MAngband

Now we've seen the player shop in action. I love this feature.

However, sometimes it's hard to find the shops, and today town turned into 1 big cookie comprised of hard biscuits. So the litter in town has become immensive due to monster inventories also, the stuff never disappears, unless someone sells the stuff.

So I'd like to have either a sign-post in the tavern, or perhaps the doors to the shop-houses could be painted blue or some other color, so we know what/where to look. Only change house-colour if there's a {For Sale} item inside.

Just tossing out a couple of ideas.

ZAL

In PWMAngband, I use FEAT_HOME_HEAD+1 to display all doors of owned houses in black instead of brown. This could be done in regular MAng, and even extended by using FEAT_HOME_HEAD+2 to display all doors of owned houses containing items for sale in another color too.

Hi serina,

Glad you like the new feature! We realised pretty early on that it was going to rapidly turn into chaos with people trying to find each others shops.

Changing the colours of the doors has been suggested a few times, but I expect that it won't be very long before every house contains items for sale, so this would rapidly become redundant. Nevertheless this will probably be implemented in some form in 1.2.

Other suggested solutions so far are using the house coordinates somehow to direct you to the shop you are seeking. A central shop (shop 9) which listed all items for sale in all houses was introduced but later removed as it didn't really work to well in practice. Also an online map of the town (and surroundings) has been suggested which would label player shops and who owns them.

All suggestions welcome!

- Jug

After playing with the out-of-game online town map I can't say I really like it.

Here are some maps that were drawn by some quick proof of concept code:

North of town:


South of town:


West of town:


Using the in-game map instead has been suggested, and this would perhaps be more fitting,

- Jug

The real problem is going to be trying to find which house has the items you need. How about allowing shopkeepers to put up a coloured door based on what kind of items are there?

Maybe something like this: Yellow by default when items are for sale, Grey for armour, White for weapons, Green for priest items, Blue for potions and scrolls, Red for magic items, and Black selectable by players who have reached some maximum depth (like 3000).

There was also the idea of trade guilds, in which all players put their weapon houses in one area, all the armor in another, etc. This only really works if most of the serious players participate, because a lone wolf with the best items on the server can easily mess that all up.

Maybe a combination of the above?

Dropping items near your door to indicate it's a shop seems to be pretty effective outside of town, so maybe the weapon sellers could use daggers, the magic sellers could use CLW's, etc.

Whatever happens, big ups to the developers for adding these shops. It's the coolest feature to hit MAngband in a long time!

Hi Ashi,

Players can now choose the colour of their shop door!

To do this you must throw a potion at the door, the colour of the potion will be the resulting door colour (more or less). Potions don't always make good paint, so you may need to throw more than one!