Minor weirdness with randart

[bron]

I don't play randarts much, so maybe this is already well known, but in a game I just finished I had an artifact where the activation duplicated an already existing function, i.e. a helm that granted ESP, but whose activation granted ESP. I can think of other hypothetical sorts of examples like this, e.g. an artifact that gives immunity to fire, and activates for resistance to fire. It seems like it would be nice to reject this sort of activation and apply the power rating to something useful instead. I also freely admit that this is a very minor point, and the programming effort to fix it is probably large.

[Derakon]

There's apparently a function intended to remove redundant abilities from randarts (Magnate mentioned it when I said I found an aggravating randart with +stealth). Teaching it to handle activations might be tricky. Or it might not. But it would be nice, yeah.

[will_asher]

There's been talk of redoing ESP to make its range cumulative with multiple ESP sources, in which case this activation wouldn't be redundant.

[Magnate]

There's been talk of redoing ESP to make its range cumulative with multiple ESP sources, in which case this activation wouldn't be redundant.

Yep, that's #1015. But it's probably going to happen after the randart rewrite, so I created #1407 for this.

[Timo Pietilä]

Yep, that's #1015. But it's probably going to happen after the randart rewrite, so I created #1407 for this.

Race-dependent ESP? Elven swords giving ability to sense orcs? Is there a ticket for that? I think there is but can't find it just now.

[Magnate]

Race-dependent ESP? Elven swords giving ability to sense orcs? Is there a ticket for that? I think there is but can't find it just now.

Yeah I thought there was too ... but I couldn't find it either, so I created #1408.

[TJS]

I don't play randarts much, so maybe this is already well known, but in a game I just finished I had an artifact where the activation duplicated an already existing function, i.e. a helm that granted ESP, but whose activation granted ESP. I can think of other hypothetical sorts of examples like this, e.g. an artifact that gives immunity to fire, and activates for resistance to fire. It seems like it would be nice to reject this sort of activation and apply the power rating to something useful instead. I also freely admit that this is a very minor point, and the programming effort to fix it is probably large.

You could wear the helm of ESP to detect a monster then activate it and swap to head-gear that protects against that monsters attacks whilst keeping the temporary ESP, so it isn't completely useless currently.