count of mobs by npc_id or clean name
 

How can I get a count of the mobs in a zone by their NPC_id or their CleanName

have a quest that I need to reduce boss HP based on # of mobs of a certain name.

I would prefer not to have to make 9 different NPC's when i only need 1

You can probably walk the NPC list and count them. http://www.eqemulator.net/wiki/wikka...ListIterations

was trying to avoid that because this needs to be checked repeatedly.

let me restate, is there any current function that will let me get a count of mobs or even a list by npc_id or CleanName. because if you dump something into an array and then dump the array into a scalar you get the count of the array.
This example for clients will get all clients in zone and $size will have the count.
Just felt I shouldn't have to walk the entire mob list in perl to count my mobs.

The current functions for getting npc's by type id return the first matching npc. One would need to write a similar function to the existing ones except instead of returning on the first result, you would populate a container and return it at the end. From there you would adapt the perl interface to return a perl array. Either way, you're iterating that list, it's just faster using C++ and STL containers.

Another option would be to set up spawn and death events for the applicable NPC type where they signal a quest manager NPC, or the boss directly.
If the number of target mobs to start is static, you could easily just reduce boss hp by a fixed amount per signal, otherwise you would want to use the management NPC so they could increment the current count with a spawn signal and decrement with a death signal.

Signals suck. The reason this came up was because the event was originally using signals, and a player got stuck with all 9 mobs down but the bosses unchanged.

The event in question is the ikkinz group 2 trial. If you look at the current quest SVN you can see how it was waiting for counter == 18 that was incrementing on a signal from the Constained Servitors. Yeah it seemed to work most of the time, but it failed once. I added the GM to instance and checked on the player. yup all down, but the Malevolent Priests were not switched. Obviously a failed signal.

I've rewrote the event and it works fine getting this counter would only make it cosmetically look better, when the serivtors are killed to reduce HP by 10% each. There are 5 constrained servitors npc id's. 1 is spawned 4 times, 1 is spawned twice and the other three are all up once for a total of nine. The way i redid it if 294086 is found i add 4 so it will suddenly drop the boss by 40% once the last one goes down. since the boss is not attackable at that point anyway it is only cosmetic.

If you don't want to walk the list or write C++ code to walk the list and return a count then signals with a backup check for existence using $entity_list->GetMobByNpcTypeID(...) would probably work ok.

That's actually a pretty simple and elegant fix.

Looking at the source, NPC AI is processed every 10ms and only a single signal can be handled per process, so two kills inside of that 10ms window (10 ms in the high end, could be 0-10 really) would trample each other. It would be a very rare case, but it could happen.

I would definitely recommend just iterating the list to do a count as needed. Even if that means 1 time per second, it isn't all that heavy on resources. If you can just start a timer with the start of the event, then iterating just while the event is going on is definitely fine IMO.