how to make these changes for a RP server

[RhinoDude]

I don't mean to cross-post, but I realize now that this forum is a far better location than what I posted yesterday in General : Server, and whereas that post was more for discussion, I want this to concentrate on the technical aspects.

In particular, I'm wondering if all of the following can be done at the database level with single SQL UPDATE and/or DELETE statements, and if so, can somebody point me in the right direction on each? Perhaps a rating of 1 to 5 on each, there 1 is trivialand 5 is herculean effort?

What I'm trying to do is roughly determine the amount of work ahead of me, and if somebody already has script to do one or more of these and if they could share and save me time.

Here is the list:

- remove NO DROP flag from all items
- remove QUEST flag from all items
- remove LORE flag from all items
- change mob/npc corpose rot rate to 24 hours real time (or never if possible)
- always force named mobs to spawn on zone pop where unnamed placeholders are used (this one is probably a lot of work?)

For outdoor and city zones only:
- change named mobs to never respawn if killed
For indoor dungeon zones only:
- change all mobs to never respawn

I'm not adverse to implementing one or more of these with stored proc logic, but what I need to know is if these can all be done at the db level, and if so are we talking a trivial to herculean effort to pull off?

For example, to permanently remove dungeon mobs so that they never respawn once killed, is there a way to automate this, or will I have to manually track the dead mob's somehow and then remove them from the db later when a gaming session is finished? Clearly a server code change could kill respawning, but if I can do it in the db through a trick like bumping the respawn rate to a point greater than our maximum game session length, then that would be fine. As long as for the next game session they are GONE.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I'd like to implement this in a way that is agnostic to a particular db or it's version (PEQ vs. others), and also I would like to do it all in SQL so that the scripts can be simply re-run against a new db drop to get it up to date. I am hoping that for most of the items above, this will be doable. The only I'm concerned about is the placeholder -> named spawn conversion. My fear is that will require specific NPC knowledge, and thus be a pain to implement, and a pain to maintain. But if I can write some smart sproc logic that analyzes the spawn condition / trigger metadata and figures out what triggers what, and can write some simple rules that handle things as expected 98% of the time, and the rest of the time I'll have to manually go in and check things out and fix it up by hand before a given adventure session starts.

Thanks in advance for any pointers...

- Rhino