In this case I'm using NWNX to access spawn point locations and increment the internal encounter "number spawned" counter, and setting the creatures encounter. That way the game engine will still take care of exhaustion, reseting the encounter, its timers, etc.
Clever bastard.
It seemed to me at the time that this would be much simpler and probably much faster than a trigger system. I'd guess that a trigger system would have waypoints to act as spawn points, which would probably have to be uniquely named for every painted trigger at least in a single area. Or is there a better way that someone has found to do a trigger system?
There's a slightly better way. We use triggers and waypoints, with bitflags on the waypoint. Encounter 1 uses only waypoints with the 1 bit, 2 with the 2, 3 with 4, 4 with 16, etc. Allows re-use of waypoints for multiple encounters. Also requires a lot of attention to detail to avoid TMI infinite loops if you screw up, due to some of our optimizations and customization.
'> Those get found and fixed quickly on the first test-runs, though. Bitmath also gets a bit cumbersome to back-of-the-hand past 16384 or so, but I usually keep to about 12 triggers per area. Can post some code if you're curious, but it's hewn pretty close to what we wanted it to do, without too much room for customization. Uses a lot of local string sets to create differing-rarity spawn tables.
Funky
