Identify by use

[Ghen]

Just to chime in on the identify-by-using feature; I personally enjoy it. If I were an adventurer in a world of magics that's how items would get identified. Going to a sage to identify a piece of equipment should be an arduous task in itself, not just as simple as reading a scroll. (I know that's not purely an angband thought, but more general fantasy)

My story.. I was going down in the dungeon and happened across my first ring. I put it on thinking nothing of it, it was a pretty ring that added a nice piece of flare to my character. A few levels down I stepped on a discolored spot and was enveloped with flames. My ring started to glow and I realized the little trinket I had thought nothing of before had saved me the pain and burning of a fire trap! How gleefully wonderful it was learning of the item's magic dynamically. Tiny yet good surprises like that make the whole system worth it IMO. I will be vary rarely using id scrolls/staves now because of the absolute enjoyment of id-by-use. (I'll have to figure something out for heavily cursed items though, but that's way later...)

I haven't gotten down far enough to check, but I hope the system goes one step further and renames items as more and more knowledge is gained about it. Like The Cloak Colluin if you only know it's resistant to fire, display that.. but once you get maybe 2-3 pieces of knowledge about it then the entirety is displayed due to the fact that it couldn't possibly be anything more benign.

[Bill Peterson]

I heartily agree. This is by far one of the best of Eddie's ideas, and when the feature is fully debugged and balanced it's going to bring some new life to the old game. For one thing, it will make ironman a genuinely viable style of play.

The only question I have at the moment (and I admit I haven't played enough to see exactly how it works) is how they plan to make cursed items affect the player. With strong ID it would seem that anyone can avoid wearing anything cursed which makes the curse sort of painless.

[Napsterbater]

How bad are they now? All it costs me are the two ?WoR and one ?RemoveCurse.

[Ghen]

Only heavily cursed items give me pause, but that's way deeper than I am currently so I don't know how they pseudo-id before putting it on.

regular cursed items are perfectly fine... and the mix good/bad items like the amulet of teleportation + speed are just fun.

[PowerDiver]

I haven't gotten down far enough to check, but I hope the system goes one step further and renames items as more and more knowledge is gained about it. Like The Cloak Colluin if you only know it's resistant to fire, display that.. but once you get maybe 2-3 pieces of knowledge about it then the entirety is displayed due to the fact that it couldn't possibly be anything more benign.

If you wield a weapon, and notice +1 to str/dex/con, it is westernesse. However, for some reason I will never be able to comprehend, doing that auto-identify is considered a "spoiler".

The current rules are completely arbitrary. I would love to see more permissive rules, but I pushed *past* the line I thought would be accepted given the above.

The rule I was told would be allowed is that if you learn all of the flags, then you get "fully known" status. I immediately amended that to "all flags that affect the player", so e.g. you don't have to learn all of the IGNORE_{element} flags. One tricky thing is that +hit/+dam/+ac are attributes that are not expressed as flags, and are handled differently.

Suppose you are wearing excellent boots. You jump into a pit and learn they give Feather Fall. If the ego is "slow descent", then you learn it. If it is "stability" you do not. IMO this is backwards, and you should need to learn whether the boots give nexus resistance. I think the player should be told up front that non-splendid excellent boots are one of those two egos and immediately mark FF on the resistance screen, but that runs afoul of that %!$@# "no spoilers" thing.

So to learn Anarion, you have to learn every friggin' sustain.

The game wasn't playable, so I added some extra rules. I remember

learn a jewelry flavor if you learn any flag -- akin to learning potion flavors
learn an ego if you learn any slay or brand

That means that if you pick up a defender, you know it on wield due to the stealth bonus, but it takes seemingly forever to "learn" the ego.

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Perhaps there should be a different way to learn, such as learning half the flags, but I didn't like that because it didn't learn a ring of sustain body when you notice your con is sustained. However, that was when I was thinking of it as the main rule. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to add something like this as an additional way to learn.

But it would be a whole lot better to assume the player knows the edit files and you learn exactly when your knowledge in conjunction with the edit files implies something.

[Ghen]

I was thinking more along the lines of an in-character reason to know what an item is. I assume that in the angband world items like westernesse and maybe the first 50% of artifacts are heard of by an adventurer who will (eventually) kill Morgoth. So that knowledge leads to deductions based on what an item can do and what has been ruled out for that item...


So what I'm thinking is less strict than 100% flags known but definitely still takes a long time to determine. Maybe while the character is resting (and fooling around with their equipment) there can be a random chance of a flag becoming known on one piece of equipment?

My playstyle isn't viable yet, but my current character is just pretending stores don't sell ID tools. I'm only using what I find to ID. Should be interesting.


By the way, I currently have a cloak that's +10AC, rFear, Invis, and FreeAction.. I've worked out about 10 other flags that it is not... By now I should be pretty close to figuring out the whole item because there's only one more thing it does.. its just a pain going flag by flag and the temptation of using an ID scroll is big

[Zikke]

Developing the ID-by-use system is fine, but please don't nerf the classic ID channels to compensate. That would be enforcing a certain play style.

[Sirridan]

It would be nice if we could have some kind of 'Ego Memory' and 'Artifact Memory' such that you find certain ego's and artifacts, and then play a save file and find those types again, you fully ID them much faster. The roleplaying excuse could be your previous character(s) made those types of items more famous.

In this way newbies still have the "discover new items" factor of playing, while a vet who can recognize most items by one or two properties would just get the ID and keep going.

[PowerDiver]

It would be nice if we could have some kind of 'Ego Memory' and 'Artifact Memory' such that you find certain ego's and artifacts, and then play a save file and find those types again, you fully ID them much faster. The roleplaying excuse could be your previous character(s) made those types of items more famous.

The problem is, without access to the edit files, when you pick up that sword with +1 to str+dex+con with SI, how do you know for sure that there is not some other very very rare ego besides westernesse that also matches it?

[Sirridan]

The problem is, without access to the edit files, when you pick up that sword with +1 to str+dex+con with SI, how do you know for sure that there is not some other very very rare ego besides westernesse that also matches it?

True I suppose

[Ghen]

Developing the ID-by-use system is fine, but please don't nerf the classic ID channels to compensate. That would be enforcing a certain play style.

Well, thats why I'm just a newb and not the maintainer.. I'm allowed to make wild changes in my head

[will_asher]

It would be nice if we could have some kind of 'Ego Memory' and 'Artifact Memory' such that you find certain ego's and artifacts, and then play a save file and find those types again, you fully ID them much faster. The roleplaying excuse could be your previous character(s) made those types of items more famous.

In this way newbies still have the "discover new items" factor of playing, while a vet who can recognize most items by one or two properties would just get the ID and keep going.

I like this idea.

The problem is, without access to the edit files, when you pick up that sword with +1 to str+dex+con with SI, how do you know for sure that there is not some other very very rare ego besides westernesse that also matches it?

You don't. But you know that this item is westernese because you recognise those famous elven runes.

[Nick]

But it would be a whole lot better to assume the player knows the edit files and you learn exactly when your knowledge in conjunction with the edit files implies something.

Well, using your Westernesse example, if the player

1. has seen a Westernesse before (using the everseen field) and
2. knows it's an ego weapon and
3. there isn't any other ego they know of with +1 STR/DEX/CON and SI

then the only potential spoiler is the one you point out - that there may be another ego type with these properties. Currently the player does not learn Westernesse; you propose that they should.

Another way would be that they learn, regardless of whether it is correct or not. So in your boots example, a player who has seen Slow Descent but not Stability, and learns FF, would identify the boots as Slow Descent. Maybe this could be a tentative identification (like in UnAngband). Then when the player learns RNexus, the boots revert to unidentified ego.

There is scope here for an "Assume all ego types known" option.

I want to get this straight, as I will probably be including some form of ID-by-use in FAangband soon.

[Pete Mack]

Only heavily cursed items give me pause, but that's way deeper than I am currently so I don't know how they pseudo-id before putting it on.

regular cursed items are perfectly fine... and the mix good/bad items like the amulet of teleportation + speed are just fun.

Beware: heavily cursed weapons (of Morgul) can occur at any dungeon level, although they are very rare. No other ego item can be heavily cursed, and ego cursed bows are often more useful than the normal bow of the same type, once they have been enchanted up.

[Pete Mack]

I like this idea.



You don't. But you know that this item is westernese because you recognise those famous elven runes.

This an only marginally useful feature. Sure, you will get FA marked for ego weapons, along with RBase for the defender. But reasonably experienced players know this anyway, and you won't learn the "hidden" ability until you find it by use.