Part of the problem with the lack of a public database is the fact that we don't have a common numbering system for anyone to modify from...
think about it... someone gives you a SQL file that adds say 200 doors to your database that populate pok, abyssmal sea, and say uh shadowhaven as an example... those doors will auto increment their id field so the doors that might be numbered 200-400 on your database might be 500-700 on someone else's
now yeah i know doors dont really matter because the id means nothing really, but think about the npc_types table, the spawngroups spawn2 spawnentry etc etc
we have no default numbering system for those ID's that *DO* matter...
a while back the concept of zonenumber * 1000 was applies to the npc_types table... but it's not consistent. some older zones still have npc's with numbers out of that scope. and the other problem is that we cant do a mass modify script using names extracted from spawn lists because there are a ton of different rat, bat, orc, goblin, giant, etc etc mobs in different zones and i can only hope that they all have different npc_type values in the existing database or we're a lot worse off than i thought we were lol
If we were to take the time to mod the database to a default numbering scheme... then we could start adding to a larger database because we would know that every door, spawngroup, spawn entry, etc etc in the plane of knowledge has an id value between x and y which means that if I make a perfect copy of the live servers' POK i can make 2 SQL files to distribute it.
one does DELETE FROM `blah` WHERE `id` >= 202000 AND `id` < 203000 etc etc
and the other adds my new stuff
reboot and tadaa. but the way it is now... i had to create a new table which was a copy of the npc_types table, then delete 3 rows from it to fit the insert query for the newest pok i found to start working from. then after the inster was done, add those rows back in to make it work with the latest db version, export it all to sql, delete all the npc types entries for pok, delete all the spawn groups etc etc etc, then reinsert my sql file into npc types with all the new values for the merchantlists etc.
difference? took me about 3 hours to source it in, VS about 5 minutes if we had a global setup for the database that everyone used.
im a php/mysql programmer so im actually working on a php system that will go through and revamp my entire database using a numbering scheme of 1000*zoneid on auto increment.
so far the past couple attempts have screwed up loot, merchants, pets, spells etc... so it's still a work in progress, but once i have it finished i will release the new database, not the utility.
if i put out the utility then everyone who has their own custom database work will just use it to mod their db and continue to mooch our releases without any contributions of their own. but by releasing the database only we force them to conform if they want to use our db updates :p
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