Instance table - ideas and looking for suggestions.

[Doodman]

Couple things to think of:

shortname - Take it out. It is not needed there. zoneid is enough to identify the zone. If you want the name, get it from the zone table via a join.
port - What use is this? Especially without an IP. Zones do no tneed to be on the host.

Also, zoneid is a int32 where one half is the actually zoneid and the other (if non-zero) is the instance id. So, the way to do this would be to make sure that world is tracking zoneid -> zoneserver by full int32 and to boot zoneservers like normal. Then add some code to zone to query your table on zone bootup if the instance id portion of the zoneis is non-zero.

Also, to do this right you may want to look at the zone->world registration and have them register as "instance" zone servers. so that you can reserve certain zones for instance only. Like, perhaps:

zone . 1.2.3.4 7000 1.2.3.4

Is still a normal dynamic zone, but maybe

zone % 1.2.3.4 7000 1.2.3.4

Is an instance zone. This could even be extended to be like

zone %.% 1.2.3.4 7000 1.2.3.4

to bring up certain instances per main zone, if you wanted to take it that far.

[bushman77]

ok I realize there are some difficulties with instancing, but lets say you want a group to enter into this zone? now with a zone being instancted to just 1 character or accoutn, won't that mean other people in your group are excluded from entering into the instance?
Also the other thing that comes to mind is dynamic mob stats. Is it posibable to enter a varable as a field in an entery in the ncp_types table and take the value from a perl script for which an NPC take from the group average?

Mabey like someone said earlier, have a zone lets say guka renamed serveral times to things such as guka01, guka02 and so on in the eq client files. People don't need to download them just to make a copy of the guka files and rename it to the appropiate zone name. i do realize with each new instance created this way an entery will also have to be entered into the DB with the corrosponding name. But this is not really true instancing.

Just a though that came to mind upon reading this posting