Featured locations are user created rooms that are publicly shared in Chathouse 3D.
These locations provide deeper and more diverse ways of playing the game and socializing. They also represent a calling card for thriXXX so they are carefully selected. Having your room published as « featured » is a privilege, not a right.
Featured rooms (previously known as « Beta locations ») are only temporary, so more players will have the chance to have their work displayed. The duration of the presence of a single room is highly variable and depends also, but not entirely, on the theme, amount of visitors, overall quality and players feedback.

While thriXXX admins will have final word on selection and replacement, your friendly mod/helpers team can be at your side in every step of the way when choosing the best theme, developing the room, and correcting bugs if you want us to. You can’t expect us to build it for you, though! It must be your work. There are no rules, you can even work in groups if you like, Room editor allows 4 players at a time after all!
When your location is ready, moderators will evaluate and submit your work for approval by visiting the location in Room Editor. There is no guarantee that a room that is approved by moderators will be accepted by the administrators. Admins are also very busy adding amazing features to our favorite games, so it may take time for approved locations to be displayed. Be patient.

The qualities thriXXX is looking for in Featured Rooms are:
1. Ingenuity. Creative designs and ideas will be favored, try and use the shapes in unconventional ways in your build.
2. Variety. You can discuss your choices with your favorite moderator and receive suggestions. Exploring new ideas is definitely the best choice. Creating a location with the exact same theme of another featured room, for example, may not be the best idea.
3. Correctness. Featured Rooms must be technically sound but that does not only mean being bug free. These rooms will be allowed large crowds of players and they also must be easy to load and well performing on medium/low end systems. There is no point in creating a room that is open to everyone but needs a super computer to run smoothly. Compatibility with a large number of players in the same room and very different computer setups will be the main issue. Basically your task will be to create better rooms with less resources.

Here are some tips:
1. The ideal Featured location should be created from a day villa or an empty room. Empty rooms are always the best choice since they will only show your own work and will be faster to load. Night villas and Fetish rooms require purchase, so they will not be available to all the players.
2. Avoid the use of mirrors as much as possible. They are real performance killers.
3. Shadows can use some resources but they give a more natural look to your locations. Try disabling shadows when possible especially on floors or where their impact is lower.
4. Use just a few lights, 5 or 6 in the entire room are OK. You can still use light emitting items and turn the “light Intensity” slider to zero. This will keep the object (lamps, candles…) but they will not emit light and will not impact performance. That works especially if you want to use many candles.
5. Animations have a major impact on performance. They load GPUs with work even when not displayed on screen. They are also bigger in filesize compared to static textures. Try to limit the number of them as much as you can. Ideally less than 5. Use thriXXX water planes instead of any water custom animation when possible. NEVER use animated pictures as metalgoss maps or normal maps.
6. Use 512 X 512 pixels textures only on universal objects. Bigger ones will not improve quality but will take longer to load. Make sure the filesize is as small as possible (with a decent quality, though). You can use online tools to archieve that like https://ezgif.com or https://compressor.io .
7. Limit the use of transparencies to a minimum. Also keep the size of the transparent object small. The impact on performance depends on how much transparency is displayed on screen, so bigger transparent objects are worse: Transparency Blending has a much bigger impact than Transparency Mask (you can find it here)
8. When adding music to your location, always prefer radio streams to Youtube videos.
9. Limit the number of textures to 256 or less. You can scale an object’s texture to zero on both X and Y axes to save on rendering resources, just use the color sliders to get the desired result.
10. Limit the number of objects in your location. 1000 objects are the suggested maximum, 500 would be better.
11. Avoid acacia trees, they are just not optimised enough.
12. Deactivate collisions and leave them on only on the objects where that feature is necessary.
13. Use as few floor levels as possible. Avoid number 0 as level number.
14. You can check ingame system performance while in your room as you develop it. If you are running Windows the simplest tool you can use is Task Manager. It is not very accurate but sure it gives you an idea about the impact of your room in Chathouse. Clearly you always need to consider the level of your system compared to the average. There are many other applications that allow you to monitor your system performance while gaming if you want more informations like the FPS. Some are free, some are inlcuded in the software that comes with your Graphic Card.

IMPORTANT: Most of all, before you attempt to create a featured location, we stronlgy suggest you read the sections of the helpsite related to Room Editor.
Here you can find some tricks you can use to improve your location’s performance; this page is VERY IMPORTANT TO READ BEFORE WORKING ON A FEATURED LOCATION.

Enjoy unleashing your creativity!