Joining condos in this current state of the game now has you waiting for a minute or two as the game has to catch up by downloading all the workshop models, and it lags the game out heavily. There are two possible solutions to this problem; one being having the loading screen take longer but ultimately loading the player into a fully-loaded world, or option two, which involves reducing the amount of workshop content the game has to download. How would that work, you ask? Well, in theory, players can submit their workshop furniture items to the developers via a forum post or developer email, and after a little review or scanning, the furniture will be added into the next update for units. Not only would this increase the amount of available furniture items in the game, but it would also keep everyone from only buying workshop furniture items exclusively. Now, this process would also involve a bit of time on the developer’s end, as well as making sure no licensed properties are added into the game unknowingly, but I think this would be a welcome change for the game. It would also end up increasing game size, but that’s bound to happen with a game as ambitious as this overtime anyway.
I have two remarks to add on to this
Firstly, addressing yourself; instead of relying on Steam Workshop models for furniture and decoration, why not use your creativity and build furniture out of the canvas primitives? I once built an enterable wardrobe using canvas walls and a double door piece. Also when attempting to place further items on top of Steam Workshop models, they don’t always snap to the mesh in the best way due to how their hitboxes are determined.
Secondly, addressing the devs; The loading of Steam Workshop models needs to be better staggered, at least maybe let the user specify a delay (in seconds) in between in each Steam Workshop API hit, and also at least maybe let the user specify an upper limit of how many Steam Workshop models may load in for the client in any given condo, I also strongly recommend filtering the visibility of workshop player models, I would be totally fine with player models used by non-friends not being visible by default.
while i would love more furniture items added more regularly, i dont really think this would address workshop item spam at all. a majority of workshop furniture models are ripped from other games, sketchfab, etc and so those couldn’t get added to the game officially. it also seems like a lot of work on the devs’ part to go through a potentially ever-growing backlog of community items to add.