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Title

Bedlamson's Dynamic Merchants System

Author

Bedlamson

Submitted / Updated

01-23-2003 / 11-22-2006

Category

Scripting routines

Expansions

Works on all versions

View Code

BEDLAMSON'S DYNAMIC MERCHANTS SYSTEM - List of features

This system uses parameters set in either the merchant object's Tag, or a nearby waypoint's Name (to allow more than 32 characters). No scripting is required for this system to work for module developers.

Any or all of the following parameters can be set for each merchant independently.

Please send me an e-mail if something doesn't work like it says it should, or if you find a bug in the scripts or an error in the documentation, or if you have suggestions for improvements.



Self-cleaning Merchant Inventories...

- Make a merchant automatically clean out his/her inventory of items that have
been sold by PCs every time the store is opened.

- Set a time limit on how long items a PC sells to the store will remain there, from 0-99 seconds, minutes or hours.

- Randomize the amount of time above to be from 0-99 seconds, minutes, or hours.



Dynamic Merchant Inventories...

- Allow a merchant to have a stock of items that is always present, and one or more 'caches' of dynamic items that appear randomly.

- Set how long a merchant's store must remain unopened for new dynamic items to appear and for old ones to be removed, from 0-99 seconds, minutes or hours.

- Randomize the amount of time above to be from 0-99 seconds, minutes, or hours.

- Set the maximum number of dynamic items that can appear.

- Make items unique, so that only one of each will ever appear at a time.

- Set a percent chance for items in a particular cache, the percent representing the chance that each individual item in the cache will be considered for random generation.

- Limit a cache to only appear for certain alignment groups, specific alignments, classes, races, subraces or a certain gender.

- Link the above limits together, to make the limit even more specific.



Haggling...

- Enable haggling for a particular merchant, and set both the DC at which the Haggle check (Persuade skill + Charisma bonus) is made and the percent at which the prices are modified for success and failure.

- Set whether the prices only change in favor of the PC or only in favor of the merchant, and whether the prices only change on items being bought or items being sold, or any combination of those things.

- Set the Haggle Modifier, or the number of points difference from the DC that the PC needs to either pass or fail the check.

- Set the Pass or Fail Modifier, as above, only limited to either the score they need to pass or the score they need to fail.

- Make haggling cumulative, so that prices are affected more for each point the PC passes or fails the check by over 1.



Favoritism and Prejudice...

- Set a merchant's favoritsm and/or prejudice for certain alignment groups, specific  alignments, classes, races, subraces or a certain gender.

- Link together either favoritisms, prejudices, or both. This allows even more specific favoritisms and prejudices.

- Set the Favoritism Percent and/or the Prejudice Percent, which are the percents at which prices are modified for favoritism or prejudice.

- Set whether a merchant's favoritism or prejudice only applies to items being bought, or only to items being sold.

- Enable a PC to get multiple bonuses for favoritism or multiple penalties for prejudice, such as a bonus/penalty for both their class and alignment, or a merchant liking elves but liking Moon Elves even more.



Stealing from Merchants...

- Enable stealing from a particular merchant, which is done through a conversation node. The PC must have the Pick Pocket skill, and an opposed skill check is made against the merchant's Spot Skill (Pick Pocket Skill + Dexterity Bonus vs. Spot Skill + Wisdom bonus).

- The merchant gets Spot bonuses for favored enemies, being an elf or half-elf, and having the Alertness feat.

- Set a time limit for the PC to make their selection on a successful steal check of 0-99 seconds.

- Make the amount of time they have to make their selection random from 0-99 seconds.

- Set whether the PC can steal any one item from the store, or just a smaller item from the store (anything that is 1x1 or 1x2 inventory squares, and books, scrolls, boots and gloves).

- Set a circumstance bonus between +9 and -9 for the PC's Pick Pocket check.



KNOWN ISSUES:

- When a store with a dynamic inventory is opened, items are added and/or deleted after the store opens. This can cause there to be 'holes' in the merchant's inventory, or for items to appear on the next page of inventory even though there is room for them on the previous page. This could be solved
with a 'SortInventory()' kind of function. Another solution I came up with but didn't like was to re-open the store with a time delay.

- When a store with cache limits is opened, the content of the store will change for whoever last opened it. If another PC is still shopping there and still has the store inventory open, they may see limited items they're not supposed to, or the limited items they are browsing may dissappear. This could be solved with a OnCloseStore() event, and GetFirstPCShopper() and GetNextPCShopper() type functions. One alternative I came up with was to check the distance to other PCs, and assume that PCs within a certain distance were shopping at the store, but I didn't like this alternative either.

- There is a strange issue involving selling items to a merchant that has a huge haggling mark down penalty or prejudice penalty. If the mark down is too low, the PCs will actually get more money than they should, instead of less. I suspect this has to do with what the Merchant's Markdown percent is set in the merchant object, and therefore it can't be prevented through scripting, as far as I know. To avoid this, just don't go too wild with the 'Haggle Cumulative' and 'Unlimited Prejudice' parameters.

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Format

Module and Code

Type

Type - Other

Includes

BioWare Standard

Description

This script incorporates several merchant features into one set of scripts: Dynamic Inventories, Self-cleaning Inventories, Haggling, Prejudice, Favoritism, and Stealing from Merchants. This system does not require any scripting, as it uses a parameter/switch system similar to NWNSS, but does not require any heartbeats. UPDATE: changed the conversation to make better use of tokens. For search purposes: store, NPC, shop, steal, haggle, like, dislike, buy, sell, random, inventory, clean up, timer, delay.

Files

Name	Type	Size	Downloads
DynamicMerchants.zipDynamicMerchants.zip Submitted: 01-23-2003 / Last Updated: 02-05-2003	zip	278.87Kb	2461
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SCORE OUT OF 10

9.67
5 votes
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Comments (21):

Posted by Hillyan at 2010-04-15 03:28:17 Voted 10.00 on 04/15/10

10 cause this is a perfect system. I could suggest just an additional feature: if there is a way to make a merchant give only to 1 or more categories of items a big price. Just like the haggle function, applied to 1 or more categories of items like "ammunitions", "armors" and so on. I don't know if this is a good tip but this is the only thing that misses from this perfect system.

It is really incredible; 10 to the demo mod, that is simple and easy to understand. 10 to the scripts and 10 to the ideas behind the system

Posted by Narph at 2007-10-06 19:29:10 Voted 9.00 on 10/06/07

Good Description on vault 8.5
Does what it says 10.
Instructions 8.5
Demo Mod 9.0
errors 9.0
useful 9.0
Total = 54/6=9

Posted by Brintinacx at 2006-08-28 23:21:04

Crap! Sorry, she didn't vanish...she was roaming the streets. I had a custom "OnSpawn" script on here, but just added your lines from your script. Must be playing funny games with each other. Any thoughts?

Posted by Brintinacx at 2006-08-27 18:06:06

Ok, dont know if anyone looks at these forums anymore, but here goes. I recently added your scripts to my MOD, followed proceedure, made a merchant to have his inventory sold to him, disappear in random 1 - 4 hours. Well, the random destroy worked fine, porblem is, it destroyed my MERCHANT! Not the inventory! She vanished, bye bye. Can ya figure that one out for me.....

Posted by CutterShane at 2005-04-25 13:41:44 Voted 7.00 on 04/25/05

Posted by Silverti at 2004-05-02 11:08:00 Voted 10.00 on 05/02/04

Bedlamson --> Something that has bugged me for a long time is the script errors that fire off with the system when there are to many items sold to the vendor. They go away after time (I delete after 15 mins) but when you have 30 people on all the time, it can happen a lot. Is there a solution for this?

_________________________
Creater / Designer / Host
Adventure Island 1: NWN
Adventure Island 2: NWN2

Link

Posted by Silverti at 2004-05-02 11:06:17 Voted 10.00 on 05/02/04

I have used this Script in Adventure Island for over a year. It is flawless and excellent
_________________________
Creater / Designer / Host
Adventure Island 1: NWN
Adventure Island 2: NWN2

Link

Posted by Bedlamson... ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2004-03-05 13:25:00

Yes, there is a too many instructions error if you try to use a lot of caches. SoU and HotU have added some new functionality to merchants, so this whole package could use some reworking.

Posted by Old_Scores_Transfered at 2004-02-20 10:29:19 Voted 10.00 on 02/20/04

This is a compilation of the old system into a single score. There were 11 that made this score of 9.81 then rounded to 10.

Posted by Primogenitor at 2004-01-14 00:08:00

Hi

This is an excellent script, really great.

Few questions though, I assume this is no longer being developed? Any problems if I develop it a bit (use toolset set variables instead of tag and add random properties to items)

Also running into some too-many-instructions errors when using in a module, and suggestions?

Posted by Fleshmelter ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-09-15 16:32:00

Well it appears there is nothing wrong now, I redownloaded the erf, and it appears all good. I also have a fresh install of NWN SoU as well, since my harddrive crash.

All seems ok, I have no idea what was the problem the first time.

Posted by Bedlamson ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-08-30 18:10:00

I just tested the demo module and it seems to work fine... are you importing it into really large modules? It could be that the store isn't being created fast enough before the command to open it is sent. Maybe try changing line 166 of the 'bdm_cnv_steal' to be DelayCommand(1.0, OpenStore(oStealStore, oPC, -1, -1)); Let me know if that helps.

Posted by Celeborn ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-08-23 17:30:00

Yeah, I can't seem to steal anything either. I've imported the store with no mark ups, and I'm pretty sure it is getting created when the script is run, but for some reason the store just will not open for me...

Posted by Fleshmelter ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-08-23 06:25:00

Is the steal store option broken?

Posted by Silvert ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-06-05 21:07:00

Ive been using this script for a long long time and never fails... I love it

Posted by Usheen ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-06-05 13:49:00

Excellent system. Added it to my mod in about 15 minutes. Great docs. Thanks!

Posted by Manora ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-04-03 09:59:00

This is GREAT! I had been playing around with this very concept and decided to check the Vault to see if anyone else had done it.

Well Bedlamson has and did a wonderfull job too! The instructions for installation and configuring are well written.

I had no difficulties with the zip file or importing the erf's.

In the game, haggling is transparent to the user but it IS working. To see the difference compare against a normal merchant! Also, the ability to "shoplift" is a feature that several of my -rouge- friends have asked for. Their gonna love this implementation.

I especialy like the cache system and the cleaning functions. It makes visiting a merchant much more interesting.

Thanks for a job well done!

Posted by Bedlamson ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-01-29 10:20:00

That's an interesting idea, and definitely could be done.

Putting items into a specific cache would be no problem,
and that cache could have whatever % chance and
limitations you wanted.

As for sorting the items amongst caches with different
limitations, that would be more difficult, but could
probably also be done. I would want to have a way to make
limitations work more cleanly first, though. Right now
there can be strange results if more than one PC is
shopping at the store. I'm tempted to test to see if
there are PCs that don't meet the limitations within a
certain distance when the store opens, but that would
depend on if there is a definite distance you have to be
within a merchant to have the store open.

If anyone has any insights for this, let me know here or
by e-mail.

Posted by Shadow-Servant ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-01-29 05:03:00

Well, all in all this looks pretty tight. I'm going to
download it and play around a little when I get the chance,
but I have a question. Is it possible to place any items a
PC sells into it's own cache? Or even into the proper
alignment or racial cache? That way you don't have to
worry about it being permanently gone, but when he shuffles
his inventory, there's a chance of getting that wonderful
item back from him. (allow it so after X time has passed,
he doesn't delete the item, he moves it into a cache. the
n, after another X time has passed, say 10 hours in a PW,
he will remove it completely. is that possible?)

Thanks for your time, Shadow

-Serve the shadows, as they conceal your attacks as well as
your retreat.

Posted by Nelzie ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-01-24 22:07:00

Hey, you only put the README in as the "code" section...
You should mention that you need to download the file, at
the download the file link.

I can't wait to give this a go in my world. Thanks!

Posted by elandys ( ..xxx.xxx ) at 2003-01-24 10:29:00

This looks like a lot of work. Thanks, can't wait to see
it in action.

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