Shopkeeping Uniformity in SWG

- Rimarath - 14 January 2002 -

[ Other SWG Commentary ]

[Version 1.0: Edited version of posts from dev forum.]

Abstract

It would be cool to have the ability to work your own shop with an interface that matched the NPC vendor/shopkeeper interface.

Background

In UO, there are three very different "shopping interfaces": trading with an independent (game-run) NPC shop, which has a nice list interface with prices, icons, and names all shown in a scroll; trading with an NPC vendor owned by a player, which has a much less convenient interface showing only the icons; and trading with a PC, which is wildly impractical for actual shopping. I always like the idea of visiting a shop when the owner is around to talk to, but to do any real shopping in UO generally requires ignoring the owner for a minute and talking to the NPC vendors.

I gather that in EQ there is (or will be?) the option of turning your PC into a vendor when you're logged out. This also sounds like an intuitive and helpful feature.

Concept

In SWG, there can be a unified shopping concept:
  • NPC vendors owned by players should work very similarly to regular NPC shopkeepers (this should be easier to implement than it was in UO, where vendors were an afterthought).
  • A PC can actually work in their own shop, selling with a convenient, consistent interface from their stock, which would be the same stock their vendor(s) used.

If (like in UO) vendor functionality and that sort of thing is implemented with a script that gets attached to the NPC object, what I'd like to see would be the option of attaching the script to a PC while the PC is in their shop. Then they could interact with their customers both as a host ("welcome to my shop" and other banter) and as an actual clerk, which would really appeal to the shopkeeper in me and, I think, others I've known.

Rim
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