User talk:TheRealLurlock/2007 08

Morrowind NPC Data

I caught your comments on Nephele's talk page about the Morrowind NPC data...since it wasn't too difficult I did a quick dump of some merchant data that might be useful to you at Daveh/Morrowind Npcs. I wasn't sure what you were planning so its not formatted or anything special. Depending on what you need I can add/remove data or output it in a different format. -- Daveh 13:05, 29 July 2007 (EDT)

Holy data overload, Batman! Yeah, this is great. I'll probably have to pick and choose from it a bit. Can you clarify the whole "Sells", "Sells Owned", "Owned", "Item" thing? I don't need to know about ownership of items that they don't sell, for instance. Also, does it take into account that armor/clothing merchants will not sell the items they're currently wearing? Additionally, keys are never sold by anyone, except for the odd keys which don't open anything or only work via script/dialog (e.g. slave keys), and even then I don't think there's many of those that are in the hands of anyone who could sell them. Spells I don't need, as I've already completed the spell merchants. The only other thing I'd ask is if it's possible to sort the lists - this would put similar items together and make it easier to get an overall picture of what each merchant has available. (If you look at the existing merchant pages, I don't usually get that specific about what they sell unless there's something unusual and noteworthy. Though with the availability of this data, there's no saying I couldn't, but for now I'm just keeping it general.) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 14:46, 29 July 2007 (EDT)

Again, I wasn't sure what you wanted so I just dumped a bunch out without doing anything special yet. Any "Owned" item is an item not in the NPCs inventory but in a cell/container somewhere owned by that NPC. Anything not "owned" will be directly in the NPC's inventory. This was mainly done as its very easy to get a count for each item in the inventory but difficult to count items owned in cells, especially for negative item counts (I haven't considered respawning containers owned by the NPC for instance).

Anything with a "Sells" tag the NPC can sell as determined by their AI settings (either auto-calc or specific). I did not include any NPC that wasn't a merchant. I can pretty easily omit anything the NPC can't sell and sort items by name. More difficult is combining the inventory/non-inventory items, especially when trying to preserve the respawn status. You'd probably have to keep it as three different values:

1. Fixed items (no respawn)
2. Inventory respawn
3. Container respawn (on a different timer than inventory respawn I think)

Also, if you have a format you'd like it, like a wikified table, I can output that to save you time from having to format it all. -- Daveh 14:57, 29 July 2007 (EDT)

Inventory respawn I'm pretty sure resets right away. Simply end the dialog and talk to the person again and they've already restocked. That's how people take advantage of the alchemy vendors to create godly-level potions - find a vendor who restocks two ingredients with Fortify Intelligence, and you can have an unlimited supply. I think this only applies to items with a negative count - whether that's on their person or in a container. The only type of respawning container that works any differently I think would be if an vendor has a living plant in their shop, in which case it behaves just like any plant anywhere, respawning over I think a month, though I'm not sure on that one. The only non-plant containers that behave this way that I know of are the supply chests in the Mages and Fighters Guildhalls, and I don't think anybody sells items from those containers, especially since you can get at them for free if you're a member of the Guilds. So in most cases, there'd be at most 2 values, unless there are live plants in the shop, which only applies to ingredient vendors. (Which I've already done anyhow.) At any rate, I don't really need it formatted in a wikified table, unless you can somehow incorporate it into Nephele's Sandbox Tables, but that may be asking a bit much. I can handle working from 2 different sandboxes without much difficulty. The only reason I'd need it formatted is if we were going to include a detailed and comprehensive listing of every merchant's wares on their page, which I'm not sure we need. (Wouldn't be complete anyhow without leveled list items covered somehow.) Omitting non-sold items and spells and sorting the rest by name would make this simple enough. Thanks. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 15:16, 29 July 2007 (EDT)

Hmm, looking at this more closely, I'm seeing some other things that should be omitted. Some things are listed which can never be sold, like furniture and doors. It looks like you got rid of containers already, but any statics or activators should also be removed. Additional information that might help would be to add a column for item type - weapon, armor, clothing, miscellaneous, etc. This would make it much easier to sort. Oh, and if you could use a delimiter OTHER than commas, it would save a lot of work. I can import this into Excel using delimiters, but some items have commas in their names, which complicates things. Use something like a | which shouldn't appear in any names. TAB would also work, or any other character that wouldn't appear in item-names. Thanks again, let me know when you've made the changes. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:52, 30 July 2007 (EDT)

Okay, I threw together the first page using this data at Morrowind:Ababael Timsar-Dadisun. Items which had different IDs but the same names I combined into a single entry for the sake of saving space. (So while there are 3 different styles of "Expensive Pants", they only appear once on the list.) I think this sort of chart could be workable on other merchant pages, though there'll undoubtedly be complications with some - particularly those who are also spell merchants. There's also some issues here - I don't know if Ababel sells the "Chest of Fire", "Holy Shield", or "Merisan Helm" armor - he might be wearing them instead. I'm almost certain he's wearing the Common Pants, Shirt, and Shoes, so I didn't list them. (Not that anybody would want them...) I'm not so sure how easy it is to tell which items a vendor will wear instead of selling. I think the most valuable item of each type he has in his inventory is what's used, but since values are not listed on the page, I'd have to look it up. Also, the three armors he's got are all Light Armor, and if his Light Armor skill is low, then maybe he isn't wearing them, except that in the screenshot, I think the cuirass and helm are visible, so that's probably what those are - thus they're not sold. These issues are going to come up for every armor/clothing salesman, unfortunately... --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 11:34, 30 July 2007 (EDT)

One other issue I've noticed - the "Merchant Types" field seems to be incorrect in most cases. For instance, it seems to state that every single merchant sells Weapons and Armor, which is of course not true. I think we had this issue before the first time Nephele gave me a list of MW NPC data, you might ask her how she got around it. Now, I can get this data from the pages she's given me, but I just want to be sure that the "Sells" vs. "Doesn't Sell" thing is working correctly, so you might want to check on that. (Oh, another item that's coming up consistently that shouldn't is Gold. Merchants can't sell gold.) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 15:40, 30 July 2007 (EDT)

Finally got around to doing another update...what I've done so far

• Only included items/spells the NPC can sell
• Combine items with identical names
• List the overall item and respawn count
• Sorted by item type and then by name
• Format into wiki tables like your examples
• Removed things the NPC can't sell (gold for instance).
• Fixed and verified the merchant types (just a bug on my part).

What I've *not* done so far

• Linkified special items. If I have a list of special item names and their links I can easily link them automatically.

As usual, if you need anything else I can probably do it relatively easily when I have time. -- Daveh 20:07, 2 August 2007 (EDT)

Great! Of course now I'm going to have to double-check all the ones I've done so far to see if they still jive with the new data. As for linking, I don't have a list per se. The only things I've been linking so far are generic magic items, books and scrolls, and ingredients. Ingredients are easy - they all have their own page. Books are about to change soon, so just linking to the title of the book in the Morrowind namespace will work. Magic items and scrolls are a bit more difficult, but it's not a big deal to do by hand. (I've been linking to the enchantment effect on either Morrowind:Generic Magic Apparel, Morrowind:Generic Magic Weapons, or Morrowind:Scrolls. Maybe if I added Linkable Entries to those pages, you could just link directly to the item-names themselves.) Sorry if that's not so easy to automate, but if so, don't worry about it, you can leave me at least SOME work to do myself.

The only other question I really have is how closely this data now reflects what a merchant will actually sell. For example, any item that the merchant has equipped cannot be sold unless you first sell him something better. I've been using italics to indicate which those are, but I might not always be able to tell - especially now that you've combined the carried and non-carried items into one list. Even with the old list I had problems, like if a merchant had armor of varying weights in his possession, which one he'd wear would depend on his skills in the relative armor skills - which I can't look up without the CS. Likewise if he was carrying multiple weapons of different types. I don't know if there's any automated way to tell which items are actually equipped or not...

The other iffy one was what exactly is meant by "Magic Items". For example, if a merchant sells Armor but not Magic Items, and he happens to have a magic armor in his possession - will he sell it? For that matter, will he buy a magic armor? And if so, can you buy it back from him?

Anyhow, if you don't know how to deal with these, that's okay, I'll just do guesswork for now. Oh, and did you figure out the problem with some merchants having items with 0 count? That was a bit weird.

One last issue is whether it's worth looking into their leveled lists or not. I know at least one NPC page mentioned that the character sold armor, but none was on his chart because it was all leveled lists. That might end up being a job for a later date, though. Thanks again for all the data. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 22:04, 2 August 2007 (EDT)

One more question - Can you automate the generation of this? Never mind the links to other item pages, though the internal links to itself should be simple enough. This would solve the problem of leveled items not showing on merchant tables - we just link to the appropriate entry on this page from their goods list and problem solved. Do you have any way of getting at this data other than what I've been doing? (i.e. Manually typing it all in by looking at the CS - not something I really want to do for all of them if I can avoid it...) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 22:33, 2 August 2007 (EDT)

What Now?

Hey man. Are we going to add the merchandise to merchants who aren't even involved in quests or only to ones involved with quests? thanks --Playjex 10:44, 1 August 2007 (EDT) p.s-Srry if i'm bugging you.

Well, eventually all of them. Right now, I'm just sticking to the ones that already have pages. You can do any that you feel like - keep in mind that in many cases a vendor's stock is randomized or leveled, so you need the data from the CS, not from experience in-game, as that may be different every time. The only merchandise you can be sure of is that which is visible on shelves. Anything carried on their person or in a container could be random. A better thing for you to check if you're doing it in-game is the trainers like I mentioned yesterday. I can't always tell from the CS data when there's a tie for 3rd-place skills. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:49, 1 August 2007 (EDT)

I can't get CS data because I don't have any TES games on my computer at all. I have Oblivion for the 360, regular Morrowind on the Xbox and GOTY on my Xbox also. I feel bad.

Alright then - you can work on the trainers, then. I can't do them because I can't play the game. And that's the kind of thing that you need to check in-game. I've already mostly got the data I need for merchants anyhow. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 11:17, 1 August 2007 (EDT)

It's a deal. --Playjex 11:24, 1 August 2007 (EDT)

Morrowind:Azura's Quest

Thanks for redoing my edit: I thought it was kind of interesting, but I agree that my direct link didn't seem quite right, so I appreciate you moving it to a footnote.--Cbh 06:55, 6 August 2007 (EDT)

Addamasartus map

I've uploaded a new map with a proper legend and everything. Hope it's good enough. By the way, is there any way I can delete the two test images I uploaded yesterday, or would it be better to leave them there? --Gaebrial 13:21, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

Definitely looks better. As for deleting, you can't, but I can. I'll at least get rid of the first map shot, that's easy enough. Let me know if you want to get rid of the other one too. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 13:27, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

Yeah, you can get rid of both - I don't think I'll bother with the ring map; maybe just expand upon its location in the text. It's not like it's a fantastic magic item, in any case ;-) --Gaebrial 13:29, 16 August 2007 (EDT)

Heyla, love!

Well, whaddya know, someone else noticed how many diet-ies we have around here? How's everything by you? What's new? I've been off for a while, but you can expect me in a couple hours a week now that school's started. Somercy 13:29, 24 August 2007 (EDT)

Well, I saw your edit, and decided to do a search for the bad spelling. Got 4 hits, 1 of them is a developer-typo in one of the books, so that shouldn't be fixed. And another was on the Oblivion:Custom Classes page, which I'm trying to get deleted, so I left that alone. But I fixed the other 2. Sometimes I just go around searching for common misspellings - like I'm doing with "Corpus" right now... --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 13:32, 24 August 2007 (EDT)

I know what you mean. I think all the Custom Classes pages are an example of personal vanity, but since I don't do Oblivion, I think I've no say on that page. Anyway, nice to see you, luff. Somercy 13:36, 24 August 2007 (EDT)

Telvanni Template Tweak

I don't quite understand what you are doing with the Telvanni Quest Trails. What is the location that you are adding? Is it where the quest starts or where it takes place? If it is where it takes place, bear in mind that it may take place in more than one location, e.g. Archmagister Gothren. BTW, I think the disposition bonus for this quest was in a script if I remember correctly. --DrPhoton 04:39, 28 August 2007 (EDT)

I'm doing it for all of them. I know it can be hard to choose which location in some cases, so the system I've been using is basically wherever the "action" takes place, as opposed to where the quest starts. The main idea was to fill up the quest location categories for places like Ald Velothi and such, which don't have any quests of their own which aren't faction quests. As for the Disposition from this quest - are you sure that there's an actual disposition increase? Or does everybody's disposition increase automatically simply because your rank in the Telvanni faction has increased? If you can find the script in question, by all means confirm it on the page. But I think it may be a simple matter of rank increase leading to increased disposition among all members of the faction. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 09:29, 28 August 2007 (EDT)

I'm not sure right now if there is a disposition increase or not; I'll have to check. However, I don't think your rank affects the disposition of other faction members at all. Instead, disposition is affected by your Faction Reputation, which is awarded to you upon completion of almost every quest, and your Reputation of course. Since you have to complete quests to advance in rank, your Faction Reputation also increases as you raise in your Faction. --DrPhoton 04:08, 29 August 2007 (EDT)