Complex Spawn Groupings

[John Adams]

Anyone,

How can we create spawngroups of 2 or more NPCs that spawn at >different< locations? Here is a prime example - when a Tunarian wolfmaster spawns, chances are he has a training wolf next to him. With our current design, you cannot /spawn combine them, because they will then spawn at the same x,y,z, and only according to their balanced spawnpercentage.

complex_spawns.jpg

In the above example, you not only have 2 "wolfmasters" of different races + their "training wolf", but it appears that opposed to them spawning, you also have the possibility of a "bearmaster" and its "traning bear" instead.
If this was 2 spawns, 1 location, it would work fine using the current system. But this is how I believe many spawns work in EQ2.

complex_spawns2.jpg

Above you see 3 spawn locations, with many different spawn possibilities, but all 3 x,y,z are "grouped". Maybe this can only be handled once NPC grouping is invented, but that won't help our cleanup effort today if we do not know what to combine, delete, or leave alone. Maybe leave these alone for now?

Let's discuss. What are our options? Can one "zonespawngroup" control multiple "zonespawnentry"s? There does not appear to be a UNIQUE restriction on spawngroupid in zonespawnentry... I am just not sure how the server will handle it. Soon as I get some work out of teh way, I'll give it a try in an empty zone somewhere.

[John Adams]

I just thought of something. What if the simple solution is to use a LUA "spawn" command that when the trainers spawn, they simply pop their beast next to them? Actually, that would work great for cleanup. We could /spawn remove any beasties and use scripts to pop them if that NPC is selected to spawn.
Yes? No?