Introducing ER Multivend

This is a project I've been toying with, on and off, for several weeks.

This is also what I spent the last week of my life working on, with a level of dedication and concentration that I haven't had in ages.

The ER Multivend is a Mesh based vendor. Built entirely of Mesh, Multivend allows for the vending of up to 32 product variations from a single vendor, that uses, at most, 6 prims.

Yes, you heard me right.. 32 products.. 6 prims.

The version pictured on the left is capable of vending 16 products, and comes in at just 4 prims. Fewer still in the future, assuming that the new "Land Impact" calculations associated with the "Pathfinding" project end up being passed to the main grid. In that case, anything over 8 items will come in at 3 prims, and 8 items or less will come in at 2 prims.

Now, this isn't a new idea really. Multi-item vendors are kind of old hat.

I've long been of the opinion that "arrow vendors" as I call them, simply don't work. Customers, generally speaking, won't take the time to browse through multiple "pages". New users also tend to get confused, thanks to the way hair-shops tend to do their vendors, into trying to "pay" the small panels along the side of the main vendor. It doesn't help that those side panels tend to have full versions of the vendor art on them, so they just "look like small vendors."

The Multi-Vend is different.

Firstly, there are no pages. No Arrows to click. There's just squares. One for every item loaded into the vendor. 6 items? 6 buttons. 32 items? 32 buttons. Click a button, and it loads in an instant on the main panel. No blur, no waiting for textures to load. In short.. no browsing a large catalog of items, the customer just needs to click on the button that interests them, then pay the vendor above. That handy blue outline moves around to confirm which item is currently selected.

Secondly, these aren't your standard vendors. You can't actually "pay" the buttons. So no more of those "I meant to buy the black one" complaints. Only the top part is payable, and it will only sell the item displayed. It's also smart enough to do that left-click-pay thing, with the price already filled in.

Each product can have it's own "SL Marketplace" link, that is provided when the button at the bottom is clicked. That's one for every single product in the vendor.. so the button can serve the Red catsuit's marketplace listing when the red catsuit is selected, and the blue one's when blue is selected. Additionally, each product can have it's own secondary "read more info on the web" page, that can lead to a youtube video, pdf file, or dedicated webpage explaining the product and it's workings.

When buttons aren't needed, they're hidden or removed.

The downside is that it's not networked.. meaning that in order to update products, I have to manually install them in the vendor. And it's never less than 2 prims.

It's still in the experimental stage.. but it does seem to be working.

Next up.. reducing some of the fluff and making the script leaner.