I'll consider it, but no promises as I think it's more important to improve the main Enhanced Economy mod - and I spend too much time modding already But I'll look at how easy it will be to take out that parts.

As TheriN has pointed out, you can still download Gold Adjustment from Enhanced Economy's TESNexus page. The no-haggle functionality isn't as streamlined there though.

So I found it, tried it, and it works. But I'd rather have the version you're using in Enhanced Economy. Like you say, it's not as streamlined. If it's not too much trouble I'd appreciate it if you could isolate those routines.

Well so much for that idea. It seems the No-Haggle feature of Gold Adjustment isn't working when buying spells. I don't get that haggle selector popping up and all my purchases are at something like 51%. I know I've done better before with the particular merchants I just dealt with.

Hi,

Yesterday I spent time investigating an old (well, at least 3-4 weeks) request by Locksley:



The good news is that I have found out how the pricing of magical items works, and that I can modify them ingame (thanks again to the OBSE team :foodndrink: ).
Pricing of enchantments is completely different for constant effect enchantments (rings, amulets, clothing, armor, etc.) and enchanted weapons, so I will need to handle them in two different ways as well.

The not-so good news is that much of it is hardcoded, so what I can do is limited. When it comes to constant effect enchantments, the pricing comes from the effect, so it is impossible to differ between type of item. If I lower the price for items enchanted with Chameleon, this will change all items enchanted with Chameleon. For non-weapon enchanted items, almost all of their gold value comes from the enchantment, while for weapons, almost all of their value comes from the weapon's base value and very little from the enchantment.


So its the non-weapon items that is most important to do something with, especially if you use a mod that increase the enchantment cost, as it tends to increase the price of the enchanted item as well.
Ex: Assume you find a ring with base value 100, that is enchanted with 4% Chameleon. In unmodded Oblivion, this ring costs 360 gold. With OOO installed, this ring costs 2340. And with L.A.M.E. installed, it costs 12100!

Now compare this to an enchanted weapon like "Claymore of Winter" (20pts frost damage Daedric Claymore) that simply costs 4653 gold, regardless of OOO/L.A.M.E.

So what I'm going to do (I actually has it mostly working already) for non-weapon items, is to reduce their prices without reducing the enchantment costs. I can do this by reducing the different magic effects' Barter Factor, and then restoring it whenever you open the enchantment menu. I think I will not touch the prices for weapons, as they are mostly deliberately coded.


You're right. In Gold Adjustment, prices was only adjusted for a specific merchant when you started bartering non-spell. So to get correct barter prices for Spells, you need to first open the non-spell barter menu. As for those that don't have that - well, it's something I forget to add into Gold Adjustment.

So I guess you're stuck with Enhanced Economy for now if you want the no haggle feature. I am looking at the zero barter gold issue in order to get that completely fixed for the next release though.

Cool. As I am using both OOO and L.A.M.E. I see now why the prices where so sky high. I get most of my money from selling Enchanted Armour - but ofcourse the merchants run out of money faster than I can sell. The whole economy seems skewed, but then again during the middle ages the gap between rich and poor were insane, aristocrats buying a dress that could have kept a million peasants alive for a lifetime or more :ahhh:

This time next week I might be back at begging... EDIT - And I think gothemasticator idea is terribly.... GOOD I always imagined the vendor showing the gold he was ready to spend, but got more if the incentive was right (that's were your mercantile perk comes in). But still they might be a bit more restrictive with doling out money sometimes. END EDIT

Cheers!

That's great news!

I have recently installed your mod and am really enjoying how configurable it is. Great work!

I have been thinking about pricing, especially the pricing of enchanted and other specialty items. I think it would be great if you could limit the vendors' willingness to buy high-price items. Something like...

• High price item is defined as value = http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1040141-relz-enhanced-economy/or> 50% of vendor's gold at the beginning of the day.
  
• Vendor is willing to buy only one high price item per week.
  
• Vendor shop will close for the day upon completion of transactions that reduce current gold to zero.

Also, to limit the buying and selling of junk...

• Junk is defined as value = http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1040141-relz-enhanced-economy/or < 10 gold.
  
• Vendor is willing to buy only 20 gold worth of junk per week.
  
• Vendor will not buy any junk once current gold drops below 100.

Changes like these, coupled with your provided setting that negates the every-vendor-buys-every-item mercantile perk, could make selling loot a much more deliberate enterprise.

gothemasticator

Unfortunately I don't want to use it with that 0 gold bug. The main reason why I stopped using Living Economy was that I got annoyed at merchants running out of money. Having them start out with none is even worse.

Thanks


Thanks for the ideas, which I find interesting. I have some other ideas for making the merchants behave more realistic, and I think things like this will blend in quite fine. It will not be in the next version though.


I understand this. And I really want to find the source of the 0 gold bug. I hape a suspicion, but I need a debug log from EE when the bug happens to be sure. So here's a suggestion for a deal: If you use EE with debug on until you encounter the bug again, and report the debug text here, I will promise to make a standalone No-haggle esp unless I can make 100% sure that the 0 gold bug is removed. What do you think?

Well you're essentially asking me to start a brand new game. Again. Using EE changes the early game drastically for me, especially since I like the idea of using Living Economy-Items along with it. The no-haggle feature of EE makes it a breeze to get the best deals that I can. But since you asked so nicely I'll give it a go. Please explain again exactly what it is you want me to do.

Hmm, I just noticed those comments. If you're going to include conditions like those, please make sure they're optional. I would find them very limiting and frustrating if I had to constantly deal with them. I'm a pack rat and will haul out everything of value in a dungeon, even if it takes me 2-3 trips. If I could only sell so much per week to a merchant, I definitely wouldn't be using the mod. I'm already dubious about any mod that reduces the amount of gold a merchant has as that means I'll have a harder time selling my stuff off. The fact that I can have their gold reset every day with EE at least makes it tolerable.

I am also willing to help you with debug stuff TheNiceOne. I have an important exam this friday, but after, I'll have some time.

Should I run only vanilla Oblivion with EE?

Just to chime in and say that I haven't encountered the 0 gold bug....yet.

I set the gold reset setting to 18 hours, and merchants reset their gold appropriately, so far. Will continue testing to see if it pops up.

Thanks.

I want you to edit the EE ini file and set debug to 1 "set tnoEE.debug to 1". Then do as you did last time. And if you encounter the 0 gold bug, you immediately open the console and look at the latest messages written to the console, that starts with "EE:..." and report them here, either by writing them down, or by taking a screenshot and posting it. Please report all, after the one that says "EE:Activating ". Note that you can use PageUp/Down in the console to scroll, but I am pretty sure you don't need that.

Also, to look for a couple of possible reasons, please type (in the console) "show tnoEEM.investment_gold" and "show tnoEMM.merchant_index" and report that too.

I have a suspicion that the cause is that I check whether the NPC is a merchant by checking whether the barter button is visible, and if it isn't then I don't initialize the variables for him either - but I'm afraid that the barter button may be invisible for a few frames before it becomes visisble on some PCs, and therefore cause the bug. I change the code here, but would appreciate to know for sure whether this is the issue or not - especially if it is not the cause.

Hmm, I just noticed those comments. If you're going to include conditions like those, please make sure they're optional.

Yes, I will. There's a fine limit between realism and frustrating, and different players have different limit, so I make sure that things like that will be fully optional.

gitar1 and koldunic: Thanks. Please set debug to 1 as explained above, and look out for the 0 gold bug or other things that don't seem correct, and then give me the debug output. I think the mod is working quite well, and the 0 gold bug seem to only happen for very few players, but I of course want to make it work 100% correct, so any help in finding any remaining bugs is apreciated

I'll check for different merchants and situations!

Well I'll never remember those two so I'll just be sure to save the game so I can get back to you about them.



Couldn't you just put some sort of token in their merchant chest to take care of that?

koldunic: thanks


No, because that would make Enhanced Economy dependent on merchants having containers, and I want EE to work for all merchants. But I've looked at how the CS checks if the Investment topic can be enabled copies that and adds a safeguard, so I'm pretty sure I have it working now. I'm still not more than 90% or so sure that this was the cause of some merchants having 0 gold though.

Sadly encountered the 0 gold bug...

Gonna enable that debug mode and see what it says... might even take a peek in the CS!

So I just got some very strange debug messages. I decided to try setting my refresh rate to 1 hour. At the time change I looked at my console, and EE had several messages about trying to activate Fly Amanita, the ingredient. Needless to say it wasn't able to. I also had a message where it was trying to activate , whatever that was. Could that be because of the short refresh rate or is it something else?

PS: One more thing. I have the reset on savegame load set to 1 and when I load up a savegame I get a message saying EE: Initializated Merchant list with 0 merchants. I've been to almost every merchant in the Market district, shouldn't those be shown in the total? It kind of looks to me like that function isn't working. Just to be sure that the previous message wasn't caused by the short reset, I'll try an experiment to see if changing the values changes the message. Maybe there's a minimum reset value that the calculations need.

Well, with the default 72 hour reset time I saw merchant gold never reset when waiting over that period. Reduced it to 24 hours and it seems to be working as expected in terms of hard resets. The gold randomization makes the barter gold feel like it stays on zero too often when visiting merchants within a period before hard reset, maybe I've just been unlucky with negative random numbers? Gonna test some more tomorrow to see how that feels long term, only been testing with waiting periods in cell so far.

No. This is intended behaviour. EE keeps track of every single item you activate. It does so in order to adjust gold/remove items from loot before the container is even opened. So that debug message just tells the name of everything you activate, which is not a very useful debug message for others than me tweaking that functionality.

When you reset on savegame load, the merchant list will be completely cleared out. Also, when you load a save-game, EE checks if the refresh time has expired for any merchants, and if so, completely clear out that merchant's data (after having reset the barter gold). This is done in order to not have any save-game bloat. So even when you have visited every single merchant in the game, EE only stores the data for those whose gold has not been reset since last visit.

And with a refresh timer of 1, it isn't surprising if all merchant's gold has been reset when you load a save-game. Try to save less than 1 hour after bartering with a merchant, and then open that save and see if it instead says "EE: Initializated Merchant list with 1 merchants". I will take one more look at the init code, just to be sure too, though.

Anyway, I appreciate the thorough testing


Thanks. As written earlier, I think I know the cause, and have already changed the code to avoid it, provided I guessed correct about the cause. But since the bug only seems to happen with very few players (and not me), it is difficult to be sure until I get some debug output from when the bug happened.

Note that unlike Living Economy, this reset is from the last time you visited the merchant, not the first. So if you visit him every second day (48 hours), the gold will never reset - though it will normally go back to full in 5 days if you use the default time_factor of 0.2.

If you turn debug on, you will see the following messages when visiting a merchant, depending on reset status:

1. If not visited before, or if the data was reset when you loaded the savegame:
EE:Adding at

2. If reset time had not expired when last loading a savegame, but has expired when visiting the merchant:
EE:Found merchant at index
EE:Completely reset the merchant's barter gold

3. If visiting him before the reset time has expired:
EE:Found merchant at index
...folllowed by:
3a. EE:At least one day since last visit (if more than 24 hrs have passed)
3b: EE:The shop has had time to renew gold (if more then 5 hrs have passed, and it is a new day)
3c: EE:Barter gold changed by to (if not new day, or less than 5 hours have passed)
3d: EE:Setting merchant gold to (if less than 2 hours have passed, in which case there should be no change from last visit)

In case 3c, there will be some more debug messages between 3 and 3c, where the calculation of the new value is written.

Reduced it to 24 hours and it seems to be working as expected in terms of hard resets. The gold randomization makes the barter gold feel like it stays on zero too often when visiting merchants within a period before hard reset, maybe I've just been unlucky with negative random numbers? Gonna test some more tomorrow to see how that feels long term, only been testing with waiting periods in cell so far.

Testing is appreciated. It doesn't matter whether you wait in same cell or not. As for gold seeming to stay too often on zero, if you turn debug on, it will write the calculated value before the randomization too, so it easy to see if the randomization is the cause. Or you can set "update_random_factor to 0" and "start_random_factor to 0" in the ini while testing, to completely turn off the random factors.

Anyway, thanks for testing

A bit offtopic but tell me about it. Having a bug in your mod is one thing but having a bug you cannot reproduce yourself is a whole other story.

Slightly more on topic about the haggle/details button, if you want to remove the small delay when changing the name you could (optionally) provide an altered strings.xml with EE. It is used by many menus and, as the name suggest, contains all the strings used by Oblivion's XML (well most of them). All english games should have the exact same file so there shouldn't be any harm in providing the file with just a changed haggle button string. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to change them by script (there is no menumode associated with them). Then again, for such a tiny 'problem' it might be a bit of a overkill.

-kyoma

Yes, that makes it hard to debug. But as written earlier, I have a guess about the reason. And with your Oblivion XML knowledge, you can probably even tell me if I'm correct:

On the first frame upon entering the dialog menu, EE checks whether the barter button has the visibility trait (GetMenuFloatValue "dialog_topics\dialog_button_layout\dialog_barter\visible" 1009) set to 2 (visible) or not. If it is not visible, EE assumes that it is not a merchant, and doesn't initialize the data. This works perfectly on my PC, but I guess that the cause of the 0 gold bug is that the GetMenuFloatValue call returns 1 (not visible) for a frame or two on some computers - i.e. that the oblivion engine first creates the dialog menu with this button set to invisible by default, and makes it visible if it is a merchant just after - and that on some PC's my check is performed too fast, as I only check during the first frame. Such a timing problem is a good explanation for a bug that happens only randomly for a minority of the players too.

Now, if this is the reason, there are several ways to fix it: Check for more frames, check if the NPC belongs to a merchant class, check if the NPC offers merchant services. So it is pretty simple to fix - assuming this is really the cause of the problem. I put in such fixes for the next version just to be sure, but would of course very much like a confirmation from the people encountering the bug.

Thanks. I guess I will modify it and include the altered file as an optional install.

It is certainly within the realms of possibility considering we're dealing with Oblivion here. I tried testing it with a token script (something that ran each frame) and checking the visible trait but I couldn't get it to return a false while talking to a merchant right at the beginning. Not very suprising considering my FPS was around 15~ in dialogue.

I'd say stick a few extra checks in there, it certainly won't make matters worse. Also you might wanna check the "dialog_topics\visible" trait before checking the barter button, it will be 1 while a response (or greeting) is being displayed and 2 when the topics and buttons are visible. Hence it should not suffer from a possible bad timing issue.

-kyoma

Reproduction of the sporadic bug seems to be an issue, because you have to visit like 20 merchants in a line until you find one. What if we would repeat the following loop...

- talk to merchant
- no bug
- reset EE (R-key in F2 menu)
- talk to the same merchant

Could this trigger the bug as well?

If I am correct about the source, the bug is probably just as likely to be triggered every time you open the dialog menu with a merchant. But (still assuming my guess is correct), the bug doesn't automatically lead to 0 gold, but to the merchant, at least after the first trade, getting whatever gold that was held in the variable named "tnoEEM.merchant_gold".

So instead of resetting EE, you can open the console and write "set tnoEEM.merchant_gold to 0" in the console between each trade. Note that you can use arrow-up in the console to repeat the last message, so you don't have to write it each time.

But, still assuming that I'm correct about the cause, the bug can be detected even simpler. Just have debug text on (in addition to debug on in EE's ini). Whenever yo activate a merchant, you shall get the following debug messages:

1. EE:Activating
2a. EE:Adding at (if first time), or
2b. EE:Found merchant at index

If neither 2a or 2b comes, it means that EE doesn't detect the merchant as a merchant, and the data will not be correctly initialized for that merchant. If even only one player manages this once, it proves that this is a source for such a bug.

If I have made an incorrect guess, then yes, resetting EE and activating the merchant again should probably be able to lead to the bug, so this is probably the best, as it will catch both my suspicion, and other causes.