Since nearly all the statics are in place now, I figure it's safe to announce this WIP: a player-owned bookstore in Pelagiad. This will be heavily based on scripts from Balmora Clothier and Wayfarer's Rest (with each author's permission, of course) since I have no idea where to start with the sales aspect, and rather liked how Wayfarer's Rest handled payment.

Once the statics are all in place I'll move on to the 'normal' NPCs (regular customers using the Balmora Clothier customer scripts or similar) and their scripting. The customer scripting is the part that I imagine will take the most time to work out, followed by working out how much has been earned (hence looking at scripts that have already achieved these things). Once this is done I will be adding a few 'quest' NPCs with specific requests.

Yep, it's a sideline in fetch-me-my-lost-book quests. ^_^ To ease the pain, I plan on making those books either existing rare titles or newly-created books held by their authors, although in the case of the latter the store's assistant will alert you to each budding talent; at least, that's the plan.

Hopefully I haven't bitten off more that I can chew here, but it's certainly something I would enjoy using. I'll update this thread with any milestones I hit.

cool. Maybe you can add daggerfall books? This is a good idea.

cool. cant wait to own a bookstore. keep up the good work...

Wonderful idea. Please do add a number of the really hard to find books and maybe some complete sets. I am always getting a vol I & II of something and not finding III or any number mix at random. I really like to place complete sets on my shelves.

All the 'stock' books are on shelves -- I'm now working on the script that displays them when that title is placed in the stock chest. It's an extension of the script from Balmora Clothier which displayed a single clothing item of the type you'd just put in stock; here, the more common a title, the more potential 'stock' copies. It's not exactly accurate, mind -- a title gets one 'stock' copy if five or more copies exist in the world, and for every five additional copies another 'stock' book has been added to a maximum of ten 'stock' copies for fifty copies and above. This way multiple copies of the same book in the chest will be reflected (up to a point).

This sounds fantastic!

Can it also include a cafe aspect, for those customers who like to come and have a coffee (or...something else) while they browse?

I love bookstores, and Peligiad is much too under developed.

Craigor is making a Peligiad expansion, perhaps you could see if yours would conflict so we wouldn't have to chose between one or the other of the mods, yours or his, I mean.

I seccond this idea, Could you please combine the finished products? so it could be like Balmora Expanded (one HUGE mod)?

I unanimously re-second my own original proposal.

But on a more serious note, I think it would be great and all to have this compatable with the Pelagiad Expansion, perhaps a collaboration? Also, Craigor is making the city of Bal Ouada which is under Pelagiad, therby adding some more to Pelagiad's development.

Sildra, you could take a look at my WIP thread, which has screenshots of the proposed expansion to the town. Perhaps making your mod and my own compatible would be a good idea, as has been suggested both to you and myself?

Let me know.

Cheers.

Sounds like a great idea.
Wayfarer's Rest indeed has a pretty straightforward way of calculating profits; random number modified by expansions to the inn (guards, dancer, etc.). Would be interesting to be able to upgrade the bookstore; e.g. with the cafe Eisoj5 mentionned, a guild guide connection with larger cities, perhaps a small press to make copies of out-of-print books or booklike objects (e.g. dwemer schematics). Perhaps a bookscout to hunt for rare books for rich customers and/or provide you with hints on where rare books may be found, for a price of course (might be a better way to make rare books and series available than simply adding them to standard stock, as it still requires the player to search and collect them)? Would also be interesting to have the amount of (different) books or amount of rare/expensive books influence profits (the last one would probably be the easiest to script; simply add dialogue to the shop assistant for having rare book x or y in player inventory and have it update a variable).

Perhaps it would also be useful to divide the books over several merchants (e.g. themed on imperial/dunmer/dwemer, etc.?)? Merchant inventories may grow quite rapidly, especially when running book placement mods such as Book Rotate (prevents multiple copies of books from being stacked, due to the attached script).

There's already a sort of caf? aspect -- there was a large area of the second floor that I couldn't figure out what to do with, so in went the tables and chairs. I'll probably put 'quest' NPCs up there.

As to Pelagiad Expanded, I'll have to read up on that. The http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e349/Sildra360/WIP/PelagiadBookstorePlacement.jpg can be changed easily enough, after all. Not sure about combining the two; I'm not going to have huge amounts of time to dedicate to this once my new job starts, and I don't want to frustrate other people.

The stock-appearance script is still being done. I'm onto stock chest/script number five and counting; it's turned into quite the extension, particularly for the titles that have ten potential stock copies, but it works nicely.

As it stands, this will work in the same way as the Balmora Clothier: the player seeks out books and adds them to stock for sale. It will be the player who finds the rare books requested by NPCs, as well, but I do like the idea of an ordering service. Perhaps once the store has been running for x-number of weeks or months, the assistant's connections on the mainland could lead to a trickle/stream of stock (since there's a finite number of books in the world at the moment).

Working out profit will probably be something like keeping note of eactly what's been sold in the week, adding that to a running total, notify player, reset running total to 0 if the player has collected the profits, rinse and repeat. Probably subtract the assistant's fee for the week before adding to the total earned, to avoid those nasty 'Your crime has been reported!' notices when you're in the middle of nowhere.

Having not played Balmora Clothier in a while, I can't recall if the stock was reflected in the assistant's inventory. I'll have to double-check that. But that mod did have nine or so NPCs that bought stock, which I plan on adapting (or trying to, at any rate) for this.

Eheheheheheheh! Bookworm ho! Finally, I can keep a set of The Real Barenziah at hand! I love those books so much...I have a script you can modify to suit your needs for a printing press. I have it from my Pelagiad Vineyard mod, (still WIP!), and all it does is have a check for certain kinds of berries, to make a wine. All you'd need to do is make it so it checks for paper and ink, the original copy of the book, and go foward from there. Would take a long time to make it so it encompasses all the books in the game, though.

~JamesW

Unless the scripts somehow interfere, thats probably a matter of assigning ownership of the supply chest(s) to the assistant, like in Wayfarer's Rest.

I absolutely love this idea. My only problem is I tend to like to collect books, so selling anything but spares isn't an option

I'll probably use this when it comes out. I really like owning shops and things. I'd use the armor merchant thing but I just can't get it to work properly. When I used it I never had a single customer and it lost a lot of money.

What a fantastic idea! I make very heavy use of mercantile mods so would love another that adds a different aspect to the MW business experience. My only concern is the stocking issue. I found with PC Clothier and PC Smithy that after a while the lack of profits due to lack of supply start to dampen the enjoyment of them somewhat (until MW Crafting came along that is). Being able to produce your own copies of stock books with a printing press would certainly solve this problem.

As you sound quite busy this might not be feasible but it may actually save you a bit of time creating unique and rare books for the mod: there are a few book mods out there that I expect you could use. The few that come to mind are

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=753

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=2289

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=555

and there's a few more in the http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.List&category_select_id=20 of PES that you could browse through.

For where you currently have it placed (in the northernmost section of town, correct?), it does not in any way conflict with what I've changed/added in my Pelagiad Expansion, so in truth, there is probably no need to combine the two. You could take a look at the screenies I've posted in my WIP thread, one of which shoes an overhead view of the expanded area. Totally up to you, but if you'd like, you could theoretically use one of the new buildings/houses for your mod. I'm totally open to working that out.

Let me know your thoughts. Like I said, what you have won't conflict in any way with what I have (and vice versa I hope?), so either way, it's all good!

Good luck with this! A very promising mod idea indeed!! :goodjob:

I did raise the land near the top of that little slope so the doorway sat better, which could cause problems. Other than that it's entirely one interior cell -- for the moment, anyway. Any exterior changes I make will likely be late on and just involve placing NPCs. And possibly a sign.

My job began today, and if I'm as wiped everyday as I am now this is going to be a strictly weekend thing. I'll keep chipping away at it, but it could be awhile; possibly early next year.

Something occurred to me as I was hooking up display-script #14 or so to its chest: at the moment this is Morrowind-only, which will save those who don't have the expansions some hassle, but it will mean that Tribunal and Bloodmoon books won't sell (and may lead to problems with profit notification later, as I believe that script requires Bloodmoon).

So my question is this: should I continue with the Morrowind-only version, or add Tribunal and Bloodmoon dependency and so increase the stock?

As a follow-up question, will adding these dependencies break anything?

Thanks.

Great concept- I will download this mod immediatly upon release.

As for whether or not you should make dependencies.... I believe so. Maybe just Tribunal, becuase most people have that. Alot of people have Bloodmoon as well, but not as many as Tribunal.

In any case, the GOTY edition is available so cheaply that it's little more than an inconvenience to buy. It's your call- that's all I'll say.

I have an idea, why not have it like oblivion where you can upgrade furniture. And maybe decorate the thing with items you find on your quests, a chitin dagger might only minimally attract customers, but a shelf of ancient dwemer items might bring in many.

The books added by Tribunal and Bloodmoon are now on the shelves. I figure a few more days to get the display-scripts done, then I'll move onto the assistant NPC and their dialouge, and the normal customers.

I'm pretty sure adding these dependencies hasn't broken anything. Yet. ^_^ I'll run it through the cleaning part of TESTool before I next run through it, just to be on the safe side. GMSTs bug me.

Any news?

The display scripts are done, and the assistant exists (although she doesn't do anything yet; doesn't even have a proper name, poor thing).

And now a whirlwind tour of what there is, as you'd find it when you start off; because everybody loves screenshots, right?

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e349/Sildra360/WIP/BookstoreEntry.jpg
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e349/Sildra360/WIP/BookstoreStockChests.jpg
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e349/Sildra360/WIP/ReadingArea1.jpg
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e349/Sildra360/WIP/ReadingArea2.jpg
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e349/Sildra360/WIP/PCRoom.jpg

Spent some time at work figuring out how the book-ordering service might work. I'm leaning toward a dialouge-driven approach, since a pick-your-letter, pick-your-title, pick-your-amount menu approach seems clunky; still, I'll worry about that once the bulk of the buying-stuff script is done. Which could take awhile... :embarrased:

Sounds and looks good!

Question: where are those textures from???