Visual States (part deux)

[John Adams]

LE, can you explain again for the idiots (namely, me...) who simply cannot wrap my mind around visual states? Here's my problem. I see a spawn on my island for Trainer Gurga Trueheart. His "visual state" is 9 (nine), yet in the visual_states table, there is no value for 9 that I can see.
Same with Trainer Charlene Stoutmuffin - visual state of 519, but there is no state for that.
If I change her state to say 125, she cackles. That's cool. Also, 126, she casts. Also cool. But combining them to make 251, she does not cackle AND cast... so maybe I am wrong on the whole bitwise thingy.
More importantly, what about these visual states that are on NPCs but do not seem to have a correlating "state" in the DB?
Secondly... Initial State, Action state, Mood state, Activity Status... did we go over this? What does this all mean?
Off to go soak my fingers from all this typing.

[LethalEncounter]

Sounds like you might have some corrupt data. Parser might have parsed something incorrectly. You were right to look in the visual_states table for those states and all of the data I have parsed has been in that table. There could be instances where a new visual state has been created on live and doesnt yet exist in our database, but I just checked and there isnt a visual state of 9 or 519.
As far as I know you can only have one visual_state active at any particular time. Below is what each one of the states is for (Note that I havent messed with these in a while, but this is what I can remember):

Initial State - This is the state that determines certain information about a spawn as it is spawned. This field does allow for multiple values.
The base value is 0 and used for things like treasure chests. A value of 1 is associated with an object and I believe if 1 is not a part of the final value the object will allow someone to pass right through it. 128 is added to signify the spawn is not attackable. 16384 is the base for normal NPCs.

Action State - This is used as the default action that is being performed by a spawn or very close to it. For instance a tailoring merchant might have 13039 (tailoring_idle from the visual_states table). This also does certain effects like flies over a dead body and such.

Mood State - Used to set the spawns mood. It doesnt make much of a difference, but you can set them as happy, angry, tired, or afraid.

Activity Status - This is used in conjunction with initial state to set objects as solid, but it also used to specify certain player events camping, linkdead, LFG, etc.

Visual State - Used by spawns closely with action states. You can use this to make a spawn do certain things as well as always have a particular spell effect on them.

I'm not sure if this caused more questions that answers but let me know if you still problems.