CasperVend. Credit where credit is due.

I have to give credit to Casper Warden, creator of the CasperVend system. These vendors are BUILT with the kind of modding I'm doing, in mind. Right off the bat, there's simple instructions for making your own vendors, even mesh vendors.

DESIGNING the new affiliate vendors hasn't been as easy as I'd have liked, but since there is a difference in functionality, I really wanted to change up the vendor's looks a little bit to make sure that affiliate resellers *KNEW* when they were using the new vendors. I wanted there to be a visual difference, something I could ask about in an IM if they were having trouble with their vendors.. something they'd recognize. "Is it an 'arrow vendor'? Is the arrow panel greenish grey? Or is it black?"



The mesh models for the vendors are done, and the good news is that all three vendor models clock in at less than 1 land impact (1 prim) each. Even the 7 panel one!

It's going to take a bit of effort to properly program the vendor so that all the buttons on the control-bar work properly, but the product panels on my model are already usable 'out of the box' just by dropping the scripts in! It's very exciting.

In terms of the profiles and product listings and such, everything seems to be properly configured on that end. Once the vendor machines are working properly and loaded with their various offline/problem textures, then it will probably be on to the "making the individual vendors" stage, where I make one vendor for every product.

Progress is coming at a reasonably quick pace. When this project started, I have to admit I dreaded it, thinking it would take me weeks to finish. At the rate it's been going, I should be able to have a test package of vendors available sometime early next week.

I've decided to do short testing phase, where I'll hand the new vendors to a couple of the affiliate locations where we've seen the most delivery failures, have them install these, and see how it goes. After a few days (possibly a week) if things are looking good, I'll make the package available to all affiliates using the standard delivery and notification systems.

The only question I'm still mulling over, is whether the single-item vendors should be "headless".. which is to say, whether or not they should have a control bar below the vendor (with the "help" Question mark button). Default action is still "touch", and there's a "help" button in the customer-facing menu, so the bottom bar really isn't "necessary".. and it does look nicer if all the single item vendors are squares.