Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: Cart-droids.
} {Master Combat Medic} {Master Doctor} {Marksman}To overcome the *low power* problem, Vendor droids can be used as mobile bazaars even when they are low power. The only thing that low power does is prevent droids from taking further commands, such as come or patrol or what-not. In short, make vendor droids power independent.
A possible problem is how do people pay for stuff being sold in a vendor droid? A possible solution will be to make a vendor droid a mini-bank as well! You can store credits in the droid, or the droid can be linked to the galactic bank network. A fee of 5% will be imposed on every transaction made, but at least it gives us the ability to sell stuff on the droid. Take it as a sales tax in a player city.
A further development of this idea will be to allow people to permanently place these vendor droids in homes, thus converting them into customised droid vendors. Allowing these customised droids to function as normal barking vendors in homes will be a plus too.
I like the idea of a cart-droid.
But I am not to sure about the afk thing. I have noticed that you are kicked out after about 30 minutes of inactivity (Kicked back to character selection) Why this is done I dont know, I think it is to keep server strain down by removing those that aren't active in SWG.
I think a better sollution would be:
being a MDE and a merchant dabbler I got vendors in my house. It is located in a player town but not everyone visiting the town comes to my vendors.
A Cart-droid would work as a housevendor but with smaller storage capacity. 5-10 items as the original poster mentioned. Only sales would be possible from the cart. no offers of any kind, and when someone purchase from it the cash would go to the owners bank account.
The cart itself could be dropped of and given some patrolpoints at any place on the same planet (higher level merchant can place on other planets maybe) and it would move around the patrol points, only stopping when someone is browsing whats for sale.
When the cart runs out of items or are low on power (power would last for several hours) a email is sent to the owner with the proper message, so restocking of materials or recharging of the droid would be done.
Also a droid that is without power for to long would start to decay, like harvesters, factories and other stuff that require maint does. If not retrieved before it reaches 50% the items inside would vanish and be lost. (This would be so people just dont leave them around)
The main reason would be to free up the merchant or other profession to do something else.