Yep, you got it. "Evolved" is the right word, too. Conceptually, I am on the same page with you and HeX_0ff. Technically, I am in over my head! But perhaps with some help that can be overcome...

I think the general approach to this thing has been pretty well laid out. An external utility that scans your ESPs, creates lists of items to be added to the leveled lists, and then generates a new composite, merge-able ESP that will allow the deactivation of all those little ESPs, serving multiple purposes... it gets rid of placed containers and "freebies", it shortens the list of active plugins, and best of all (IMHO), it spreads these things out in the world to vendors, loot containers, even NPCs, making these items all suddenly much more interesting.

Sound about right? Darn it all... now I really want to see this happen! So much for thinking small...

This has been done before you know.
A good friend of mine Hobbs combined most all of the clothing/ armor (and some weapons) for the eyecandy body mod to a shop in the IC market district. The shop has 4 vendors that sell all of the items. The amount available in that one shop is staggering.
It's here for those interested>>>http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=26704

The initial idea... yes, you're right. But what it has grown into is quite a bit different. We're no longer talking about a vendor or a store, but all vendors, stores, loot chests, and maybe even NPCs. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but you get the idea.

Thanks for the link though... That is an impressive store!

I would highly recommend blasting a message off to Pacific Morrowind, I think he is handling Wrye Bash development now? If he could manage to add this functionality to the bashed patch, that would be just friggin stellar.

Well this thread certainly has gone off on a tangent. But to answer your question, no it's not that hard at all. You just need to find the appropriate Vendor leveled list then drop the item into it. It might take you all of 10 minutes to do, including the time it took to load up the CS. And as long as you're only using it for personal use, you don't need to get permission from the author.

Yes, I was thinking it's time to retire this one and start a new thread that better represents the direction the idea has headed in. Thanks for the tip. Whatever ends up happening with it, I do intend for it to be made available to anyone that would like to have it. But if things go in the direction they're headed now, then permission will be a moot point.

Thanks!

I would love to see a single .esp that adds all my favorite and possibly not so favorite armor, clothing and item mods together. Would be cool to see a new shop open up where all the items are sold (by multiple vendors) and the only way to get said items is to exchange tokens that you get from performing extremely difficult tasks. Gold is cheap, lets make it hard to get those shiny new weapons.

So, it turns out that Waruddar's new Cbash.dll for Wrye Bash is capable of doing the actual work of creating the merged mod, but he needs someone to do the preliminary work.

Which I presume is setting up a set of rules for the various items and a list of "content designations" for the various levelled lists. ie "What is this item similar to?" and "What kind of items does this Levelled List Contain?".

If a comprehensive set of this information can be attained, probably in a spreadsheet format so it can be manipulated fairly freely, then he may be able to do the extra coding to make this work as a Wrye Bash option.

Now that is very promising news! I am approaching this from the ground-level pretty much, and would need some (er, a lot of) guidance... but I would be totally willing to help with as much of the preliminary work as I can. Should I contact Waruddar directly about this?

Might be worth inquiring if he has any specific needs. Don't be surprised if he's too busy to put much thought into it now, though. This is a project for after cbash is done.

I'm thinking your best option might be to define standards for the new items that relate them to vanilla items. So, a Heavy Armor Shield with defense between 15-19 is equivalent to a Steel Shield and should be inserted into levelled lists where Steel Shields already are and at the same level (numbers made up). You could inquire as to whether you can designate offsets for the highest level items (a shield with better defense than Daedric would be inserted into levelled lists where Daedric Shields already exist, but with a minimum level +7 to the Daedric). And you could inquire as to whether you could add an enforced rarity (Shield A would be given a "Chance None" of 95%). Useful for high-end items, maybe.

This will require a lot of thought in order to be halfway balanced, and you'll likely have to create a different spreadsheet for vanilla, OMOBS, MOBS, etc. settings. Fortunately, Wrye Bash can already export weapon and armor stats to a spreadsheet, so you'll have no trouble acquiring the base data to work from.

Excellent... I'll shoot him a message just as a heads up, but I can go ahead and start looking at spreadsheets. I'll glean what I can and ask questions as needed. Thanks for giving me some direction with this! Over the weekend I thought about it some, but wasn't sure what I could do to get started. This gives me something to do...

This thread has officially peaked my interest.