Files
docs/website/MARKETPLACE.md
wtclaude 6ce60a82c3 docs(link): the player-vendor marketplace (Protocol 3.0 §8)
Documents order 5b across the four repos, and records what building it changed
about §8 as designed.

- NEW website/MARKETPLACE.md — the operator guide: what the pages must say out
  loud and why, the privacy contract (the player's in-game Vendor Search toggle
  wins, and no admin setting overrides it), the Bridge.cfg knobs and how they
  trade against each other, and the measured sweep costs.
- INTEGRATION.md — catalog entry for vendor.listing / vendor.listing.remove with
  its six consumer gotchas, and the GET /market REST section (the sidecar's only
  paged read, and why it orders by serial rather than shop name).
- BACKEND_DESIGN.md — shard_vendors / shard_vendor_items, the routes, and the
  marketplace search as the only rate-limited public read.
- SHARD_VISIBILITY.md — why the market's fields default to Everyone (the in-game
  gump already shows exactly that set), why location is one setting covering
  four things, and why hiding the owner name without the owner id achieves
  nothing.
- PLAN.md — the amortized round-robin as the one sweep pattern the bridge did not
  previously have, and an update to §7's cliloc note: pushing name resolution to
  the plugin was never an option, because ServUO cannot read a modern client's
  compressed cliloc files either.
- v3.md §8.8 — the four things the build settled differently, chief among them
  that §8.1's FLAT location payload would have made Part A's pre-wired
  market.location rule inert, exactly like the characterName miss one part
  earlier.

Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-29 09:52:14 -05:00

168 lines
8.9 KiB
Markdown
Raw Permalink Blame History

This file contains ambiguous Unicode characters

This file contains Unicode characters that might be confused with other characters. If you think that this is intentional, you can safely ignore this warning. Use the Escape button to reveal them.

# Marketplace — the player-vendor index
**Status:** On `edge` — servuo-plugins [#5](https://gitea.whitlocktech.com/RunicGateway/servuo-plugins/pulls/5), link [#19](https://gitea.whitlocktech.com/RunicGateway/link/pulls/19), website [#116](https://gitea.whitlocktech.com/RunicGateway/website/pulls/116).
**Design:** [`docs/link/v3.md` §8](../link/v3.md) — Protocol 3.0 Part B/3.
**Depends on:** [`CLILOCS.md`](CLILOCS.md) — without a cliloc table, listings render as item ids.
The marketplace is a searchable index of every player vendor on the shard: what
each shop is selling, for how much, and where it is standing. It is the same set
the in-game **Vendor Search** gump reads, offered from outside the game — so a
player can find the vanquishing kryss they want before logging in, and someone
who does not play at all can see that the economy exists.
Page: `/site/market`, plus `/site/market/vendors/:serial` for one shop.
## Three things the pages must say out loud
Everything below follows from how the data is gathered, and each has a visible
consequence the UI is required to surface.
**1. The prices are not live.** The shard sweeps vendors **round-robin** — at
most `Bridge.MarketSweepBatch` shops per tick — so a given shop can be a full
cycle behind. The page carries a *"prices last refreshed N minutes ago"* banner
driven by the **oldest** vendor row, not the newest: the one stale shop is the
one that wastes somebody's trip.
**2. A shop can be truncated.** `Bridge.MarketMaxListings` (250 by default) caps
how many listings one frame carries. A commodity reseller with thousands of
stacked resources is a real thing, and an uncapped frame for one is measured in
megabytes. Over the cap the shop reports `truncated`, and the vendor page says
*"showing 250 of 3,104 — this shop holds more than the shard publishes"* rather
than presenting a partial shop as complete.
**3. An item may have no name.** Items on the wire carry a cliloc id, not a name.
On a shard whose operator has not converted a cliloc table
([`CLILOCS.md`](CLILOCS.md)) the honest render is the item id — never an invented
label, which would be indistinguishable from a real one.
## Privacy: the player's own toggle wins
Only vendors whose owner left the in-game **Vendor Search** flag ON are ever sent
to the site. A player who hides their shop in game is hidden here too, and no
admin setting overrides that. When they hide one that was already indexed, the
shard emits `vendor.listing.remove` and the row is deleted — so revoking consent
takes effect, it does not merely stop refreshing.
Shop name, owner character name and location default to **Everyone**, because the
stock Vendor Search gump already shows exactly that set to any player in game.
They remain admin-configurable; see [`SHARD_VISIBILITY.md`](SHARD_VISIBILITY.md).
Account names and website user ids never cross the wire at all.
## How it is put together
```
ServUO uo-link sidecar website
────── ─────────────── ───────
BridgeMarket.cs vendors table shard_vendors
round-robin sweep ──────► (whole frame blob) ──────► shard_vendor_items
per-vendor diff GET /market (paged) + display_name
vendor.listing resolved at ingest
vendor.listing.remove
```
**The shard side** walks at most `MarketSweepBatch` vendors per tick from a
persistent cursor, diffs each against what it last published, and emits a whole
frame for any shop that moved. Per-tick cost is therefore bounded by the batch,
not by how many vendors the world holds — full coverage takes
`ceil(vendors / batch) × MarketSweepSeconds`.
**The sidecar** stores each frame whole and serves `GET /market`, its only paged
read. It normalizes nothing and defines no audiences: it is a dumb forwarder, and
search is the website's job.
**The website** splits each frame into a vendor row and its listings, replacing
that vendor's whole listing set inside one transaction (the frame is
authoritative for that vendor, never a delta). Item names are resolved against
the cliloc table **on the way in** and stored denormalized, which is what makes
search-by-name possible and keeps the cliloc table off the hot path.
## Operating it
Everything is in `Config/Bridge.cfg` on the shard. There is nothing to configure
on the website.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| `MarketEnabled` | `true` | Master switch. Off publishes nothing; the page shows an empty index. |
| `MarketSweepSeconds` | `60` | Tick interval. |
| `MarketSweepBatch` | `25` | Vendors inventoried per tick. Clamped 1..500. |
| `MarketMaxListings` | `250` | Per-shop listing cap, after which `truncated`. Clamped 1..5000. |
**Faster coverage vs. per-tick cost.** Lowering `MarketSweepSeconds` or raising
`MarketSweepBatch` both refresh the index sooner and both cost more per tick.
The expensive part is the item walk, which recurses into every container a vendor
is selling — so a shard of big shops should raise the interval rather than the
batch.
`[bridge status` reports the sweep, including `lastMs` and `maxMs`:
```
market(enabled=True sweeps=42 scanned=108 emitted=27 removed=0 skipped=0
truncated=0 tracked=27 vendors=27 cursor=2 batch=25 lastMs=0.31 maxMs=15.40)
```
A tick over **50 ms** prints a rate-limited warning naming the knob:
```
[Bridge] market sweep took 82.4 ms (budget 50 ms) - lower Bridge.MarketSweepBatch (now 25) if this persists
```
Measured on a shard with 27 vendors × 40 listings (209k items, 43k mobiles):
**15.4 ms** for the first cold tick of 25 vendors, **0.3 ms** in steady state —
the diff is what makes an unchanged world nearly free. Note the arithmetic: 25
*full* shops at the 250-listing cap is 6,250 items ≈ 95 ms, over budget. Real
shops hold tens, which is why 25 is the default and why the warning exists.
`[bridge sweepnow` runs one tick immediately; `[bridge reload` re-reads the
settings above without a restart.
## Names arriving late
Item names come from the cliloc table, and the market sweep will **not** re-send
an unchanged shop just because the site learned what its items are called. So a
cliloc import triggers a bulk re-resolution of every stored listing — otherwise
an operator who configures clilocs after the first sweep would see item ids until
every shop happened to change on its own. It runs after a boot import and after
an admin import, takes ~50 ms per thousand listings, and never throws: a failure
leaves names exactly as they were.
## API
All under `/api/v1/public/shard`, gated by the `market` feature and
**rate-limited** — these are the first genuinely expensive public reads on the
site (a `LIKE` scan plus a `COUNT` over what is typically the largest `shard_*`
table, reachable with no session).
| Route | What |
|---|---|
| `GET /market` | Search. Returns **listings**, not vendors — "who sells X and for how much" is the question. `?q=&minPrice=&maxPrice=&itemId=&map=&region=&sort=&limit=&offset=`, `sort ∈ {price_asc, price_desc, recent}`. |
| `GET /market/meta` | Index size, staleness, and which facets and regions actually hold vendors — so a client builds its filters without running a search it will discard. |
| `GET /market/vendors/:serial` | One shop and its listings. **404** for a serial the index has never seen, which also covers a vendor since dismissed or hidden — to an anonymous caller those are the same answer. |
`q` matches the resolved display name **or** the item's own literal name, because
an item with a player-set name (most of what is worth searching for on a
player-run shard) may carry a generic cliloc. `%` and `_` in a query are escaped:
they are `LIKE` metacharacters, not SQL ones, so parameterization alone would let
a search for `%` match every listing on the shard.
Full schemas are in the OpenAPI spec (`ShardMarketPage`, `ShardMarketVendor`,
`ShardMarketMeta`, `ShardMarketListing`, `ShardMarketLocation`).
## Tables
`shard_vendors` (one row per shop) and `shard_vendor_items` (one row per priced
listing). Both are ingest-owned; nothing else writes to them. No foreign keys,
in keeping with every other `shard_*` table — the ingest transaction is what
keeps them consistent, and an FK would turn a malformed frame into a failed write
rather than a dropped row.
There is deliberately **no `payload` column** on `shard_vendors`, unlike the
points board next door. The board's top-N is a fixed-size list read whole, so it
lives in JSON; here the items *are* the searchable rows, so they are normalized
and there is nothing left worth duplicating. The sidecar keeps the whole blob,
because outage resilience is its job.
`shard_vendor_items.display_name` is denormalized and indexed (alone, and
composite with `price` for "cheapest matching X"). See "Names arriving late"
above for how it is kept current.