New nightly

[d_m]

Thanks for the detailed feedback! I will respond inline:

Summon spells can still pull up nothing (e.g. Dwar trying to summon hounds). Dunno if this was supposed to have been fixed yet.

I am working on this but don't have a fix yet. I have definitely seen this issue with spider summoning as well.

With fire immunity, when I get breathed on I get the message "The Foo breathes fire. You resist the effect!" The resistance message is new; what exactly am I resisting here that I otherwise would be vulnerable to?

This is probably the result of Jeff/Gabe's work refactoring messages. The message should either reflect the immunity or just be hidden... I'm not sure which.

This is the second time I've seen an orc unique with an escort composed entirely of a single normally-solitary race (first time orc captains, second time orc shamen). Is this expected?

I think this is a result of refactoring Gabe did to generalize monster bases and remove some of the hardcoding that was present. I will have to think about whether this is worth fixing, although I agree that it seems weird (maybe some kind of orcish officers convention was going on).

I detected a Quylthulg, after which it blinked. I saw it at its previous location, then saw it update to the new location (which was still not normally visible to me) after it blinked since my next turn hadn't come yet. Is this intended?

I think I have seen this before. I wonder what the best thing to do is. I'm not sure I mind the current behavior, but it is a little strange. Unfortunately the fix would be to give monster detection a "-- more --" prompt or something, after which the monsters all disappear (you can't keep displaying them since the monsters might move before your next turn, and the game doesn't currently have structures to separate the view from the actual reality of the situation).

I saw the message "gazes at you with mind blasting". I'm pretty sure that phrasing is new and it could be better. What's wrong with the old mind blasting message?

I think this is also fallout from Jeff/Gabe's work with messages

When squelching ammo, the top setting is for all non-artifact [arrows|bolts|etc.]. Given the total lack of artifact ammo as it stands, this seems a bit odd. Then again, maybe there's plans to introduce artifact ammo in the future?

Yeah, there has been talk and I think we should keep our options open (rather than doing a bunch of work to hide this option).

Clearing a dragon pit is far, far more lucrative than clearing a vault. Which is rather sad.

Yeah, that is disappointing. Do you think dragon pits are too lucrative, vaults are not lucrative enough, or both?

I can confirm that the earthquake bug is fixed.

Great!

This is the fourth randart game in which protection from confusion has just not been available on anything useful -- though, this time right at the endgame I got an aggravating pike that had it. I generally consider getting blindness + confusion resistance to be an important turning point for my characters, since it allows them to ditch non-0% failure escapes. This turning point happens routinely for standart characters somewhere before 3000', if I recall correctly. Blindness and confusion are important protections, and while I don't expect every randart game to provide them, going 4 in a row without them tells me that something is wrong with protection distributions.

I haven't taken the time to load up your savefiles yet, but do you think it's the case that too few items have rconf? Or that they're all terrible? Or just that they're not nearly as good as other items in the slot?

[Derakon]

I am working on this but don't have a fix yet. I have definitely seen this issue with spider summoning as well.

Okay. I didn't remember if you had a fix yet, hence the report. Good to know you're able to reproduce it at least.

I think I have seen this before. I wonder what the best thing to do is. I'm not sure I mind the current behavior, but it is a little strange. Unfortunately the fix would be to give monster detection a "-- more --" prompt or something, after which the monsters all disappear (you can't keep displaying them since the monsters might move before your next turn, and the game doesn't currently have structures to separate the view from the actual reality of the situation).

Yeah, this may be one of those things where the fix would either require a horrible hack or a complete re-do of how the game tracks and represents state. There's a few cases where we want to be able to separate what the player sees from what's actually going on (e.g. undetected monsters picking up objects, opening doors, boring through walls, etc.), so this might be worth doing eventually, but it'd be a lot of work.

Yeah, that is disappointing. Do you think dragon pits are too lucrative, vaults are not lucrative enough, or both?

A bit of both, I guess. Part of the issue here is that what I was really looking for at this stage was late-game consumables, like scrolls of Destruction / Mass Banish and big heal potions. Those kinds of things just require generating very large numbers of objects, which dragon pits do better than vaults. For gear, vaults may still be better.

I haven't taken the time to load up your savefiles yet, but do you think it's the case that too few items have rconf? Or that they're all terrible? Or just that they're not nearly as good as other items in the slot?

If you compare the numbers between my randart set and the standart set, you'll see that a similar number, total, have protection from confusion. The problem is twofold, really: first, most of the sources were on weapons, which absolutely have to be decent damage sources for everyone except mages and the occasional priest. Second, the items that did have confusion protection were quite rare. I counted several items in the spoiler that I would have considered using, had I found them, but the ones I did find were either unusable or late.

I don't have artifact spoilers handy for my previous games, but basically the same held true: confusion protection was incredibly rare, and when I did find it, it was typically on weapons that simply couldn't compete.

Contrast that with standart games, in which you're practically guaranteed to find one of Isildur, Rohirrim, or Caspanion fairly early on -- and Holhenneth and Thranduil, which also show up reliably and early, are excellent contenders for covering blindness resistance. In other words, the standart set is designed (intentionally or not) to give you access to blindness + confusion resistance with a minimum of fuss. And of course, all of these artifacts are, if not great, at least usable in the endgame. And eventually you'll probably find Gondor, which is great -- in fact, it's freakin' absurd -- telepathy, blindness/confusion, STR/WIS/CON/Speed, and a 250HP healing activation!

One question: is randart rarity based solely on power? I wouldn't be surprised if the rarities for standarts deviate from the formula used to generate randart rarities, if so. It'd be interesting to see which standarts are more common than they "should" be, and which less.

[fizzix]

* This is the second time I've seen an orc unique with an escort composed entirely of a single normally-solitary race (first time orc captains, second time orc shamen). Is this expected?

This is the difference between the ESCORT and the ESCORTS flag. Most uniques have the ESCORT flag which means that they only get grouped monsters if those monsters normally occur in groups. A couple of the orcs have ESCORTS flags (I think Azog, can't remember who else). These orcs can get groups of captains or shamans. Similarly, Lungorthin, Moria, and Gothmog can get escorts of Balrogs, Gelugons, Horned reapers, and Pit Fiends. All these are demons that occur only solitarily on their own.

[fizzix]

I don't have artifact spoilers handy for my previous games, but basically the same held true: confusion protection was incredibly rare, and when I did find it, it was typically on weapons that simply couldn't compete.

Contrast that with standart games, in which you're practically guaranteed to find one of Isildur, Rohirrim, or Caspanion fairly early on -- and Holhenneth and Thranduil, which also show up reliably and early, are excellent contenders for covering blindness resistance. In other words, the standart set is designed (intentionally or not) to give you access to blindness + confusion resistance with a minimum of fuss. And of course, all of these artifacts are, if not great, at least usable in the endgame. And eventually you'll probably find Gondor, which is great -- in fact, it's freakin' absurd -- telepathy, blindness/confusion, STR/WIS/CON/Speed, and a 250HP healing activation!

One question: is randart rarity based solely on power? I wouldn't be surprised if the rarities for standarts deviate from the formula used to generate randart rarities, if so. It'd be interesting to see which standarts are more common than they "should" be, and which less.

Often randarts will have a hole that you have to fill with egos. I'd really like "magi to go back to rconf instead of rblind. That seems like a good choice to fill a possible rconf hole.

There's also the possibility of getting rconf on cloaks and helms of magi (i think) so you could use them also. I have no problem with having randart sets have a 25% probability of not generating a useful item with rconf (or any other resistance)

[Derakon]

Often randarts will have a hole that you have to fill with egos. I'd really like "magi to go back to rconf instead of rblind. That seems like a good choice to fill a possible rconf hole.

There's also the possibility of getting rconf on cloaks and helms of magi (i think) so you could use them also. I have no problem with having randart sets have a 25% probability of not generating a useful item with rconf (or any other resistance)

I'm seeing more like a 75% chance though, which is what bothers me. Again, four randart games, only one of which had pconf on an (i.e. single) otherwise-usable item, and even then only in the endgame. This is not tracking even close to how standart games normally go. I agree that randart games should be able to have different "it is hard to cover this hole" issues than standart games, but they shouldn't always be the same issues.

[fizzix]

I'm seeing more like a 75% chance though, which is what bothers me. Again, four randart games, only one of which had pconf on an (i.e. single) otherwise-usable item, and even then only in the endgame. This is not tracking even close to how standart games normally go. I agree that randart games should be able to have different "it is hard to cover this hole" issues than standart games, but they shouldn't always be the same issues.

that could be problematic. I don't think we yet have a good randarts stats generation so it's hard to tell exactly how prevalent this is. I haven't noticed a glaring lack of rconf in my randart games, but there might have been a recent change to cause a problem. The problem is specifically rconf not appearing on non-weapon slots?

[Derakon]

The problem is specifically it not showing up on otherwise-usable items, yeah. I don't have artifact spoilers for my previous games so I can't look at what they got, but in this game the only other artifacts I found besides my aggravating pike that had pconf were weak weapons, and Zilla's game (which I posted about in the AAR forum awhile back) the only artifact with pconf at all that I found was a pathetic axe of some kind.

[Magnate]

Further to d_m's and fizzix's replies:

* With fire immunity, when I get breathed on I get the message "The Foo breathes fire. You resist the effect!" The resistance message is new; what exactly am I resisting here that I otherwise would be vulnerable to?

Inventory damage. You now get messages about resisting side effects even if you are immune to the damage which causes them. Cold immunity, for example, prevents damage from ice bolts, but does not prevent them shattering potions. It does, however, prevent cold breaths from shattering potions. It's a complex set of permutations to communicate as concisely as possible.

* I saw the message "gazes at you with mind blasting". I'm pretty sure that phrasing is new and it could be better. What's wrong with the old mind blasting message?

It doesn't fit the verb + noun structure of the current spell messages. If you can think of a better phrase ending in the noun "mind blasting", please let me know. Or a better noun, even - but I suspect that's harder.

Please note that this is not a permanent issue, as eventually the text messages will all be in an edit file (ticket #1376). At that point the verb/noun restriction should go away.

* I got two randarts that activate for polymorph. It'd be nice if randarts didn't get duplicate activations. The only duplications in the standarts are between the *thancs and the Paur* gauntlets, if I recall correctly.

There aren't enough different non-negative non-inhibited effects to do this. Randart generation is already terribly slow (it will speed up when I rewrite it, but even then I worry). Effects have to have a power which is non-trivial but not excessive (something like between 5% and 50% of total power), and if we added a restriction not to duplicate, we would unnecessarily reject entire randarts. But I'll bear it in mind for the future - one day *all* spell-like effects will be part of the effects framework, and there will be lots more to choose from. (At least, that used to be takk's intention - not sure if it still is.)

* Randarts seem to get off-weapon combat boosts a lot. Though I recall Magnate saying this is going to change.

Indeed. They get them a lot because there are a lot of them in the standart set - the total is the same, though the randarts may be more findable. Both are likely to be reduced for 3.3 ...

* I detected a Quylthulg, after which it blinked. I saw it at its previous location, then saw it update to the new location (which was still not normally visible to me) after it blinked since my next turn hadn't come yet. Is this intended?

No, but it's part of a very large can of worms we've been discussing recently. We basically need to split the storage of the dungeon into a "real" array (i.e. what is actually in the square) and a "seen" array. Although simple in concept this requires a whole lot of tidying up of the dungeon code that clearly hasn't been done for years. So pls don't hold your breath.

* When squelching ammo, the top setting is for all non-artifact [arrows|bolts|etc.]. Given the total lack of artifact ammo as it stands, this seems a bit odd. Then again, maybe there's plans to introduce artifact ammo in the future?

Definitely. But again, don't hold your breath.

* From my randarts, 9 weapons, 2 launchers, 2 pieces of armor (body and shield), and 2 rings provided protection from confusion. Compare that to the standart set, which has protection from confusion on 1 amulet (Ingwe), 4 pieces of body armor (Bladeturner, Rohirrim, Isildur, and Caspanion), 3 hats (including Gondor), 1 pair of boots (Dal-I-Thalion), and 1 weapon (Totila).

This is the fourth randart game in which protection from confusion has just not been available on anything useful -- though, this time right at the endgame I got an aggravating pike that had it. I generally consider getting blindness + confusion resistance to be an important turning point for my characters, since it allows them to ditch non-0% failure escapes. This turning point happens routinely for standart characters somewhere before 3000', if I recall correctly. Blindness and confusion are important protections, and while I don't expect every randart game to provide them, going 4 in a row without them tells me that something is wrong with protection distributions.

Not really. 4000 in a row, yes. 400 in a row, maybe. But at the moment the randart generator doesn't test for per-slot availability of any flag, neither does it test for the overall rarity of a flag (only the number of occurrences in the set). Given these two limitations, 4 or even 40 consecutive games with hard-to-find pConf is not really surprising.

I am nearly ready to rewrite the randart generator, and it will behave fairly differently. It will certainly do per-slot flag tracking, but overall rarity tracking is potentially a lot of overhead for little gain. I'll try it, and see what it costs - but it seems to me that the slot distribution is the main issue here.

Quite separately I have implemented per-slot power ratings, and it occurs to me that most resists should be rated less on most weapons. (At the moment I've only reduced the ratings on weapons for stuff like ESP, hold life, FA, SI etc.) But ironically this will actually *increase* their appearances under the current randart generator! Ho hum. One thing at a time.

Also, I just want to say that the devs are doing a great job. Keep it up, guys!

Thank you. We're back up to five or six active devs, out of a max of eight in my memory, so things are looking good.

[Taha]

A couple of issues I have seen in the latest nightly. Playing as a hobbit mage.

Reveal monsters doesn't show invisible monsters. It says detecting invisible, but nothing shows up, even when I have a ghost of some sort right next to me

I quaff a potion of rpoison, my screen shows RPois, and the air hound just poisoned me. I know this wasn't the old behaviour, assuming it is a bug unless there was an intentional change.

Haven't seen much else different yet, but that is as it should be.
________
LIVE SEX WEBSHOWS

[Spacebux]

If you compare the numbers between my randart set and the standart set, you'll see that a similar number, total, have protection from confusion. The problem is twofold, really: first, most of the sources were on weapons, which absolutely have to be decent damage sources for everyone except mages and the occasional priest. Second, the items that did have confusion protection were quite rare. I counted several items in the spoiler that I would have considered using, had I found them, but the ones I did find were either unusable or late.

I don't have artifact spoilers handy for my previous games, but basically the same held true: confusion protection was incredibly rare, and when I did find it, it was typically on weapons that simply couldn't compete.

Contrast that with standart games, in which you're practically guaranteed to find one of Isildur, Rohirrim, or Caspanion fairly early on -- and Holhenneth and Thranduil, which also show up reliably and early, are excellent contenders for covering blindness resistance. In other words, the standart set is designed (intentionally or not) to give you access to blindness + confusion resistance with a minimum of fuss. And of course, all of these artifacts are, if not great, at least usable in the endgame. And eventually you'll probably find Gondor, which is great -- in fact, it's freakin' absurd -- telepathy, blindness/confusion, STR/WIS/CON/Speed, and a 250HP healing activation!

One question: is randart rarity based solely on power? I wouldn't be surprised if the rarities for standarts deviate from the formula used to generate randart rarities, if so. It'd be interesting to see which standarts are more common than they "should" be, and which less.

Indeed, the RandArts game will generate far fewer RConf items than the Standard game. The last RandArts game I played, I have 5 artifacts (if I count a certain massive iron crown) with RConf in it; and I uncovered a ton of artifacts. 95 to be exact. If there are 137 artifacts in the game (maximum), then I would have uncovered approximately 70% of the artifact items in the game. Hence, at the same rate, I only had about 2.2 more items left with RConf in them. Now, I don't think I uncovered any of the power rings, or perhaps some of the more powerful artifacts, such as Crown of Gondor's equivalent, so perhaps the rate of RConf was > 5.26% for the remaining items.

Point is, though, in the Standard Artifacts game, the player is typically able to come across at least one or two artifact items to alleviate the RConf slot: Thengel or Holhenneth, e.g., are often found in the early stages. In a RandArts set up you have no idea if/when RConf is coming. Often it will not be on head gear, or early on. Coupling that with an IronMan setting, one practically clings to any RConf item one gets. I think I nearly finished with a Suit of BronzeDSM of Speed until I found Crown of Serenity!

I think if you increased the odds or depth range of regular RConf items, that would alleviate some pressure on RConf protection. Caps of Night-&-Day and Seeing, for example, help RBlind greatly in the mid-levels, until one finds a better more permanent source. 'Shrooms of Clear Mind are nice, but they are quite rare and don't solve the problem once one is already confused. Maybe add RConf to another ego item or create a new one? Serenity crowns are too rare, too deep at the moment.

Would be nice if Mages had the spell "Mind Shield" which provided protection against mind blasting and confusion, in book A, as opposed to CLW, which never should have made it into the mage book in the first place.

[Spacebux]

Randart generation is already terribly slow (it will speed up when I rewrite it, but even then I worry). Effects have to have a power which is non-trivial but not excessive (something like between 5% and 50% of total power), and if we added a restriction not to duplicate, we would unnecessarily reject entire randarts. But I'll bear it in mind for the future - one day *all* spell-like effects will be part of the effects framework, and there will be lots more to choose from. (At least, that used to be takk's intention - not sure if it still is.)

Don't worry about the re-write of RandArts too much: I don't mind the slowness, actually, as it only happens once. A bit more even distribution of resists would be nice; or, as I wrote earlier, to give balance to RandArts players---slightly increase ego/flavor item appearances with resists. Increasing the # of potential effects sounds great.

They get [to-hit/to-dam bonuses] a lot because there are a lot of them in the standart set - the total is the same, though the randarts may be more findable. Both are likely to be reduced for 3.3

Uh-oh,.. there goes one of the alluring points of playing RandArts.



You may want to consider increasing the total # of MaxArts to something slightly larger than 137 and potentially decreasing the odds of finding an artifact that has a larger number of flags / bonuses.

BTW - any chance we could have breath affects added back into DSM artifacts on RandArts? It just seems odd the artifact DSM suits cannot be activated.....

[Derakon]

There was some discussion about DSM randarts awhile back. I doubt the devs would mind getting a patch that fixes the problem, but it's also probably not an especially high priority.

There's a one-to-one ratio of standarts to randarts, since the randarts use the standarts to decide how powerful an item should be. It's certainly not inconceivable to have a larger number of randarts, or even an unlimited number, but it would muck with game balance. At some point you just have to get in there and win the game, and that point should happen well before you start running out of artifacts to find.

[scud]

Apologies if this has been discussed already and I missed the memo, but...

Playing OSX nightly of 14 April, I've progressed beyond cave spiders and have found three RoS. All three have been +10. Are RoS now coming in fewer flavours, perhaps +5/+10/+15, or is this simply coincidental?

[Derakon]

Probably just coincidence. It's not that uncommon to find multiple rings of speed with the same pval; finding three in a row is unusual but not enough that I'd leap out and cry "bug!" just yet.

If you're really worried, you can turn on wizard mode and generate a bunch more just to check.

[myshkin]

I just ran my speed ring monte carlo. Of 6,000,000 speed rings generated at dlvl 91:

Mean: 9.00
Std. dev: 1.80
Count>10: 2600109
Count>15: 81634
Count>21: 1305