ2 Forums:

Update is that we started them and where trying to figure a way around skinning issues. Well our new graphic programmer says he can give me better skinning code. Right now a vert (point at the edge of polygon) can only have two bone influences, making it really hard for long skirt type cloth. Well Alex (GermInUSA) our graphic programmer says he can get me 4 influences. It’s on his task list for about April. Then we will probably block more time for the creating of kilt art assets.

You will laugh at this, but EQ1 has four influences per vert, why we didnt get that, I am not sure.

Dave

From covic on the EQ2 Forums:

The classic looking Erudites wear everything a human does from the neck down. They also use the human skeleton so they have all animations of human character. The problem comes with the head. Since their code looks for human outfits they try to put on human helmets which their head would shoot out the top. We made some specific head pieces for them to be used as NPCs.