Well, I dropped by this thread a couple of days ago and saw the discussion related to black sandals and the like. Among the topics I noticed some information suggesting that the only NPCs that spawned black sandals were Jewelers, and that they spawned these items due to a typo in the template file. To make a long introduction short, this did not jive well with my memory of OSI servers, nor did it match somewhat recent experiences with the demo.
From my recollection, jewelers and weavers were the two sources of black sandals on OSI servers, and in fact, they did not always spawn with these sandals (in fact it was somewhat rare). This notion came from the practice of sandal farming in Papua during early-mid UOR. The process was to pre-cast fire field (which had been disallowed in towns), and to run into Papua and cast it on the target. This exploited a bug in the targeting portion of the scripts that forgot to check to see if you were in town upon targeting the spell (this was not the only bug of its kind, mind you).
For anyone who recalls the configuration of the map, both the weavers and the jewlers shop were very close to the edge of guard zone, allowing a pre-cast spell to be released before the timer expired. However, the jeweler's shop was right next to the bank, which would attract attention and almost certainly get you killed, and your sandals looted. Thus, the weavers shop was the ideal location for an "out of the way" place to get sandals from.
Given that, on OSI servers, I farmed my fair share of black sandals using this method and one of the things that I decided to do while farming these sandals was to keep a set of sandals for myself. A couple of hours ago, I got onto my OSI account that I had re-activated some time ago in order to compare OSI functionality with demo functionality in certain areas and checked the black sandal stash that I had. The black sandals that I had (7 of them) all had a hue of 1. Thus, the sandals that I had farmed, that were quite specifically from the Fellucia Papua weavers on OSI servers, suffered from the same glitch.
Small note: during the time that I farmed on OSI servers for these sandals, weavers and tailors would both spawn either shoes or sandals. But when they spawned shoes, the hues weren't simply limited to the neutral color hues as they were on sandals. Sometimes deep blues and hot pink colors that were available on normal dye tubs would show up when they spawned shoes.
But back on the main topic, I also recalled seeing black sandals spawn on the weavers once on the demo as well. Unfortunately this was over a year ago (back before Batlin had even decompiled the scripts themselves), and I didn't have the forethought to take a screenshot then. So, I decided that I would take the time to mess around and see if I couldn't get one to spawn again on the demo. Luckily it didn't take more than a couple of tries (although this is not indicative of the total difficulty) to get one to spawn. Here are the screenshots:
Weaver spawns the black sandals
- blacksandals.PNG (316.67 KiB) Viewed 168 times
Sandals on the weaver's corpse
- blacksandals2.PNG (334.51 KiB) Viewed 168 times
Shiny new sandals!
- blacksandals3.PNG (321.78 KiB) Viewed 168 times
And there you have it. It looks like something else is probably the root cause of this issue in the first place. Some testing on other NPCs should be done to see if any other NPC will spawn such sandals. From my recollection it is only Jewelers and Weavers, and if the demo confirms that, then we'll have ourselves a really awkward bug to track down.
Edit: Upon further testing in the demo it was discovered that only female weavers would ever drop black colored footwear. Further investigation into the templates revealed this amusing bug:
Here is the shoe equipment line from the demo for male Weavers:
<eq random_shoes neutral_colors 1>
Here is the shoe equipment line from the demo for female Weavers (notice the bolded letters):
<eq random_shoes netural_colors 1>
So basically both instances of black footwear come from a mis-spelling in the actual template itself. Given that, we can say that black sandals should spawn approximately 1 in 4 times on Jewelers and Weavers (1 in 2 for male or female, and 1 in 2 for sandals or shoes).
