Cleaning up the merchantlist table

[John Adams]

Originally Posted by site3op

An alternative would be to create vendors for the various casters that have to research or gain their spells via raiding. I don't think many would even mind if the price is high on said spells...

While I can agree that making things harder for people might cause them to lose interest, at the same time, we're talking about the base, core Emulator data here - not custom, low-pop servers. I personally believe it should be as live-like as possible - at the core - then each server op can add bots or merchants that provide anything lacking (like buff bots, or spell vendors).

Why even bother with Researching skill, then? Just put the Researchable spells on a vendor...

[eq4me]

I finally have enough data to compile a list of purchasable items.

http://80.237.220.68/files/allowed_vendor_items.txt

This should be enough for now to clean up the existing merchantlist table. Unfortunately I can not do this myself due to a lack of time in the next days.
Hopefully someone other has the time and uses this data to shrink the merchantlist table down. While simply grepping out all valid entrys should be done in a matter of minutes I guess you also have to recalculate the slot id for each vendor.
As soon as my time permits I will start to write scripts to generate the merchantlist table from scratch. On a first glance there are quite some merchants missing or the npc's are not flagged as such.

EDIT
Do the items in merchantlist_temp show up on the merchants? My understanding is that this table is dropped on an restart?
The loot_it seems to start at 10 and not 1 for each vendor.

[eq4me]

I've done some research on generation a new merchantlist from scratch this weekend and I have discovered that this will take quite some time. Unfortunately far more time I can spare in the the next few weeks.

So as an interim solution I am going back to trimming down the exisiting merchantlist table.

Provided you have both the peq-luclin-release file load_system.sql and my allowed_vendor_items.txt file in one directory on an Linux Box all you need to do is:

grep "merchantlist " load_system.sql > merchantlist.orig
for i in `cat allowed_vendor_items.txt| cut -d"," -f1` ; do grep ",$i)" merchantlist.orig ; done > merchantlist.new

The above will weed out any item id not listed in allowed_vendor_items.txt and write a new merchantlist table. Be aware that there is no change to the slot id.

Edit: Please be aware that the merchants in cshome and all customized adventure merchants and such will loose most to all of their inventory.