Vendor Container Strategies

[drakeelvin]

I just wanted to post a final addendum to this because I finally got everything working 100%. There was one thing I had misunderstood about using existing store cells.

 

To add items to an existing New Vegas Merchant (Chet, Johnson Nash, Cliff Briscoe, etc..., etc...) without changing their existing inventory or causing conflicts with other mods it turned out to be very simple:

 

1. Create a new vendor container (e.g. just make a copy of VendorContainerChet with a new Form ID)

 

2. Remove the old items and put your own in.

 

3. Place the new container in the same cell as the vendor you want to add items to. Put it in the gray area outside the playable navmeshed area.

 

4. In the render window object listing, edit the container and under the Ownership Tab set the owner to your NPC (e.g. GSChet)

 

That's all there is to it.

 

Run New Vegas, visit the merchant and you'll see your items added alongside all the rest.

 

I was unsure about placing a new container into an existing store cell until I realized I could use the gray area outside of the playable navmesh area where there is unlimited space that avoids any conflicts with the game items or other mods.

 

A final thing that becomes clear is the advantage of putting new merchants into an interior cell so it is easy to expand on their inventories later on with plugins, if you want to. You could place new merchants outside and put their primary container in a buried cell, but any plugins would have to put additional containers into the exterior cell where they'd be playable, not to mention I think that respawning containers in an exterior cell can create lag issues ... I read something to that effect quite a few months back.

 

Thanks to all of you who provided me feedback along the way.

Edited June 24, 2011 by drakeelvin