As you may have noticed, the garden has 8 large doors along the perimeter that don't currently go anywhere. One of the comments from the beta testers was disappointment upon seeing that these doors don't go anywhere. It was one of those things that I was always trying to decide on my own, without much luck, but now that the project is open, how it is done can be discussed a bit. At the moment, I'm dealing with 2 basic ideas involving how to integrate the garden exterior into one of the rooms. Although something a bit more surreal is an option (leading to the top of some very high mountain with a sort of cosmic looking sky), I wanted to discuss some of the more "normal" means of doing it.

I was thinking that the exterior of the garden would be part of the Blue City worldspace. This would fit the best since the landscape, sky, and appearances between the two would be very similar. So as not to invalidate the purpose of having the blue gateway, the garden would be located on an island of some kind. The two ideas revolve what kind of island to do. The general mass of the island would need to have room for a 5x5 cell area. (19968 units corner to corner with some space around to walk on)

The easiest option would be to locate the exterior area on a normal island, which is part of the normal grouping of islands that make up the Blue City. This island would be positioned quite a ways away from the rest, and have a dual purpose of being a sort of graveyard/sanctuary island. There would be lots of gravemarkers, a few tombs, and a small dock for purchasing a ride back to one of the other islands (once created*). This is the easiest way to do things as it doesn't require too many new meshes (just LOD meshes for the existing garden pieces, and some minor changes to whatever set we use for the tombs). This graveyard island was one of those things I wanted to incorporate into the worldspace anyway (being the only place in the worldspace where dungeons could be situated).

The harder option would be to locate the exterior on a floating island in the sky some distance away from the other islands. The main complication of this involves creating many new meshes to make up the ground of this floating island, and creating LOD versions for everything. As it is a floating island, it's more unique, but it also can't make use of normal terrain texturing. The advantage is that minor features, like falling water, small platforms, ect can be added to make it a bit more cool looking without having to add anything to the LOD mesh. It looks cool, and more magical, but requires quite alot more work.

Some size cheating can be done in all instances (making the exterior larger than the interior by several hall sections) since the exterior would look like the area around the garden, and look kinda bland to have in mass repetition. The repetition can be toned down a bit more using the graveyard method, since there would be more land to work with that isn't comprised of large statics.

I wanted to get some discussion on this before anyone even had any ideas regarding that worldspace. As that worldspace would likely be one of the best places for locating new shops and misc quests, it will probably be more likely as a next worldspace to define and open for work. Obviously, since I'm mentioning new meshes, it means I acknowledge that I will probably be the one to do them since I still have all the source files for the hallway meshes. For the tombs, I was thinking of making use of Hel Borne's Elven Tomb Resource or some sort of retextured mix of Alyied Ruins and Fort Ruins, or something.

* As mentioned Here the Blue City would be made up of 5 islands, 3 of these islands would be close enough together to be connected by bridges, the remaining 2 would require dealing with some sort of ferryman (ala Vivvec) to enter/leave. The ferrymen would go to all the islands, but those 2 would only be approachable by ferry (not counting it being the garden exterior). Swimming would be mostly restricted to only the area directly around the islands. The main reason for blocking off swimming is to handle internal processing related to what portion the player is on (and establishing some subspaces). The blue gateway would lead to a central island, near the temple complex. This means that 1 island is for the graveyard, 1 island for the temple, 1 island which is populated mostly by the elven races (homes and shops), 1 island for non-elven races (shops and homes (creates the basis for an opposing faction questline)), and 1 island either floating for the garden, or some other use. Not sure what would be done about the temple, but that's a totally separate matter.