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Rockford Plaza Mall


Anubis

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The most used NPC Businesses are Tattoo/Barber/Clothing/Plastic Surgeon.

 

Just having these four businesses next door in one building, would increase footfall into the Mall.

 

Then you can have player owned businesses around that

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When I was new to the server and had not figured out how to find work, I ended up accepting an automated job at the Davis Mall phone shop. It was up the escalators right ahead. While I was on shift it lit up, so people knew /someone/ was working at that mall. As a new fresh players over the following week, because I badly needed the money, I spent about 8 hours in that little shop before I eventually got a better job. During those 8 hours, I had... 3 customers. Two who was surprised that I was in there, and the last guy didn't speak to me, he ordered his phone and left.

As others have pointed out, when the shops are in mini dimensions, you will find yourself very isolated from the main mall itself, and people might not even know you are in there. The only way it could work would be to map the shops in the same dimension as the mall, but that doesn't work because the game really don't like if when you start getting close to 2000 furniture slots. I am not talking about lag, which is a creature in itself, walls and furniture simply wont spawn in properly at that point, and you end up with things like missing floor. Double so if you add 20+ people.

I love the idea of a mall, but I think we should nurture the individual shops we have on the server already.
 

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The magic fairy mappers at staff.

 

A project like that would take several hours over several weeks of somones life. It hurts my mapping heart just to think about the work that need to go into mapping a mall. I understand if there is a super passionate mapper out there eager to map a mall, but I worry it will be yet another gorgeous mapping interior that took somone dozens of hous only to ever seen by a handful of people.

 

Editing the Davis interior would be a possible compromise, but that building need a lot of work as it does not look very Rockford inside.

Edited by Natala
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28 minutes ago, Natala said:

I worry it will be yet another gorgeous mapping interior that took somone dozens of hous only to ever seen by a handful of people.

This pretty much.

Unless there's people ready to operate stores once it opens, there's no point building a mall really.

 

Realistically, these several shops should then open simultaneously so a mall-goer could go from shop to shop.

While in theory possible, this is a worse logistical nightmare to organize than the saturday riots (which was a singular event for a reason).

 

The biggest downside is the cost-profit relation (in terms of ooc effort and created roleplay).

Malls are... traditionally not directly known as the pinnacle of roleplay in gta history. Nor are shops the huge attraction in our current scenery.

This ultimately means a whole lot of effort in first mapping and then potentially operating would stand against a fairly average visitor count long term once the "new" sensation wore off to attract many visitors.

 

Last but not least, the effective attraction of the mall in certain samp-server designs attracted people because several things to do were possible only if physically present at the mall ingame.

Most prominently advertising and accordingly showcasing own cars/goods was restricted to the mall in lsrp, which ensured a steady influx of players passing by and creating the social hub in all its terrible facettes some oldtimes might still remember.

 

This wouldn't happen here, so effort to map such a location from server side would really be in vain.

If anything, such a large project would have to start in character and gather many many business operators to fill it and attract visitors with their activity.

Not by mapping it first and hope it fills.

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14 minutes ago, knppel said:

If anything, such a large project would have to start in character and gather many many business operators to fill it and attract visitors with their activity.

Not by mapping it first and hope it fills.

 

This is really important. Mapping doesn't generate roleplay, other characters generate roleplay.

 

For this to become a reality, @root, you're going to have to assemble a team of at least 30 - 40 players and a few administrators that are willing to commit to this project, for a longer term.

 

Start with collecting players that are willing to operate regular stores that don't require much planning to open up, such as a 24/7, smoke shop, liquor store, hardware store, Ammunation, phone store. They'll need someone to run the business, and they'll need staff. Then you'll have your niche stores, with owners and staff. Then you'll need at least a couple of bars, cafes and restaurants, because they attract people more than the others. Same story, owners and staff. A few helping hands that can fill in for people that depart the project along the way.

 

Next you'll need a team of mappers. At least five or six if you're going to do this properly, also with helping hands in case of people leaving the project. Mapping this is no small task. You'll likely encounter performance problems if you are trying to map all publicly accessible areas. It might even be technically feasible to mapmod the project instead of mapping it in game, but we probably lack the modder capacity to undertake such a task. Making everything publicly accessible within one dimension is crucial to its success though. Otherwise, players will experience an empty mapped building and just leave again, its chance of success as high as the Davis mall. There's also that one annoying issue of having to fit multiple business scripts into a single interior. Might require some development, who knows.

 

Might take you 4-6 months, but it could get there. Its not all gloomy prospects though. If it works well, you'll have created a place where players can always go to find roleplay activity. That comes with its own set of problems, but hey, its not fun if there's no challenge.

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