[crossfire] specialised shops

[Brendan Lally]

On 8/16/05, Mark Wedel <
     
     mwedel at sonic.net
     
     > wrote:
>
     
      Brendan Lally wrote:
     
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      > On 8/13/05, Mark Wedel <
      
      mwedel at sonic.net
      
      > wrote:
     
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      >>  Looking over the patch, a few quick thoughts:
     
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      >>1) Why not put shop_greed as its own field to make it easier to pull that data out?
     
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      > well, the thing is that if I start doing that, it can lead to a stupid
     
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      > number of map headers. I have been writing in a prefered race to the
     
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      > things it can parse for, I suspect other things may be added with
     
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      > time.
     
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        I'd rather have a number of map headers than a long string of stuff that one
     
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      has to parse.
     
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     having just been testing using strings such as 
shop 3;8;33;34;35;70;109;111;130;race-dwarf;<3000
and
shop 13;14;race-elf;<2000

I am inclined to agree....

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      >>2) Another thought would be to add a shop_cap value or the like.  Right now, in
     
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      >>the sell function, there is a point where objects higher than a value become
     
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      >>worth quite a bit less (lines 155-160 in shop.c).  Having these adjustable based
     
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      >>on shop could also be interesting (high level players wouldn't find scorn shops
     
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      >>very useful, but places like lake county or brest could be more useful).
     
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      > And there we have another thing :)
     
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      > actually that is an idea I really rather like, I don't know if there
     
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      > is a nice way tell a player that they are up against the cap though,
     
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      > (maybe in the description in c_object?)
     
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        One thought, if not already done, is that when the players use the shop map to
     
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      enter the shop, pull the info from the map header and tell the player, eg:
     
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      This shop specializes in weapons, bows, and arrows.
     
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      They generally do not buy things above 500 pp.
     
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      They will not buy things worth less than 3 pp.
     
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        (better phrasing may be necessary, but you get the idea).  Thus very clear to
     
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      the player what they are and are not getting.
     
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     I am unsure about this one, what I have done so far is give a cue to a
player leaving a shop as to the shopkeepers mood, instead of saying
'thank you for visiting our shop' all the time, it now has things like
"The shopkeeper gives you a friendly wave." or "The shopkeeper glares
at you with contempt."

likewise I was going to have a cue in the description for the max
price (something like 'the shopkeeper says, 'this is more valuable
than most things I would trade in, I can offer you FOO but no more
than that', I would have an equivilent thing for things that are worth
too little.

getting the item types isn't possible as far as I can tell, the
correspondance between description and  number is in a series of
defines, and is stripped out by the pre-proccesser.

In any event I was thinking more of using some of the spare people in
taverns to give hints to the player (eg someone in a pub says, 'I got
a new pair of gloves from $FOO in $BAR yesterday, he ripped me off)

I've also preserved a degree of symmetry with prices, if somewhere
sells a certain type of thing expensively, then you know that they
will not offer the best prices.

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      > Yeah, I have the penalty for being a general store at 50% at the
     
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      > moment, that is trivial to change though if that is too harsh
     
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        Having that be setable is what I was thinking - then that general general
     
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      store may give 75%, but that membership general store gives 85% or something
     
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      (but maybe once again has higher minimum value it buys)
     
     
That is more a thing for the greed field, set it to about 0.9 on the
latter, and the same effect is achieved (that is why I added it in the
first place)

I meant using a define for the general store ratio, setting it to 1.0
would turn off shop specialisation by type entirely (though not the
min, max prices, greed, or racism)