begolf00, right now the way to test would be to compile from source.

What Operating System are you on?  Maybe I can put up a test package.

Yeah, you'd have at least one more tester if you did an XP build.  I've sorta run out of stuff to do on the most recent build.

I have compiled the SVN version in Windows XP but i don't know how to put it in the forum. If you explain me how to share it i upload it.

The vendor is working fine and the 50% money penalty too.

Sorry for my bad english.

It appears that selling to shops has just been implemented.

[quote="Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup manual"]
Unfortunately, the shopkeepers all have an exclusive deal with the Guild of Dungeon Procurers which prevents them using non-guild labour to obtain stock, so you can't sell anything in a shop. (But then, what shopkeeper would buy stolen goods from a disreputable adventurer, anyway?)
(...)

Anti-grinding

Another basic design principle is avoidance of grinding (also known as scumming). These are activities that have low risk, take a lot of time, and bring some reward. This is bad for a game's design because [b]it encourages players to bore themselves.[/b] Even worse, it may be optimal to do so. We try to avoid this!

This explains why [b]shops don't buy: otherwise players would hoover the dungeon for items to sell.[/b]
[/quote]

Please disable selling to shops ! Or at least limit selling to rare items. I can always work as a janitor in the meatspace if I feel like it.

People should be able to ruin their own fun by grinding if they so choose. Since FLARE is simply an engine, it would make sense for selling to be allowed, and then whoever makes the actual game can decide whether they want players to be able to sell or not.

FLARE has ambitions to be an enjoyable game too - right pfunked ? And once you enable the selling, there's no "players may grind if they want" option. Either you grind, or you have less money than everyone else. You won't afford the gear necessary to kill the harder monsters. The designer has to choose one balancing point, either for janitors or for people who don't sell everything.

It really depends on how you balance the game.  I do not believe that selling to vendors necessarily means that suddenly you will be grinding forever and the game will be ruined.  If you make that necessary to advance normally, that's a problem, but it need not be so.

Side note, and I don't know if this affects your point of view:

You don't have to visit a vendor to sell items.  Any carried item can be scrapped for gold wherever you are if you CTRL+click it.  It's the same price a vendor would give you.

The way I play Flare now is that I pick up all loot until I get something that might be an upgrade.  I open my inventory and compare it to what I'm wearing.  If it's no good I CTRL+click it, along with every other garbage item I picked up.  Meanwhile because the game is no longer paused, my health and mana are regenerating.

The ability to sell directly from the Inventory, and the ability to sell to vendors at all, could both be settings.

Morris989 sent this megaupload link.  If someone tries it on XP lemme know if it works: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2G05F4FI

Hi,

I've just download it and tried it, it runs perfectly on xp. Very nice, Vendors are a great improvment !

I've a little problem : I've tried to do a mine map (100x100) with Tiled, I've spend lots of hours to design it (there are no enemys or event), I translate (from csv) it in .txt, but when I try it, it looks quite chaotic... it seems that the numbers generate with Tiled are not the same as in the tileset. What can I do ? I hope there are solutions... If somebody could help me, thanks !

CyberTroll, the tilesetdef file indexes are hex and the Tiled output is dec.

Also, note that a Tiled map must have the tiled_collision.png tileset first, then the main tileset for that map.  If you don't have the collision tileset in place, all the map tiles will be 15 off I think.  Basically the first tile in the main tileset should resolve to dec 16 or hex 10.  If you forgot the collision tileset, it will resolve to 01 instead.

If you have a map done in Tiled and need help getting it working in .txt, let me know.  You could send the map to me as well.

Hi,
I've changed the order of the tileset : first =>tiled_collision.png then tilset_cave. It's much better, the minimap is right, but there are still incredible things.
You told me that tiled was dec and tilesetdef hex, do I have to translate each number from dec to hex ?
in the .tmx is the layer order important ?

sorry to bother you...but i really want to take part in this great project.

CyberTroll, if you're using Tiled to draw maps then you shouldn't have to worry about the tilesetdef file at all.  Tiled's tmx files (CSV option) will save in decimal.  And when you copy that data over to a Flare map txt file, layer data is decimal by default.

If you're getting stuck feel free to email your work in progress to me, and I can figure out if there's something missing: clintbellanger (at) gmail.com

Regarding "you can sell everywhere", my opinion is that half a bad idea is still a bad idea. At least consider the approach Nox used - yes, you can sell almost anything, but often you can't go back to shop (because the path has collapsed etc). And inventory space is limited. So yes, you can fill your inventory with items to sell, but from that point the collecting of items is over until you find a vendor. (You may still want to pick up items if you find something more valuable than what you're carrying, but Nox has item weight and it makes it more complicated).

Dungeon siege avoided the problem entirely by making monsters not respawn.  You were always moving forward, and that got you more than enough loot and experience.  While that (perhaps extreme) degree of linearity doesn't seem to be what FLARE leans towards, I think that the general idea is solid: balancing so that grinding as such is unecessary.  It's not like this is an MMO where you have to compete to be the best or something like that; if difficulty isn't too steep, then grinding shouldn't be a natural result regardless of shop status.

My experience with dungeon crawlers where you have very limited inventory space is that I get dragged into a constant game of "should I swap this item with the one that just dropped?"  I think that not being able to sell anything would actually be very freeing for me as a player.  Instead of having to manage a vast inventory of vendor trash, I'd just pick up whatever seems like it might be useful later, and leave everything else on the ground.

...and realism should be our least concern here. Not being able to sell is not realistic, but so is selling huge numbers of junk to a single person isolated from society. Where's the demand for it ?

> ...and realism should be our least concern here. Not being able to sell is not realistic, but so is selling huge numbers of junk to a single person isolated from society. Where's the demand for it ?

I have some funny ideas about this.  If I ever do a humorous "un-rpg" I'll explore this theme.  The hero can ask a merchant for a discount; after all, he's saving the world.  But the merchants will all laugh and laugh.  The merchants know that the dungeons are all meat grinders, and so they happily sell equipment to adventurers at full cost.  New heroes meant to save the world show up every day (and die in the dungeons every day).  The merchants just send their interns into the dungeons to fetch the mostly-unused equipment from dead adventurer bodies, ready to resell to the next hero.