I logged onto Everquest 2 early this morning and went to place a book in our guild hall library. After placing it and having a look around I noticed someone had made a start on tidying the shelves so the books look better placed. I decided to continue their work and set about placing items on the shelves. This is where the pain began!
Bookshelves in Everquest 2 leave a lot to be desired! Placing items on the bottom shelves is easy enough but when you try to use a higher shelf you have to use Ctrl and mouse wheel to move the books up higher. This would be fine if the book would snap to the shelf when it reached that point, instead you find youself having to use the Ctrl + Alt + mouse wheel method to make sure they are flush on the shelf. To allow better positioning maybe something like a “snap to” key so that you could tell it to link to the nearest object, this would make placing all house items much easier.
There is also a problem with the larger bookshelf downstairs in the Tier 2 Guildhall side rooms. I have to turn my character sideways to be able to place the book on the shelves without it staying highlighted in red (meaning you can’t place the item). I’ve had this problem before with certain crafted furniture so it’s not just a problem with this specific shelving area.
With patience though you can achieve some nice results, I had to rebuilt a flight of stairs Wodge had made out of maple shelves which was not a quick job. To do this I had to use a crate placed at different points in the air and then link the shelves to the crate to get the right result, feel free to check out the stairs in the neXus guildhall on splitpaw (South Qeynos). With patience we’ve also managed a nice crafting area and Bar (credit for the bar goes to former guildmate and MMO Symposium writer Wodge).
To make it a bit easier for any of you Everquest 2 house lovers, here are the basic controls in case you’ve been wondering.
The options available to position items at the moment are:
- Ctrl + Mouse Wheel = Move items up and Down
- Mouse Wheel = Rotate Items
- Ctrl + Alt + Mouse Wheel = Move up and down slowly
- Alt + Mouse Wheel = Rotate items slowly
There may be others that I’m not aware of at the moment.
What pain have you experienced placing items in your MMO house? Any tips for me in Everquest 2? 
EQ2's main problem when it comes to moving house items is that, and this is going to get a bit technical, each item has it's own "bounding box", the physical size of the item in game mechanic terms, that is often a different size/shape to the actual 3d model we see, the bounding box is what allows the player avatars to phyically interact with the object, such as stand on it, but as it's often a different size, this is when "clipping" occurs.
I suppose the way they've done it is possibly the best way, minimum clipping, but sometimes awkward item placement, but it does minimise clipping, and it usually is possible to place items in certain positions if you try a few different ways of doing it (e.g when constructing a large wall, place the top items first..)
That was me who reorganised the library.
As an aside, it would be nice to group objects. Sometimes you want to move many items and end up doing 20 times the work.
If you could right click and tag to a clipboard, you could clip 20 objects, that change to orange for example and then you right click one and choose move, this then moves all of them on mass.
I guess it's a game and not a Lego style game universe
You've also forgotten the resizing key and mouse option, I think it's Shift and Mouse Wheel.
You mean part of the library.
Yeah the wheel resizing is a nice option, I resized a fair few of the books to make it look more varied.
There's a few mods for oblivion that add auto sorting book shelves, they're treated like a container, you drop your books in (of which there are many) and they appear on the shelves, no way to organise 'em, but it sure beats placing every one individually.