First of all: you can put too much crap in shops. We're literally talking hundreds of items here. The mud can't output that much text at once and the contents of the shop get truncated. The shop becomes partially useless - players simply can't see what's for sale. There are also loading issues - the mud lags when you try to view a shop with 600 items in it.

As such, I'm going to limit how many items you can put into a shop. Please help me pin down the numbers below. These are just random numbers I grabbed out of my head. Please post your suggestions.

The first limitation will be how many lines: for example, you can't sell more than 150 different items. Having 200 hoes and 200 old shirts is OK because only 2 lines are used.

The second limitation will be a total number of items. You can't have more than 400 items in your shop.



And now, on to the cool stuff I mentioned in the subject: HELP LIST.

After looking through the shops, this is mainly being done to target Xerxes's shop. The XML for his shop weighs in at 1.04 MB (compared to an average of 100 kb for a shop storage room and 1kb for a store front). He has 2,811 items in his shop. His shop will most likely be removed and the items returned to him if he decides to play again.

I like the idea of limiting the number of lines but limiting the total number of items in a shop can make it hard on the shop owner to decide what items to keep and what items to remove....of course I am biased when it comes to this subject.

Some sort of limitation makes sense....Unless of course shops use Time Lord technology and are bigger on the inside than the outside.

Specifically, you could offer different shop deeds that have different size item allowances. That way shop owners could benefit from using different strategies such as:

- small shop with a little item differentiation but vast quantities of items on hand
- large shop with many different items but only a few of each

...etc, you get the idea.

Obviously, smaller shops would be cheaper.

I kinda like the idea of having a limit of how many items you can have in your shop.

I've currently set the line limit to 300 (which is still too much data for normal telnet clients) and the object limit to 1000. I may reduce these in the future - we'll see how this works out.

I threw in some new code to reduce file size (and hopefully load times) for shops. All player shops currently added up to 3.48mb before the new code; after running it, they add up to 2.89mb.