I'm working on plans for a small building with interior, and I'm running into a problem deciding between realistic contents vs. usable space. Has anyone found a happy medium between the two?

Right now, these are the three options:

1) Build it as per plan with full 3" high walls. Some rooms like the 2"x2" room would be very hard to use in gameplay.

2) Build 1" walls where there are full height walls. The gives division of areas, but allows easy access.

3) Mark the lines of walls onto the floor tile, but don't actually build interior walls.

4) Redo the interior and ignore things that don't work for gameplay... like toilets, etc.

Any thoughts, help, advice?

Arabin

Thanks for the responses. I have a hard time keeping my projects realistic. I start out with a simple modification and before you know it, I'm trying to create models from scratch and grab a few pixels at a time from various sources to make up the textures. I need to start focused this time

Mel is right, gameplay is king, so I will try to run with that theme.

My latest thought is to mark the walls on the tile that will be the floor, and then make the 3D walls as a single floating object. That way I could leave it in there for the aesthetic value, but remove it when players approach. That might be something I add later though. For now, I'll focus on modifying the floor I think and see how much time I have left.

Increasing the real estate would work, except that what I'm building, although it's nothing major, it's a building for a scenario I'm writing. I am doing it all at once, so I don't really want to enlarge it any more. It's already morphed a great deal beyond my original idea...

Arabin

2d Objects:
Top down view printed on a piece of cardstock or maybe even foamcore.

The 1" walls have always interested me, a bit of extra work if you still want a full exterior. but it jives a little better with my personal traiing and outlook of models.

In architecture when you look at a plan, generally speaking it is drawn as if the walls, stair and so on are cut off at a level 4' from the ground. This typically lets the plans describe what is happening at that floor. On a normal stair run you would see 7-8 actual steps before the stair going beyond that 4' height, allowing you to see the closet unders the remaining steps and so on.

This would allow for all the gameplay effects and give you a 3d world to play in. However, as I mentioned to do that and still make a 'scaled' exterior it takes a bit mroe work. in the lines of having wall guides to aid you in putting the stories back together.

I have thought partially about doing this exact thing with my existing buildings.

Heh, so really I need to do all three things and see how they come out.

1) Modify the tiles to give me an indication of the walls. This way I can play on the terrain right away.

2) Try floating 1" high walls and see how that looks. Spread the base to 1/4" either side so the walls are is free-standing. This would be multiple seperate walls as the doorways would need to be either a solid door, or the door cut out completely. I guess I could join a 2" door frame to a 1" wall, and try to cut and glue accurately enough to still have the door openable, but I doubt that would be very sturdy.

3) Try the full 3" high walls as a single insert.

I have a lot of work to do

Arabin