Knowledge menu bugs

[Nomad]

Noticed a few quirks in the knowledge menu while I was testing my tile set. I'm still playing the June 22 nightly.

1. Starting a new randart game populates the object knowledge menu with all the base types, so there are entries for all of the weapons, armour, diggers, and Phial/Star/Arkenstone/Palantir right at the beginning of the game. This didn't used to happen in 3.2; I didn't realise it was unintended until I noticed it didn't occur with standarts.

2. Finding a randart Phial causes the Phial entry to disappear from object knowledge. (Not sure if this occurs with the other artefact light types: haven't found any of the others yet.) Also all the artefact light types have the descriptive text for a lantern.

3. The ego item description for DSM of Craftmanship seems to be wrong/misleading - it describes the ego type as producing an acid ball of damage 125, recharge 50, which presumably only applies to the black variety. (And some other lines of description would be useful there anyway, since I had to resort to searching this forum to find a clear definition of what it was.)

[Magnate]

Thanks for these - as far as I can tell, none of the three has been reported before. I think the randart quirks (1 & 2) are a side-effect of some other change, but I'm not immediately sure what.

[Nomad]

Don't take my word for it, but it's possible the disappearing Phial trick is older. I think I have a vague recollection of trying to find it on the object menu and not seeing there it before, possibly as far back as 3.1.2v2. But I could just be hallucinating that.

[jens]

3. The ego item description for DSM of Craftmanship seems to be wrong/misleading - it describes the ego type as producing an acid ball of damage 125, recharge 50, which presumably only applies to the black variety. (And some other lines of description would be useful there anyway, since I had to resort to searching this forum to find a clear definition of what it was.)

Ego types don't usually include a description. Of all the ego's only 4 have a description, and being able to add a description is not even mentioned in the header. And in general it's a bad idea to add a desription since, I believe, the current behaviour is to concatenate the descriptions. To get that to work you need to check the descriptions of all the base items and make sure they make sense to put together. And in the case of DSM it would probably just confuse the issue since DSM are special to begin with. Also I dislike descriptions that tell you what the item does, I feel a description should describe what an item looks like, or how it was made, or something else with flavor. The game gives you the full account for what items do when they have been ID'd, that should be enough.

[Nomad]

The game gives you the full account for what items do when they have been ID'd, that should be enough.

My issue was that in the case of Craftmanship, it wasn't enough: I cast ID, but the difference from ordinary DSM was sufficiently subtle and non-obvious that I couldn't figure it out, and turned to the knowledge menu to see if it explained. For newbies, the same would apply to those four items that have description lines in ego_item.txt. (Although I'm not sure those are even implemented any more; they don't seem to be displayed in the knowledge menu.)

I guess the root problem is that ego descriptions are generated from an item's flags, but to-hit/to-dam bonuses are not done with flags, so understanding what the ego type does relies on the player recognising that the values are out of the ordinary. And in the case of Craftmanship, is further confused by the fact that you're required to notice that the standard penalty is not there.

But anyway, that's a side issue; the main bug is really the first part, the knowledge menu description for ego DSMs inheriting information that only applies to one specific type of DSM.

[jens]

Now I get your points :-) I'll see if I can't come up with a description for Craftmanship...

[Nomad]

Another thing I just noticed thanks to the monster info cheat, though I'm not sure it's necessarily the knowledge menu at fault: there's still an entry for giant bronze dragon fly in the monster list. Are they actually still generated in the game now that confusion breath has been removed? Because, well, to quote the monster info: "It has no physical attacks."

[Magnate]

Another thing I just noticed thanks to the monster info cheat, though I'm not sure it's necessarily the knowledge menu at fault: there's still an entry for giant bronze dragon fly in the monster list. Are they actually still generated in the game now that confusion breath has been removed? Because, well, to quote the monster info: "It has no physical attacks."

No, they're not generated, so this is only an issue with the cheat mode. (In fact, IIRC recall used to comment on commonness, so it could say "this creature is NEVER found"!)

[jens]

I think I saw a bronze baby dragon, because I distinctly remembed thinking it must be sad, knowing it can never grow up...

[Nomad]

2. Finding a randart Phial causes the Phial entry to disappear from object knowledge. (Not sure if this occurs with the other artefact light types: haven't found any of the others yet.)

To update on this: I can confirm that the same happens with the Arkenstone and the Star, and that the object knowledge menu entry is still there when an artefact light is dropped, but disappears once you pick it up and recognise that it's an artefact.