New idea (i think)
 

From what I can tell, placeholder mobs are not implemented.

I think an easy way to accompish this would be to add a field to npc_type called placeholder usigned int and PHchance usigned int.

placeholder would have the ID of the mob that can spawn in its place. PHchance would be a number 1-100 indicating how likely the other mob would spawn. Can be as simple as:

You could even cascade them, where a mob could have a placeholder, who is also a placeholder. In this case:

Something to chew on...

Huh? We have this already.

PH is in EQemu, i remember this ...bip... Taskmaster whiping my ass in crushbone, a gnome friend was thinking he was pulling a slaver ... Damn gnomes.

I never thought it was implemeneted either. I always see the rare mobs spawned anywhere I go. Must be somethign in the MW database where they either didn't use the placeholder mobs or just upped the percentage of the named?

This is managed in spawngroup and spawnentry. No npc_type field is required.

yes spawn holders is here its just it seems none of the databases use it =/. Well cept GW maybe.

it is?.. maybe we missed one of those lovely letters from the dev's telling us what fields are added-changed.. dunno though.. would be nice to set this up for everyone..

It's quite simple really. You create the spawngroup with the desired ID. You then go into spawnentry and input the spawngroup ID, the NPC ID from npc_types, and the spawn chance. You can have multiple NPCs in a spawngroup this way if you so choose.

Guildwars is like this because it was hand created by devnoob - WR is probably another good example of a db with placeholders.

hum yes spawn tables are working =)
they work good,
eqbuilder build thos spawn tables automaticly by creating a spawn point at a location and an associated spawn table and then adding in the table all monsters that spawn at this point
to prevent dupes, i added too an error margin for spawn locations
for example all monsters that spawn in 10 points away around from the spawn point are added to the same spawn table too

but it still needs a human brain for named monsters to link all spawns to the same spawn table to be close to how it works in eqlive

spawngroup defines an id and a name of a spawn table
spawn2 defines a spawn point for a spawngroup
spawnentry are the entries of those spawngroup
one entry by npc

This isn't something new. We have had it for a long while.