Wrong Section? Merchant's Items Mislabeled?

[cavedude]

Slot in merchantlist doesn't get changed by the server at all. Once you assign it, only you can change it. I think the confusion comes because perhaps you are thinking slot is an id. While it could be viewed that way, its real purpose is to allow the world builder to determine what slot he or she wants a particular item to show up in in-game on the merchant's list. This would allow somebody to say, put the more expensive items at the top of the list if they so wished.

In-game items will fill in to cover gaps in the slots, so there are no gaps visually. However, the slot column will still remain the same. If we have items with slot 1, 2, 3, 5, 21. The items would use slots 1-5 in-game, but the slot values in the database would remain 1, 2, 3, 5, 21. If the server did change that column, we wouldn't have a problem with slots overlapping, but we would also lose control over item placement on merchants. We want to tell the server which slots to place items in, not the other way around.

[ChaosSlayer]

i am not sure why is it important to have item on vendor listed in SPECIFIC order in GAME - after all you not in the mall where they try to push all the jewelry at first floor and for shoes you have have to go to 3rd floor.

I realy doubt that in game vendors can posibly seduce players into buying their junk this way =)

after all -in game you have on vendor sort by name and by price

eitherway from what I see - any time you want to make some TINY change to a item list- you instantly break it - imho thats poor coding/design

[So_1337]

That is a point; items are sorted alphabetically anyway, from what I've seen. Even if you manually ordered items, is there some method for having them show up the way you put them?

[trevius]

As Cavedude already said, the option to be able to order the merchant list does have possible uses. Perhaps you want to have a vendor that sells free starter items and a bunch of other items as well. It would be best to have the starter items sort to the top to make starting out just 1 step easier. I can see definite use for this and now that I know that, I might just adjust my starter merchant's table lol.

But, I also agree that it is bad coding not to have it check the merchantlist again before adding more to the merchantlist_temp. It is probably a fairly simple change. Yeah, having the Database accurate is the right way to do it and I think it is important for a database like PEQ which shoots for accuracy and is used by a large number of people. But, for custom servers running custom DBs and merchants, I don't see the need to be quite as anal about it. It is a fairly minor issue to not have them in the proper order, but the bug that results is not as minor. So, if the bug can be fixed, I don't see why not.

Really, I could care less about if my merchants are in order or not. I also don't plan to ever completely update my server to PEQ again just because I don't have much need to since my focus is custom content. But that doesn't mean that I want some merchants to be broken if I ever enabled temp merchant lists. This isn't really an issue either way to me, personally. I am just playing devil's advocate about why it might be good to fix the bug :P

[ChaosSlayer]

Originally Posted by So_1337

That is a point; items are sorted alphabetically anyway, from what I've seen. Even if you manually ordered items, is there some method for having them show up the way you put them?

Better question: can anyone imagien situtaion when player opens merchant inventory and says:

"OMG OMG OMG!! A Rusty Bastard Sword!!! only 2 gold!! OMG I will buy it rigth now!"
<click>
and then (after purchase) player looks down the list and says: "OMG they had Rusty dagger for only 3 silver! If I only knew I would have never spent 2 gold on rusty sword! OMG I now have to go and camp large rats for 2 hours to get back all that money!"

I am honestly can't posibly imagine anything like that


Back from my days on LIVE I did ocasinaly found nice items on vendors - but all of them were player sold

[cavedude]

Originally Posted by ChaosSlayer

eitherway from what I see - any time you want to make some TINY change to a item list- you instantly break it - imho thats poor coding/design

No, you don't. Most editors should put new items in order at the end of the list. If you remove an item, you should re-order the slot list. The same goes for anything. Why do you think the PEQ DB used to have spawn IDs that were 8 digits in length? Because nobody seemed to care enough to keep the table organized when they added new entries or removed obsolete ones. It isn't perfect now, but just under 59,000 is a hell of a lot better than a max ID of 28,000,000. What it comes down to isn't a functionality thing, but an organizational thing. It just so happens that in this case, choosing to be disorganized will cause an issue with the functionality.

[ChaosSlayer]

Originally Posted by trevius

As Cavedude already said, the option to be able to order the merchant list does have possible uses. Perhaps you want to have a vendor that sells free starter items and a bunch of other items as well. It would be best to have the starter items sort to the top to make starting out just 1 step easier. I can see definite use for this and now that I know that, I might just adjust my starter merchant's table lol.

I do have soemthing like that on my server too. But I use a stand alone npc vendor who sells free (0 copper priced) items for beginers. But I don't put those items in same pile as normal items (with price)

Really, I could care less about if my merchants are in order or not.

well as a potential player (aren't we all?) I would be rather upset when I am trying to buy a Blue Diamond (for example) which normaly not sold by vendors (LIVE-like/peq DB) (hence player sold) and keep geting something else instead which is rather expensive, and keep loosing money

[ChaosSlayer]

Originally Posted by cavedude

No, you don't. Most editors should put new items in order at the end of the list. If you remove an item, you should re-order the slot list. The same goes for anything. Why do you think the PEQ DB used to have spawn IDs that were 8 digits in length? Because nobody seemed to care enough to keep the table organized when they added new entries or removed obsolete ones. It isn't perfect now, but just under 59,000 is a hell of a lot better than a max ID of 28,000,000. What it comes down to isn't a functionality thing, but an organizational thing. It just so happens that in this case, choosing to be disorganized will cause an issue with the functionality.

well I only use Georges Merchant Editor - so I hope it does the reordering thing =)

[Angelox]

Cavedude:
Is my 2 week old PEQ merchant list current, or should I get a new one? I have an idea, and am going to try it out.

[cavedude]

2 weeks old is outdated, but to tell the truth so is the current CVS dump. I'm just trying to get a few more things in, and I'll update CVS either tonight or tomorrow.

[GeorgeS]

The merchant editor automatically reorders the list so it's contiguous by slot number when making a new merchant or editing the list. I also added some code to reorder the entire merchantlist as an option, but I would only do it on occasion since the execute time is about 20minutes to parse and analyze and repair the entire table.

I should mention the merchant stand alone program is now depreciated, but now included in the npc&loot editor
Running the tool to reorder sometimes makes the window say not responding due to the time it takes to finish, but just wait till its done.
GeorgeS

[cavedude]

Making me use Windows. Bah! Thank you very much, George! You've just saved me a boatload of time.

[Angelox]

Wow, that was fast!
You know all of GeorgeS programs run well with Wine, I just haven't had time to figure out how to tell it where the database is, so I get that error.

[cavedude]

I thought they were C# based?