Guild Halls-

besides all the (wonderful!) furniture ideas:

Let's improve/change the guild hall itself!

4 things:

-Balcony
-Room Roofs
-Environments and Themes isolated to single rooms (also more themes).
-Speed Zones

== Balcony ====================================================================================

Remember the old days of guild halls? No?
Okay, here's a screen shot.

This is heavily cropped from the HQest image I could find, cause I'm too lazy to get on my old comp for pics. But that should jog the memory enough/get what I'm talking about across for new players.

Have a balcony similar to that one be an install option for every full floor after 2F (east and west wings) have been installed. If you wish to expand, you'll automatically poof the balcony, but you'll retain permission to install it again on the next level (for free, since you bought it already), once all rooms on that level have been installed.

Primary Features: top-down views into the depths of the clockworks.

Changes from the old: more elaborate, beautiful artwork. The floor could be 100% see-through in some areas - a window to below, as if you're walking on air! The curved balcony itself could be one giant curve from the far west to the far east of the guild hall, with the top of the arch of this curve being in the center. walking into the area of this curve initiates top-down view, walking out of it, normal view. Besides the curved balcony, the area could be about ten tiles Xwidth-of-GH thick. You would be able to place furnitures here and so on. Furniture placement on the balcony would be limited, if even allowed, since the aesthetic focus of the balcony would be looking down into the works, not on shrubberies and such.

== Room Roofs ==================================================================================

I propose roof types for Guild Hall Rooms. These would be 9x9 to cover the room exactly. They'd come in a variety of forms and styles.

Mechanics: you can't see anything under the roof (unless it's a glass dome roof, or ice, etc.) if you're not under the roof. Walking under the roof makes it fade away completely, as if it isn't there at all (the border under the roof is translucent, walking further under = poof, walking out = solidify). So, players outside the room would see an interesting roof, and players inside the room would see the guild hall as it normally looks in the game at the moment.

The roof has absolutely no effect on light visuals around the hall when you're under it, looking at other places in the hall that are not the room. Game logic, amazing!

Roofs wouldnt' be too large - just extending, say, 1-5 volume tiles above the room's walls, with the height only being far above the walls near the center of the roof. For a flat roof example, find a guild hall with Bechamel's Makeover Studio - the purplish-blue canvas cloths over the top left and right corners are roof-like. Now just picture that over the whole room, and with the fading behavior I described. Perhaps cloths could extend upwards in the middle, like a little tent. The Auction house has something similar, but those are not as good as an example for this idea IMO.

Roofs would have the same fading behavior in design mode.

Roofs would vary in expense and availability depending on type.

Roofs would also install support columns in the 4 corners (blocking a 1x1 tile for furniture) and archways at the entrance and side entrance of the room. These will match the roof in style - so, rocky piles of stone for cave roofs, Olympus like pillars for cloud roofs, and so on. Doors which limit member rank entry can still be installed, of course, they'd just warp a bit to fill the entire archway that comes with the roof. A full forcefield filling an arch would be beautiful, imo. And the roof would make the room extra special and exclusive feeling, since if you're not in a roofed room, you can only glimpse what's in the room through the door.

I would highly suggest matching roofs to themes (see below), but this isn't necessary.

Types of Roofs:

-Cavern: a rocky dome covered in moss and vines. Archway/support column art includes stalagmites, stalagtites, and columns - these drip water on occasion.
Variation: icy, fiery, etc. The cavern style will NOT change with the theme of the room. But, Dracora, rooms can't have their own themes! I know, that's part of this whole suggestion, see below!

-Cloud (puffy and storm types) - a large cloud constantly hovers over the room. The puffy cloud is white and glowy like heaven and such, the storm cloud is dark greys. Both clouds have movement, but the storm cloud "roils" with energy quite a lot more, with occasional lightning flashes. Combing the storm cloud with rainy weather for fun.

-greenhouse. This faceted roof is shaped a bit like a shallow, flatish pyramid, and its glass is translucent green. Would probably go well with a tranquil snipe garden.
---Variation: clear, blue, purple (fiendish activities? harrumph!), blue, glass etc.

-Lab Dome. A clear glass dome bubble - two types: just a dome and dome+telescope. This is one of the tallest roofs, being 5 tiles above the walls of the room at the center of the dome. Dee Dee, stay out of my laboratory! Combine with cooling chamber theme for extra Aperture Science.

-Woodland Roof. This would match perfectly with the feel of the Hunters' Lodge room. Thatched, triangular, slightly covered in nature and so on.

-Haventown Roof. These roofs come in a few different colors. They are tent-like cloth/fabric. Variations: one type is flat, the other is extended up like a circus tent. These are most like Bechamel's room and various shelters around haven (particularly as you head from the town square to the arcade).

Gloaming Roof: this is basically a tree canopy with a lot of vines (it looks like the dark trees in the Gloaming Wildwoods...that place where the Snarbolax hangs out in the "shadow of the beast" mission/arcade). It adds a little more than other roofs - several fat branches come out of the top part of the room's walls to support it. these branches remain visually solid, unlike the roof, when you walk under the roof. the four corner supports and archways are, of course, tree trunks. TREEHOUSE ROOM. NO "OPPOSITE GENDER" or "ADULTS" allowed!

SPECIAL roofs: for war room and console room. These don't have as many styles.

Note: the vanaduke statue's staff may very well poke out of some of these roofs. Highly amusing.

=== Mini Roof ===
Related furniture: 3x3, tall as an Ancient Bookcase, archway type structure - a miniature roof if you will. Comes in all available roof styles, but doesn't go transparent when you're under it. Anyone wanna play hide-and-seek? :D.

Two main variations: 4 pillars supporting a covering, or two walls supporting a covering.

The Furniture Placement Mark for the 4pillars piece is only at the corners, so you can put furniture underneath it too, as well as place a series of these right next to each other to make "tunnels" for those narrower pathways that connect everything in a Guild Hall. Fun! (these could also be placed in room doorways themselves with the current placement allowances -though the archways that come with installed roofs would block these tiles).

The Furniture Placement Mark for the 2walls is wherever the two supporting walls are (a total of 6 placement marks).

The Cavern ones would be so pretty <3...all vines and rocky and such...and a potted plant between the supporting pillars of each one. Such design! Wow!

Make a maze with the solids! Wow!

Scientific: these miniroof furniture could have pulsing electric lights in them, and be black/grey/white in color overall.

ALTERNATIVELY:
these "roofs" could be "huge" furniture items, 9x9 area of effect, that only have 8 actual 1x1 points of contact: 4 corners of the room, and 2 points for both entryways where the roof supports "touch down."

Even better, a version that can be rotated that has 12 points of contact: 4 room corners, and 2 for each N/S/W/E entryway touchdown supports. That way they can have their own texture behaviors that don't get confused with the "skin" of the hall itself. Also, this lets tents be placed in larger areas! Neat! (same going-100%-transparent-when-you're-under-them behavior of course).

any "walls" would go transparent when you're under the roof, so you can still place furniture within them, and it would clip in reality, but wouldn't LOOK like it really.

Yet another version is 9x9 with only 4 1x1 points of contact - these would be the tent-like ones (caverns couldn't really do well with this)

== Roome Themes+ Environments ====================================================================

Rooms could have the option of installing a theme and environment. This would only affect one room - the one they're installed in. Blending into the rest of the hall would be an interesting artistic effort. IMO, the room ends in the 9x9 area, and that little 3x3 area that joins rooms together is like a tiny hallway. So the little 3x3 area wouldn't get the theme.
If the GH has a theme/environment installed, individual room environments would override.

Things I would do:

spooky theme + cavern roof
rain+shower environment + cloud (thunderhead variant) roof.
And many others!

-New themes: aurora isles, Scarlett Fortress, Candlestick Keep, Boss Realm (especially JK palace!).
-New environment: Celebration! (confetti weather like you see in treasure vaults). = Constant Party Room.

== Speed Zones ==================================================================================

I often feel as if I'm walking the length of this Spaceballs ship (youtube).

Guild halls can get pretty large! let's add speedzones to them (cost: free, by default, once you get 2F and above, or make them cost things to install, I don't really have an opinion). These speedzones are one direction, and you can't get off of them until they end (if you've ever walked on an icy floor in the pokemon games, you'll get the mechanics exactly) - you don't retain momentum, so as soon as you hit a tile without a speedzone you stop.

Visual of Speedzone Area.

the bar on the left goes down, the bar on the right goes up. These bars are actually kind of already in the floors of guild halls, if you look closely...but they would stop at corners like they do in the pics. Since knights can totally walk through each other, this would work nicely.
As you can see, it spits you out right at the intersections. If you want to keep goin, keep goin! or if you're where you want to be, don't get on the speedzone again!

speed: almost instant/teleportation OR MSI max, depending on which type you install.

Visuals: just very softly, not obvious, kinda hidden, sequence of arrows pointing in the direction they take you. a very not-annoying pulse of light could go through the arrow sequence once every 10 seconds or so.

you can only get onto a speedzone and have the speedzone work if you enter the zone walking backwards (this would be stupid in real life, but I feel like it makes the most sense for the game).

So if you want to get to the top floor quickly, just keep walking up into the speedzones (backwards) until you get up there.

NOTE: if a guild installs speed zones, then any furniture on the speedzone area poofs into the guild's furniture storage as unused. No furniture (except snipes/things you can walk through) can be placed on a speed zone (you wouldn't want these to be blocked, right?)

NOTE: the lag! it burns! Vog help us!

REMEMBER: speed zones in GHs only grab and speed you if you enter them walking backwards.

== Other =====================================================================================

-Better furniture placement option, IMO. This would let more things be put right in the center where it's important, and people could still get to places they want to go.

== TL;DR =====================================================================================

More shiny things for GH, but they're not furniture. But that doesn't mean we don't want moar furniture and different kinds of rooms. And the hundred billion or so posts that want one of the alchemy machines in the Alchemy Room to be a pet food machine (IMO I just want a 2x1 pet food machine to put anywhere we want, or even a bakery room with all those sloshy, colorful liquid containers, but whatevs).

Thoughts?