I am thinking about doing some modding to introduce some new monsters into the world. I've gone through all the tutorials I can find including the excruciatingly painful "New NPC" one by The-DeathKnight which unfortunately left me entirely confused because I had no idea what the net effect of that exercise was. It didn't seem to add any new NPCs to the world. I'm quite confused about just how exactly one adds new data to the game world and whether or not it requires a new game to take effect.

All that aside, I have since discovered the spawn command provided by the Community Patch for .info files which seems to be a significantly easier way to add new items into the world. I'm wondering what kind of a limit there is on such a tool. What would happen if I put 1000 spawns in an .info file? What's the best way to trigger the spawns? I have discovered that by using an InfoType of "1" that the spawn which execute as soon as you are near to the Owner NPC. I could obviously tie this to some NPC that you're likely to be near when you start the game, but I would like something more automatic if possible. I tried setting the owner to PC_Hero but that just caused the script to execute repeatedly spawning forever. I guess the .info runs once if the Owner is not PC_Hero (and not permanent) and repeatedly if the Owner is PC_Hero.

Can I use the SetGameEvent command somehow to cause the .info to execute once? I could make use the of new CondPlayerKnowsNot but I'm not sure if that guarantees that the script will execute once. Do the .info files get processed in sequential order or are they multi-threaded? And is there any performance considerations to this technique (specifically with using PC_Hero as the owner)?

I'm a little surprised that in all my dredging through these forums, I haven't come across any discussion on the subject (specifically of the spawn command).