Enhancing Knowledge Attempt

[SilverD]

Okay, well, I felt that the Knowledge menu was pretty lacking, especially in terms of descendant... so.. Here's something I cooked up for myself personally:


Here you can see the number of different objects you have found compared to the total number of them in the game. By default, your item knowledge retains from your ancestors, except for flavors.
The Known: display takes this into account, so it only counts the items that you are aware of. If your ancestors didn't find an item, it won't show in the list.


This shows all of the artifacts that your character's ancestors ever found, greyed out. It also counts the artifacts that your current character has found and displays those in white. Again, not ever found ones don't show up.


The ego knowledge counts the different types of ego suffixes that you're aware of. It only counts the type, so a (Blessed) counts as 1, even if it applies to different groups.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't count the local number of sightings, so this will be the same for every descendant. And doing this will be over my head right now and would probably break save games.


Pretty much the same. Shows monsters that any of your ancestors ever saw. Counts the different monsters that you have slain for your current character. The monsters that your current character hasn't defeated yet are shown in grey.


So, what do you guys think? The thing is, I have NO clue about coding standards in Angband (hell, I'm not a C coder, either), and therefore, I might have done some really serious 'no-no's while patching it. I'm not even going to attempt at cleaning it up and/or posting a patch if there won't be any interest.

I like it though, adds a little spice to completionists imo ;-)

[Marble Dice]

I have frequently wished I could browse artifacts that I've seen on ancestors. I wonder though, how would this work with randarts enabled?

[SilverD]

I have frequently wished I could browse artifacts that I've seen on ancestors. I wonder though, how would this work with randarts enabled?

Argh, you got me there

Yea, that's a pretty big issue if randarts are re-generated for every descendant.

This probably breaks the idea there, for randarts

Maybe someone with knowledge of the game's code can speculate on how to fix this problem?

EDIT: Well, I thought about it a bit.. If indeed randarts are generated for every new descendant, then you won't have access to the descendant's artifacts. I'm assuming the game dumps the character's randart data into the save file.. but does it read or reset that data on every descendant?.

If not, probably the only sane solution is to disable artifacts view when playing a randart game.

[Marble Dice]

At least for the monsters, the game remembers total killed for all time, and number killed for this character. How do you know what artifacts were found by ancestors, is there a similar set of counters for the artifacts? When randarts are on, you'd have to disable ancestral recall and stop the counters from increasing.

[SilverD]

At least for the monsters, the game remembers total killed for all time, and number killed for this character. How do you know what artifacts were found by ancestors, is there a similar set of counters for the artifacts? When randarts are on, you'd have to disable ancestral recall and stop the counters from increasing.

Yea, I only display what types of monsters the current character has slain (I have access to both counters there, though). The Known part comes from monster entries seen by any ancestors and you.
However, they don't have your character "seen" entry - only global sights that get passed down.

But artifacts also have an 'everseen' and 'seen' entries which I use in order to give you a list of every artifact ever found, and those found by you. There is something odd I just noticed. If you ever 'sense' an artifact but never ID it, the counters of global seen (if not seen before) and local seen will go up, without actually displaying an entry until you ID it. =p

I'd have to make a randart game to test this. Thanks, I'll see if anything can be done while keeping the sanity in check. Worst case scenario, I'll only show the 'seen' artifacts in a randart game. Which would still provide information on how many total artifacts there are and how many of those you have found.

[PowerDiver]

But artifacts also have an 'everseen' and 'seen' entries which I use in order to give you a list of every artifact ever found, and those found by you. There is something odd I just noticed. If you ever 'sense' an artifact but never ID it, the counters of global seen (if not seen before) and local seen will go up, without actually displaying an entry until you ID it. =p

I was wondering if that ever got implemented. Basically, the question is whether the way to stop an artifact from respawning should be to have to identify it, or just to know it is an artifact. This means that if you pick up an artifact and use it for a while and drop it before you learn all the flags for IDENT_KNOWN status, it still counts as known for preserve purposes.

[SilverD]

I was wondering if that ever got implemented. Basically, the question is whether the way to stop an artifact from respawning should be to have to identify it, or just to know it is an artifact. This means that if you pick up an artifact and use it for a while and drop it before you learn all the flags for IDENT_KNOWN status, it still counts as known for preserve purposes.

Well, the help entry for [birth_no_preserve] explicitly states that the artifact requires ID in order to stop respawning. But, imo, having one in your inventory for a couple of turns to find out that it's an artifact is enough.

Besides. If you're playing a 'natural-id' game and you can't get the full ID for quite a while due to some obscure flag, the game shouldn't generate another one - you're already using it (or just have it), even if you don't fully know of it.
BUT.. if you do lose it somewhere along the way, then, maybe it should be able to be respawned.

Anyway. I decided to try and clean things up a bit and post it up here when I do. I have no idea how to do proper patches and I think I only modified one file, so shouldn't be too hard. Maybe someone will find a use...