The main way of distributing manufactured goods is through vendotronics or
vendors. Vendors are automated machines that can be placed in private homes and
filled with goods. They can be programmed to sell goods to anybody who accesses
them and they can also be programmed to buy goods from characters. This way, you
could for example set up a vendor that buys raw materials from prospectors and
then use those which are dropped to manufacture items that you sell in another
vendor.
Vendors, like lockers, have a limit on how many items they can store. First of all there is a weight limit, which is quite high and should be reasonable for everyday life. It is much greater than the weight limit for Lockers. Next, there is an item count limit of 200 which means that the vendor can store 200 separate items. Stacked items count as 1 so you can store thousands of raw in your vendors as long as they are stacked and don't reach the weight limit. But you can store only 200 separate objects. This restriction is necessary to keep the server database reasonable.
When you place a vendor in the first room of your house and you leave your front door unlocked, the name of your house will show a * VENDOTRONIC * next to its name in the entry dialog so that people who want to enter a house on your street can see which houses offer goods.
There are two types of access to a vendor: In order to buy, remove or deposit items just double-click the vendor, this method works both for the customer and the owner of the vendotronic, the only difference being that the customer is charged credits for the items he buys and is paid for the items he sells. In order to progam the Vendotronic, the owner of the vendor has a button on the Room Owners Tab. He needs to select the vendor first and then the room owners tab. The "Program Vendotronic" button allows him to program the vendor. We will now examine the two possible ways of interacting with a Vendotronic with the most common first.
When you double click a vendor, you get the following dialog:
In the left list, you see all the items that are in your Sales Inventory and which can be sold to this vendor. In the right list you see all the items the vendor has in stock, sorted into several categories for easier access. Since the dialog is a modal dialog that prevents you from writing speech in the input line in the client, there is a simple input line and a Send button at the bottom of the dialog that allows you to speak to others in the room.
When you want to sell items, you proceed like this:
First move the items you want to sell into your Sale Inventory. Only items in this inventory will be regarded. Double click the vendotronic to get a pop up window. Then click each item to see the price the machine is paying for this item in the edit box under the list. The price is dependent on the base price the owner has programmed and the quality of the item you are selling. After you have decided what to sell
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The vendor will now buy whatever it can. This may include some or all of the objects you want to sell. There are two possible reasons why a vendor would not buy items from you:
You can buy one or multiple items in a stack. To do so, you select the item you want to buy in the right list. You may have to navigate to different categories to find the items, but the categories are the same as in a Locker, so after a short while you should know which category holds what item. When you select an item, it's information will be displayed in the lower part of the dialog.
In the Item Information box, you see the color of the item, if any, and the quality range that this machine sells. Keep in mind that any item in this machine is within the given quality range. If the range is too great, you may want to consider buying from another vendor, because the items you buy can be of the highest, but also of the lowest quality here. Next you see the purchase price of this particular item based on it's quality. If there are stacked items, the average price of one item is shown. When you buy an item from the stack you may pay more or less per item.
Next, you enter the amount you want to buy in the edit box under the list. If you are buying from a stack, like raw materials, the amount you selected will be transferred into your inventory in the form of a stack. If you have one item selected but the vendor has multiple items of the same type stored as single items and you enter a number greater than 1 here, then the desired number of single objects will be transferred into your inventory, up to a maximum of 20 pieces for technical reasons.
When you are done, you press the Buy button and the sale will be completed, provided you have enough money in the bank.
The money will be stored in the machine, if the house is owned by just one character. However if the house is owned by multiple characters, each usually participates in the business done in the house, after all that's what Shares are there for. The money is then transferred directly into the bank accounts of the owners according to the relations of their shares. This prevents the owners from having to divide up the profit manually and from cheating.
This behavior has some consequences if a machine is used for buying and selling. If a single owner operates the house, he may very well program a vendor so that it buys and sells and hope that the machine will sell enough so that the incoming money, which is stored in the machine, is enough to pay to those people who sell items to the machine. However, with multiple owners, incoming money is removed from the machine right away and can not be used to purchase goods from characters. Therefore it is always best to set up separate vendors for buying and for selling and keep them separate. Provide your buying vendors with the amount of money you want to spend on purchases and when it runs out of money it can't buy any more. This way you avoid confusion.
The following picture shows the programming dialog that comes up when clicking the Program Vendotronic button on the Room Owner Tab. the dialog is disabled if you bring it up and are not the owner of the vendor.
The left list is a category list that contains all the items that can be bought or sold in a vendor. You select the item which you want to program there before you enter data for it. Or you can also select the general category if you want to enter programming steps for all items in the category. However category commands are more limited than single item commands.
The next thing you do is, you
enter in the Selected Item Or Category box, whether you want to buy or sell this
item, or both, and the sales price for one item of quality 100. If you intend
only to buy an item, you must still set the price at a sales price - and
calculate the buy offer at 75% of the sales price. Example: if you wish to
purchase ready glass at 15 credits per unit, you must set the price at 20, and
choose only the buy checkbox. The actual price for items of various quality is
calculated from this base price. the next thing you do is click Send Individual
Data to send out these data and program this item. If
your intent is to only buy, and to buy for 0 credits, you must enter a price of
1, and choose buy only. Otherwise, if set to buy only at price 0, the vendor
will buy at the prevailing average price.
Note: Vendors are not intended or supported as personal storage lockers. The
owner is responsible for all pricing programming made or not made in their
vendors. Losses incurred through unintended sales or purchases cannot be
"corrected" by game staff.
When you select a whole category, you can not enter a price, since the items in
the category will usually vary greatly in price. Instead you only set if you
want to sell or buy items of this category. The price is determined by the
system and it is taken from the average price of all vendors which have set this
item's price. You can see an items average price from the Items table, which is
accessible from your client's Help menu. This website is rebuilt every day at
server restart and contains the most recent prices. Beware that these prices
change every day and that a price you see today, may not be what you want your
machine to use tomorrow when the average has changed. Therefore it is best to
use individual settings, even if it is tedious.
As the owner, you will never be charged when you buy form your own vendor or receive money when you put anything in the vendor.
The Static Data box right under the Items box allows you to set several general parameters for your vendor.
The Owner box just shows the name of the owner in case you are a co owner of the house since all co-owners are able to program all vendors of other owners in the house. Since you are running a shared business you should be able to trust your co-owners or don't give out shares in the first place.
The maximum and minimum quality edit boxes allow you to define the quality range this vendor trades in. Nobody is able to put objects of quality outside this range in the vendor, not even the owner! You can not change these values while there are items in the vendor! This prevents malicious merchants from changing the range to deceive customers. You should always set this information first after you placed a new vendor in your house.
The Money edit field allows you to take money from your vendor or put money into the vendor. Simply enter the amount of money you want in the vendor. The money is transferred from your bank account into the vendor and is then ready to be paid to customers who sell items to it, if you want to take money out of the vendor, just enter a smaller amount than the one shown there and the money will be transferred to your bank account.
Finally the Maximum Purchase Per Day box allows you to restrict the amount of money the vendor pays when buying items. Once it pays out this amount, it will stop buying new items for the rest of the day until server restart.
Once you have edited all fields to your satisfaction, click the Send button and the data is transmitted to the server.
The lower part of the dialog helps you in keeping track of every day operations and move vendors.
The vendor keeps track of who buys what. This gives you an overview about your customers and what you might need to restock and also helps you catch cheating co-owners. To see the history of the past two days, just click on Request History and the transactions will be transmitted and shown in the list just above the button. Since the vendor only stores the transactions of the last two days, you may want to export the list into a text file with the respective button. You will find a TXT file in your Logfiles subdirectory with the data and the vendor ID which you can see when you let your mouse hover over the vendor graphics.
When you want to move, it can be very tedious to remove all items of the vendor and move them to a new location. Instead you can use the two buttons to the lower left. The Remove button moves all items into a special box in your vault and the Fill button moves all items from that box into the vendor. If the box contains more items than fit in the vendor, perhaps from emptying two vendors at a time, an arbitrary amount of items will be transferred into the vendor and the rest remains in the box in your vault and can be transferred into another vendor. However it is best to move one vendor at a time.
(c) 2005, Sociolotronics LLC