Merchant Archive

Placing two or more vendors on the overheadmap creates a horrible mish-mash of vendor names when you look at them with CTRL-M (the overhead map). I've seen so many vendors/shops suffering from this problem.

I have two of my four vendors on the map, one is "Vehicles" the other is "Weapon Powerups".

On the overhead map it looks like: VendXXXXXXs (where X is a bunch of overlapping letters).

I could put one on the map, but thenI won't get my Merchant XP. It's a pretty serious bug for our profession

It is freaking annoying and would be solved by simply allowing us to register the location instead of the vendor, and allowing us to place our location on multiple catagories in the vendor list instead of just one. That would clear up the mess.....

Otherwise,no, sorry

I am adding this to my bug list. Do you all have any recommendation if they keep it tied to the vendor?

If they insist on keeping it tied to vendor (the easierless effective option) then ask them to check if the waypoint--and associated text on the overhead map--is at the location of the actual vendor rather than the building. It seems like mine are in the center the building, no matter where the vendor is in that building.

Haru: If only the vendors could actually be altered like that. Mine are all facing in different directions and as someone has already pointed out, the text originates from the CENTER of the building, not the vendor itself. It's such a huge problem for Merchants, it really should be in a our top 5

There is one solution hundreds of years old - a palimpsest. Rotate the text on overlapping descriptions so the conflicting text remains legible.

When mail was very expensive to send per page people used to continue a letter by writing over the earlier text at right angles to it. The result is (reasonably) legible if not pretty, since the human eye is very good at removing random distraction. When the text is overlapped in the same direction this isn't possible since you can't tell which entry the letter belongs to.

The overhead map is 2d which makes it easy so long as text can be distinguished from other objects. When writing a text string, after calculating its intended size and position, look for conflict with another text string. If a conflict occurs, set the rotation angle to 30 degrees more than the largest rotation ofconflicting text. Note that withenough vendors in one place you could have text at six different angles, and no more than one letter would overlap for each conflict.

I think the result could be attractive, a shop with six vendors would have a nice star appearance on the map. More names than that leaves some text conflicting but upside down, but I think that would be rare.

90 or 45 degree rotation would be more attractive if only 2-4 vendor names conflicted, but it gets quite complicated to have to count the number of conflicts before doing the rotation.

---

Neutral wrote:
Haru: If only the vendors could actually be altered like that.

---

Indeed, that was my point. It does take a developer change to add the feature of changing the text rotation angle. However, it is a simple change relativly speaking, if we could get any attention to it.

This isn't a fix, but a work around. If you own building right next door, put a vendor in it, named in my case "Museum of Rare Loot - Next Door" and register it on the map. He barks on approch "this is the worng building, the museum is in #1"

My Vendor is in the Museum, with the name "Resources and Adv Med Comps" and registered on the map.

My third small house next door has a vendor, but I haven't decided if I really need more, I think not. He remains off the map.

This is why I keep only one vendor per shop registered. It's an option for me (though it obviously won't work for some) because I only sell one general type of product per building. While I do have different vendors in my clothing tent (one for BE clothes, one for sale clothes, etc) I only keep the main "Kara's Tailor Shop" vendor registered. So it shows up in both location searches and is easy to read on the overhead map.

It would be nice if I could register the others though, so folks specifically looking for BE clothes would see the BE vendor on the planetary map...

Has this been fixed yet?

Doesn't need to be... The aim of being on the map is to appear in the vendor list on ctrl+v, the small map doesn't matter much as you can just use a waypoint to find the vendor you are looking for.

---

Neutral wrote:

I could put one on the map, but thenI won't get my Merchant XP.

---

This problem does not need some over engineered solution with loads of code that checks all sorts of stuff.
If they would just let us have a number (0-360) we could set on the vendors when we registrant the vendor on the map(like add barking), then it could solve the problem. There is no complicated code in that.
Moreover, we as players would be far better at determining the right angle of text then any program would.