Loot table structure... please help!

[RuddigerEladamri]

Hello everyone! New to the forum, but I have a firm grasp on what is going on, I think. I played back before lizards walked Norrath, and left a while after the lost dungeons were found. Nostalgia, member berries, a thirst for knowledge, whatever you want to call it, made me look into setting this up when i finally wanted to break down and learn SQL. First off... wonderful project. The amount of work here is impressive, and it is a lot of fun to get running and play with.

But I have a problem. I cannot get loot entries to work as I think they should. Here is everything I think I know about it:

In game, I located an orc centurion. #npcstats says it is NPC ID 54004. That is confirmed by a perl quest script that I wrote in the gfaydark quests folder. On reboot, that spawn triggers the Perl script named 54004.pl, so I know it's firing the spawn events for that npc id.

I run the query :
SELECT * FROM npc_types WHERE npc_types.id = 54004;

And there he is. orc_centurion. According to the loottable_id, he has loot record 1513. Easy enough.

SELECT * FROM lootdrop_entries WHERE lootdrop_entries.lootdrop_id = 1513;

And there are 3 matches. Assuming they are the other drops for my orc, I make another entry for id 1513, reboot the server, and wait for my new drop to roll.

But it never shows up.

Ever.

So I dig again, checking it over. All seems right. But this time, I dig one step deeper and look at the items returned by searching for loot table 1513....

SELECT * FROM items WHERE items.id = 12878;

Drachnid silk? What? That can't be right. I looked at the other 3 drops for record 1513, and they are all drachnid style drops, and this orc clearly drops its correct items. From the wiki, I'm following the db correctly I think, but it just does not make sense how it is pulling the items. I have not gone killing drachnids looking for my new item to show up, but I've got a dollar that says I'll find it on one somewhere.

I'm using the PEQ database, and akka's beast of an install script with login server and bots enabled on my private setup. Anyone have a clue as to what im doing wrong?

[ChaosSlayerZ]

I won't answer your question in detail here, but I will give you a useful hint:
Loot structure is a complex system that is spread across 3 interconnecting tables
To better understand it its better viewed in a George Editor that shows you all 3 phases at the same time.

Once you looked it the loot system though George Editor you will better grasp the concept how it all interconnects.

http://www.georgestools.chrsschb.com//

[RuddigerEladamri]

Excellent. I'll check it out and see what's going on using George's tools. I've seen mention of them around the forums, and I'll give it a go. I appreciate the gentle nudge in the right direction.

[RuddigerEladamri]

*edit*

Never mind. Link works.

[ChaosSlayerZ]

Best of luck. Personally i can't do any serious Emu work without George tools - PEQ editor is way too limited for my needs. ;)

[RuddigerEladamri]

I got the toolset installed and running just fine. I can see what you mean. There is a ton of really good stuff there, and I got my drops working. Curiosity is killing me on how it actually ties together (I'm just that kind of guy), so when I have a bit of time, I'm going to be still looking at the db before and after using George's tools, just so I can hopefully see what changes are being made.

Thanks again for the info. I can see I'll be using this software set a bunch as well.

[Kingly_Krab]

NPCs have a loottable ID, loottables have lootdrops, lootdrops have items.

So to find what items drop on a certain NPC all you need to do is run this query (# is your NPC ID).
SELECT
items.*
FROM
items
INNER JOIN lootdrop_entries ON items.id = lootdrop_entries.item_id
INNER JOIN loottable_entries ON lootdrop_entries.lootdrop_id = loottable_entries.lootdrop_id
INNER JOIN npc_types ON loottable_entries.loottable_id = npc_types.loottable_id
WHERE
npc_types.id = #;