Magnate's new egos

[Antoine]

Great coding/conceptual effort Magnate

But

am I the only one who's a bit nervous about this? (For V)

A.

[Magnate]

Great coding/conceptual effort Magnate

But

am I the only one who's a bit nervous about this? (For V)

A.

No - the entire dev team is nervous, which is why it's not been released in a dev version yet. If people want to test it, they have to build it themselves.

EDIT: Just as a reminder, this doesn't remove any of the old objects or ego types - they're all still generatable. It just adds a bunch of new stuff, which needs playtesting and balancing.

[Derakon]

From my understanding, the major changes with this, as implemented, are:

* You can now get a "partial ego" which has only some of the attributes of existing multipart egos. For example, armor that has two basic elemental resistances, or that can't be damaged but gives no resistances.
* You can get "egos" that don't have bonuses to-hit/dam/AC.
* Some new item combinations are available (e.g. Katana of Chaos, Broken weapons)
* Object distributions may have changed.

So for all that text, this feels like a comparatively low-impact change to item allocation. However, it sets us up to change so much more...

[Magnate]

From my understanding, the major changes with this, as implemented, are:

* You can now get a "partial ego" which has only some of the attributes of existing multipart egos. For example, armor that has two basic elemental resistances, or that can't be damaged but gives no resistances.
* You can get "egos" that don't have bonuses to-hit/dam/AC.
* Some new item combinations are available (e.g. Katana of Chaos, Broken weapons)
* Object distributions may have changed.

So for all that text, this feels like a comparatively low-impact change to item allocation. However, it sets us up to change so much more...

It's kind of you to ratchet down the scariness - at the most basic level you are quite right. But the thing that Antoine and others are probably scared about is the last one: I can't possibly have preserved the balance of the previous object and ego item sets, introduced all these new permutations *and* magically balanced them all perfectly. So yes, distributions will probably feel quite different for both egos and artifacts (n.b. artifacts haven't changed, but the method of generating them has) - this is precisely why I'm keen for it to get wider testing in a dev version, because it'll need adjusting before any new release.

Unless I'm wrong, and what people are scared of is that it somehow breaks the "flavour" of V. I've tried very hard not to do that - there are no new abilities, and no changes to the combat algorithm at all, just new permutations of object flags. Nothing has been removed either. The weirdest thing is probably that you can find (+0,+0) weapons with magical abilities, which never happened before. In general +hit/+dam are a little less common, while variations in dice are more common (they were insanely rare before, for non-artifacts).

[Narvius]

Can affixes be obvious to the @? Like, you see a sword on the ground and can immediately tell whether it's broken. Or burning.

[Magnate]

Can affixes be obvious to the @? Like, you see a sword on the ground and can immediately tell whether it's broken. Or burning.

It would be possible to achieve that, but I haven't implemented that yet. I think we'll wait until rune-based ID before looking at stuff like that.

[Derakon]

I can see arguments for four levels of breakdown, but I agree we should probably wait for rune-based ID before worrying about it. Those levels are:

* Obvious on sight. This would mostly be for stuff that changes the physical composition of the item, like Mithril or Giant.
* Obvious on pickup. Pretty much this is just limited to items that are lighter or heavier than they should be but don't match the first category.
* Obvious on wield. As current -- that flaming sword extinguishes itself when not in use.
* Obvious on use. As current -- that sword of Slay Orc appears mundane until used on orcs.

The number of runes on an item should probably be revealed on pickup.

[Nomad]

The simplest thing would seem to be to make all the "obvious on sight" traits like size and material into prefixes, and have the non-obvious traits as suffixes. It's very close to breaking down that way in any case, though you'd have to switch a few like "Aggravating" into "of Aggravation". I presume it would be much easier to code prefixes as apparent and suffixes hidden than to do it on a case by case basis for different affixes.

[Antoine]

From my understanding, the major changes with this, as implemented, are:

* You can now get a "partial ego" which has only some of the attributes of existing multipart egos. For example, armor that has two basic elemental resistances, or that can't be damaged but gives no resistances.
* You can get "egos" that don't have bonuses to-hit/dam/AC.
* Some new item combinations are available (e.g. Katana of Chaos, Broken weapons)
* Object distributions may have changed.

So for all that text, this feels like a comparatively low-impact change to item allocation. However, it sets us up to change so much more...

[grumpy old man hat]

"Object distributions may have changed" is not what I would consider to be a low-impact change.

But this
> However, it sets us up to change so much more...

is the bit that worries me

A.

[Antoine]

Unless I'm wrong, and what people are scared of is that it somehow breaks the "flavour" of V.

That's my other major concern. If I wanted to find a Cruel Voulge of Dweomercraft, I'd go buy a copy of Diablo 3.

A.

[buzzkill]

Not to worry Antoine. At some point all the rapid fire changes will cease, and the subsequent maintainers will get to the serious work of producing a game that is vaguely resembles Angband and is indeed playable (by your great grandchildren). But not to worry still, cause as our friendly public relations rep is always quick to point out, you can always play 3.2 or 3.1 or 2.8 some other non-maintained UI nightmare that still had some sense of balance and old-school charm. "Vanilla Angband, we're not just Vanilla anymore."

FK is making a comeback. That should say something.

[fizzix]

[grumpy old man hat]

"Object distributions may have changed" is not what I would consider to be a low-impact change.

Object distribution definitely has changed. It wasn't that great before, and it's in a bizarre state right now. However, the ability to tweak it has gone up incredibly. Before, we only had a couple knobs to play with, now we have a lot more. The hope is we can tweak things to get good gameplay. It's possible, but unlikely, that we won't be able to. In which case, it won't go into V.

The biggest change though, as with most, is internal. The item generation is such a gigantic kludge and this fixes a lot of it.

But this
> However, it sets us up to change so much more...

is the bit that worries me

A.

So, as you're probably aware, one of the main ideas behind Angband is to make it very easy for variant maintainers to make their own game solely by changing the edit files. This puts a bunch more stuff in the edit files, and greatly expands what other people can do with the game. I think that's a net win. I think, but I'm not sure, that this is what Magnate is implying.

Anyway, nothing is set it stone yet. I have great hopes that affixes will work out, and will apply myself to that goal. And I hope you and buzzkill are willing to give it a shot and tell us what works and what is complete crap.

[Magnate]

That's my other major concern. If I wanted to find a Cruel Voulge of Dweomercraft, I'd go buy a copy of Diablo 3.

Come on - it's not like I've just added a wilderness - or friendly monsters. All I've done is give names to features that were already in the game. If you think the names lack flavour, by all means suggest better ones. If your argument is that Angband really shouldn't have more variation in items than exists in the current ego_item.txt, how do you support that?

[Shockbolt]

Come on - it's not like I've just added a wilderness - or friendly monsters. All I've done is give names to features that were already in the game. If you think the names lack flavour, by all means suggest better ones. If your argument is that Angband really shouldn't have more variation in items than exists in the current ego_item.txt, how do you support that?

Although it might not fit in with this thread, I'm also supporting the idea of having a wider variation of food/drinks within Angband...

[Magnate]

Although it might not fit in with this thread, I'm also supporting the idea of having a wider variation of food/drinks within Angband...

takkaria made a branch for that in the official repo, it's called 1520-food if you want to test it. Hopefully it'll get merged into a dev version soon. More variety is clearly bad though, so perhaps it won't.