Yesssss please add alts as decor, it would be so much fun.

Come join us on the bastion!!! Ruinnation is growing, and we need people!!

for free stuff, http://www.swtor.com/r/hGQqmC

I hope it gets added in, i just want to have my alts in one place so it feels like a real legacy home instead of all being in their own ships all the time. /signed

It's even sillier when their ships can be parked right outside (on Tat and Nar Shaddaa) and yet they're suppousedly "out in space". No they're not Biwoare, their ship is parked right there. Lemme see them in the house

Edited October 2, 2014 by Pietrastor

I won't rest till Alts as Decos are in!

Innocent bump

I think this is a great idea, be able to have all of your legacy in one room instead of some clumsy half-arsed family tree that I pretty much totally ignore now. definitely a /signed from me!

This is an essential idea. Being able to stand next to a characters child or spouse seems a no brainer for a story or screenshot, but at this point our only option is to hide a companion's face and pretend they are someone else, or have someone else do a mock-up of your character.

 

My guess would be concerns people would just make a zillion characters and no loner buy NPC's to populate the SH's. But a reasonable cap of how many Alts you can place at once would seem an easy balance fix.

+signed

This would be great. One one floor, my Consular playing chess with my Marauder.

 

Downstairs, all my female toons and companions dancing, with my fat, sloppy Jedi staring at them from the corner.

Agreed, would be nice to get a legacy family get together

Can we get t-shirts? "Starbreeze Family Reunion 2015"

This is what I thought Stronholds were all about before I actually saw them; a place for my Legacy to get together outside of their abstract family tree screen. I also assumed there'd be ways to show off the gear and goodies you'd collected during actual gameplay. I like the hooks and the new decorations, but being able to place alts, companions with gear, and maybe mount a blaster rifle or two on the wall would do a lot ot integrate Strongholds into the rest of the game.

I would really like to see this.

Strongholds have some great utility, and I've really worked to utilize that, but at the same time, I want them to be more than that. I want to have a reason to go more than 20 steps into my stronghold, hit my most needed node, and check the GTN.

They should be a place to really display your "power base" like they advertize in game.

Yes, I'm slowly turning mine into a trophy hall from raiding, and that's a really great part of strongholds.

But this would be a whole other level.

By adding alts, you allow the display of our greatest in game accomplishments: Our characters.

And it gives us a reason to actually bother to decorate, as we can try to match the room the the persona of the character's we've decided dwell there.

In short, it makes strongholds relevant beyond travel abilities and legacy storage.

bump, this would be amazing!!!!!! would love to see my legacy family!

Devs said to on stream to tell our suggestions so BUMP. I really really want my own characters as decorations so I can see my entire Legacy family while visiting the stronghold. NOT as holograms of course. Can't see this decoration being hard to make, especially as all of the Legacy characters are already rendered in the game in Legacy Family Tree

I would love to see my alts in a stronghold, as well as the companions being flesh and blood (I'm okay with companions having default appearance when not logged in). I am thinking it might be easier on the database if the alt stayed in the outfit you created him/her with (instead of dynamically updating) and we just delete them and recreate when we want them in different clothes.

Great idea. +1 from me. I also like the no-holo idea the best, for me half the point of seeing them is to appreciate their carefully crafted appearance. After all, that's not just another smuggler standing there, it's my smuggler.

I would love to be able to place my alts in my strongholds, much better than trying to populate the place with NPC decorations or crew that turn to holos. I could have them standing around conspiring all over the place <3

Would love this to happen, it would work very well with the legacy family tree.

i came here to post a suggestion about making the companion "decorations" non-holographic, 'cos i'd like to see them all there hanging out in a bar or something, and have Kira chatting with Jaesa, or Bowdaar staring down Blizz, etc... but the alt idea is also terrific.

 

+1 for both non-holographic companions and alts decorations. also bump.

+1 for this, but it also needs an NPC count upgrade at the same time.

Some thoughts / guesses that I this topic brings to mind for me...

 

At the most basic level, what we're looking for would be a type of decoration like the pets / mounts / etc. which is only available to place from a particular character. Except that there needs to be some real data here, not just a reference to a generic placeholder.

 

I wonder how much flex there is in the data structure for placed decorations. Could they attach additional data to an object beyond just the placement offsets? (Name, species, customization settings, a set of gear.)

 

While the game can access such data from your legacy (as seen in the family tree screen), perhaps it would load faster with a relevant packet of data stored in the decoration itself. (Because instead of loading up a referenced character's file and extracting the relevant data, it would have the relevant data prepackaged in the object that was generated when that character was online and placed it.)

 

That same answer would apply to companions as well. Currently they seem to only really store a generalized reference and check whether or not the current character is capable of summoning their own version of that companion so the game can load in a generic holo if the companion isn't found on the current character. What we want to see instead would be that placing the companion generates an object containing specific data like the master's name, the customization, and the gear.

 

So when the stronghold loads it has that prepackaged packet of data for "Darthbob" or "Darthbob's Companion Ashara" or whoever else instead of needing to request to load Darthbob's data file and then extract the data about him or his Ashara or whoever else from that file.

 

12 characters and companions from 8 different characters have been placed in a stronghold? The game would not need to dip into those 8 different characters' files (likely requesting to load certain files multiple different times in some cases). It would just have that data at the ready.

 

Of course this all hinges on whether they even left the data structure open to having extra data stored for some objects or if they kept it pretty strict about the formatting such that nothing is allowed anything beyond some sort of reference code and some offsets.

 

On the other hand, if all they can do is store some sort of reference... Can they create a new data structure that is a lightweight form of the legacy's data specifically tailored for what would be needed to display them in a stronghold? Then the reference calls out to an entry in this lightweight database instead of the usual decorations database or the full character files. The data for the placed decoration is still just a reference and some offsets but the reference throws together the stored elements from this other database instead of just calling up a default model.

 

Of course then they've got to address when this smaller file gets brought up to date about what every character and companion in the legacy looks like. Logout? Login? When any piece of gear is changed? When a button is pressed in a new interface added just for this feature so we can manage who is stored in each of a very limited number of "custom NPC" slots?

 

I don't know how much of anything I've said is actually accurate to however they've actually implemented this stuff, but I'm trying to be practical about what they can or cannot do here. I'm trying to anticipate what their techincal hurdles might be.

While the game can access such data from your legacy (as seen in the family tree screen)

Pretty much the whole point. The game already fully renders alts and their curent looks. The only thing Bioware needs to do is copy+past this code on a decoration node.