Workshop Furniture/Items for sale on Tower Express

I didn’t know if I could’ve put this on suggestions or General Tower Express. But that doesn’t matter. My suggestion was when workshop is item/furniture compatible, instead of being for sale at stores, it should be for sale on Tower Express, and will show who the item is made by, but it will say “seller” so I am saying this will kind of be like Tower Unites version is EBay or Amazon in a way.

We don’t have plans to allow for selling of workshop items, the current plan is to have an item like the canvas, but it loads any workshop model.

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Oh I like that idea!

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I was wondering how that was gonna work. Very interesting.

The only issues I have with this are it’ll probably mean people can’t expect to make things like custom seats due to the lack of interactivity, and it means that all models have to be public. What if I want to make some things for my condo which I also don’t want to host out to the public?

You should look into the Tabletop Simulator system and allow people to use pastebin and imgur to upload models and textures.

EDIT: Perhaps you would be willing to curate some of the higher quality items into the main shops?

Items with custom interaction will require a custom in-game editor which is something we’ve discussed in the past and shown interest in.

Yes, all workshop items will have to be public or at least uploaded to Steam workshop (you can use the visibility settings to disable public usage, but then players won’t be able to download it when they join your Condo). It is designed around Workshop being the storage service and the downloader for the content. We have no plans currently to allow for downloading from any other source or hosting our own file service.

It is also designed around sharing your creations with other players.

We’ve talked about curation, but we’d have to make absolutely sure nothing copywritten was used when curating the items. It’s still undecided if we’ll do curation at this time.

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You are setting yourself up to have your workshop filled with a wave of context specific trash, and 18+ content. I heavily urge you to reconsider this stance to avoid headaches in the future, as well as giving your players more freedom. The sharing happens at the level of the condo, and anything beyond that should be determined by the player. It seems tedious to just prevent players from using their own objects privately AND allowing them to be seen by others when such options exist.

Tabletop is able to utilize a workshop AND the means to retrieve models from a URL. I don’t understand why this is even an issue considering you wouldn’t be required to host the files yourself, and everything you want to happen via the workshop would still be entirely possible. (This link demonstrates the usage of the Tabletop retrieval model more clearly: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=268568181)

18+ content is not allowed on workshop and we’ll be moderating it.

Again, you can use your models privately, but only you can see it. You could also use friend-only viewing so people on your friends list see it.

I am very aware of Tabletop and how they do it.

Creating a system like that is beyond the scope of what we want to do right now. Our model importer system uses our own external tool that imports and converts them into our own proprietary model format that we can load in real time on Unreal 4.

Unreal 4 does not natively support loading models in real time (unlike Unity, which Tabletop uses), this is something that we had to code ourselves. So for us to add that feature, we’d have to code in real-time OBJ parsing and rendering support. It’s definitely not plug-in-play, there’s a lot of work to be done to make that feature reality.

Which is why we’ve planned to rely on making our own proprietary model format.

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There’s very little point in decorating a condo with things other people can’t see, so the system is basically “host your personal condo specific content on the workshop where everyone can see it, or have the content be obsolete.”

All I want is an in-between, I am fine with the file being downloaded via the workshop IF someone enters my condo to see the content. What I do not want, is for people to necessarily see that stuff within the browser. Can a middle ground be reached where these models rely on the workshop, can be downloaded automatically by anyone who enters the condo with the specific workshop item, BUT don’t appear within the workshop browser?

Steam workshop only has three visibility options: Public, Friends-only, and Hidden, so, unfortunately, an in-between like that is impossible without Valve changing things on their end.