What is it that you need to know? Waypoints are tricky to say the least, but not out of reach -- especially to beginners.
Things it'd do you a lot of good to keep in mind:
Random pauses seem to be the only 'working' solution in eqemu 5x atm.. Creating full pause grids will only cause your npc to run off into 'the great beyond' and dissapear once one waypoint has been reached.
Example: (target npc and type folowing) #grid add 11100 2 2 (adds grid #11100 to your 'grid' table in your db, with random wandering and random pause ) this is used heavily for wandering npcs. To decide what range of grid numbers to use, use some type of db frontend (eg, mysqlfront or control center), click on the table 'grid' and you will see a bunch of 'id' values on the first column in the table. Sort these in ascending order and go to the last used (highest) number in that table. Make your number higher than the highest value to make sure you don't try to add grids already there. (this will cause you to not be able to zone into that zone) ie: zone unavailable errors.
After I add my grid, what then?
You must now define the waypoints your npc will travel. Waypoints are x,y,z coordinates that an npc looks for in movement. This is a common 'grey area' for people animating npcs... In hilly/mountainous terrains this
will be a pain in the ass.. in other words, plan on using all 50 waypoints on each npc if you don't favor watching a zone full of mobs 'hop up and down' when it comes to travelling anywhere near a hill (or even flat terrain that warrants a +/-1 Z coordinate value).
Example: After having added your #grid , you make sure you target the npc and type the following to add your waypoints.. #wp add 11100 10 1 (move to next point of movement) #wp add 11100 10 2 (and on, up to 50..) eg: #wp add 11100 10 50.
#wp [the waypoint command] add [you're adding a waypoint] 10 [if using a random pause timer like I did in the previous example, this is how many seconds npc waits to travel another random path] 1 [what waypoint number is this?]
Finally, assigning movement:
Your 'grid' table should now have 11100 defined (or whatever number you chose) and in that 'grid' table, you should see 'wp1','wp2','wp3' and on.. those are the fields that were populated when you typed #wp add 11100 10 1. Now let's assign that gridnum to the npc so the npc knows what grid number [11100] you've created for it.
Example: Target npc, type #gassign [grid number you created] in my above example, this would be #gassign 11100. This will add that grid number [11100] to a field called 'pathgrid' in the npc_types table for that npc.
Now, the big dum dum dum.... type #repop (or, if your computer is slower, type #depopzone ... wait a minute, then #repop). If you immediately notice your npc moving after he repops, then good job. Make sure you watch the npc to be sure it isn't walking off its path... if it continues its path, you have just animated 1 npc! Think of the other billion of them you have to do now
As newer innovations become of the waypoint/grid system, i'll post an updated tutorial. Would pictures make this easier perhaps? :P
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