v4 now available

[Zyphyr]

As one of the people who are Selling holdouts, I feel I should mention that standard run-of-the-mill lanterns now sell to the General Store for over 300g (and he then wants to sell them back to you for over 600).

[Nick]

It seems weird to have to go down this kind of road - I thought the whole point of affixes was that all properties of the object were manifest from its long-form name.

I guess you were wrong

It's possible that talking about this as the "affixes" approach has been a bit misleading.

My take on it is that rather than template ego weapons, it goes as follows:

1. There are a whole bunch of little (named) properties, and any ego item gets a selection of them.
2. It then gets named accordingly, provided there aren't too many. If there are too many,
3. ???
4. Profit!

[Nomad]

Yes, as I understand it, the point of affixes is that each possible flag/bonus can be generated and added to a given ego individually. So instead of being restricted to templates with fixed combinations of flags, you can mix and match any combination, creating more middle ground egos to fill the jump between, say, Resist Acid and Resistance. (Which would have been a real bugger to achieve with the previous code, since you would have to create individual templates for every possible combination of two and three resistances.)

The naming issue is a consequence of having this new, massive freedom to create different combinations on the fly. If you no longer have individual named templates for every possible combination, how do you name them in a way that communicates all the properties to the player? There needs to be balance found between creating a flood of new names that overrun the traditional V flavour, and having non-descriptive names that force the player to constantly Inspect things to keep track of the properties.

Incidentally, one idea that struck me is the possibility of giving 'pvals' to some collective names for related groups of affixes; i.e. maybe, we could rename the old "Resistance" to "Resistance (4)" and have "Resistance (2)" and "Resistance (3)" for items between single resist and all resists? Same for Sustenance, etc.

[Magnate]

The naming issue is a consequence of having this new, massive freedom to create different combinations on the fly. If you no longer have individual named templates for every possible combination, how do you name them in a way that communicates all the properties to the player? There needs to be balance found between creating a flood of new names that overrun the traditional V flavour, and having non-descriptive names that force the player to constantly Inspect things to keep track of the properties.

This. It's clear from the recent replies to the "magnate's new egos" thread that getting the naming right is a real issue for people - nobody wants V to sound like Diablo. Not that I ever proposed to make it sound like Diablo (I have avoided as many Diablo-like affix names and kept as much Angband flavour as possible), but that's irrelevant to people's fears.

Incidentally, one idea that struck me is the possibility of giving 'pvals' to some collective names for related groups of affixes; i.e. maybe, we could rename the old "Resistance" to "Resistance (4)" and have "Resistance (2)" and "Resistance (3)" for items between single resist and all resists? Same for Sustenance, etc.

Yes, possibly. I've been thinking a lot about this. Before we agree on the best words to use as names, we need to agree on the concepts we're going to name. Furthermore, we need to reduce the number of concepts as far as we possibly can, because we want to end up with names that can be produced using one prefix and one suffix. So, I think there are at minimum these four groups of affixes:

Combat mods: dice, sides, weight, to-hit, to-dam, blows, might, shots, blessed, slays, brands, base ac, to-ac

Resistances: acid, lightning, fire, cold, poison, light, dark, sound, shards, nexus, nether, chaos, disen ... and including ignore flags for elemental damage

Protections: sustains, fear, stunning, blindness, confusion, hold life, free action, slow descent

Physical/mental capabilities: stats, digging, regen, slow digestion, stealth, speed, searching, SI, infravision, telepathy


... but it's not easy. I've spent about forty minutes buggering about with those groupings, and there are dozens of other combinations that would be equally valid (and neither light radius nor Everburning fit neatly into those four groups).

But anyway, if we could agree on a small number of groups to name, this leaves us requiring a small number of words for use in naming items which have more than one affix affecting any those groups. We then have several options for representing the number of mods in a group: we can use more powerful words (e.g. for combat mods we could have Of Combat, Of Slaying, Of Violent Destruction etc.), or we can use numbers as suggested above (of Combat(2), of Combat(4) etc.), or we can use asterisks (of Combat, of *Combat*, of **Combat** etc.).

My preference would be for the extra flavour from the extra words, but it doesn't really matter. But the real question is what do we do if an item has properties in all four groups? How do we choose between a Combative(2) Sword of Resistance(3) and a **Capable** Sword of *Protection*? Or do people really want a Capable(3) Combative(2) Sword of Resistance(3) of Protection(2)?? I presume not.

I can see why the makers of Diablo thought sod this, anything with more than one prefix or suffix gets a totally meaningless random name, and they can damn well look up its properties when they need to.

[Jungle_Boy]

What about giving all the affixes a value rating, then the name can be the most valuable prefix and suffix with a marker to show if there are more affixes. The problem arises if there are multiple affixes of identical value that are the most valuable. In this case we could use the names of Slaying, of Branding, of Resists to indicate multiple slays, brands, or resists. I think that affixes that add to the weight or dice or AC should have the lowest property for getting into the name since the info is already available in the name.

[Nomad]

To preserve V-like flavour, I think we have to analyse the naming conventions currently in use in V. For a start, there actually is an existing notation in use to distinguish "Item X (no other affixes)" from "Item X (has additional affixes)" - slay versus *slay*.

Further, from looking at *Slay* weapons, we can see that slays have a high priority name-wise. If an item has a slay, a stat boost, an ability and a base 4 resistance, only the slay is used as the name.

Similarly, when a weapon has a brand and a base 4 resistance, it's named after the brand and the resistance is hidden. When an item gives a stat boost and a sustain, it's named after the stat boost and the sustain is hidden. Combat bonuses are never named unless they're the only thing on the item (Protection/Accuracy/Damage/Slaying).

So I'd say V's naming priority goes roughly something like this:

1. Slays
2. Element Brands
3. Base 4 Resistances
4. Abilities
5. Higher Resists
6. Stat Boosts & Extra Blows/Shots
7. Sustains
8. Combat bonuses

Based on that, you've got a simple system for giving egos V-like names. Name the item after the highest ranking affix it possesses. If it has other, lesser affixes as well, apply *name* notation to indicate them.

The only difficulty comes in where an item has multiple affixes in its highest priority category - e.g., both Resist Acid and Resist Cold. For those situations, I think you'd need to use a collective name and a pval, i.e. "Resistance (2)". So we'd have to make those up for the categories like slays and element brands that don't currently have a collective form. But still, that kind of system would dramatically cut down on the explosion of new flavour names that I think are most people's main issue with importing affixes into V.

[Starhawk]

In other news, I just ran my first stats on v4 (after fixing the last stats-affecting bug, #1565). Boy is it mean!! So I've made some adjustments, so that "good" drops can't get "bad" affixes, and a few others. I've just kicked off 50,000 runs overnight, so tomorrow I'll have a good idea of how far v4's item distribution differs from 3.3.0. In the meantime, those of you currently playing might like to upgrade to the newest version, because the one you're currently playing really is ridiculously stingy.

I am so glad my anecdotal whinging was backed up by cold, hard stats.

Haven't played the new version more than a couple of minutes, but I did just find Narthanc at CL7...

[Antoine]

I guess you were wrong

It's possible that talking about this as the "affixes" approach has been a bit misleading.

My take on it is that rather than template ego weapons, it goes as follows:

1. There are a whole bunch of little (named) properties, and any ego item gets a selection of them.
2. It then gets named accordingly, provided there aren't too many. If there are too many,
3. ???
4. Profit!

So I guess my take is "don't give too many properties and thus avoid the ??? step".

(Except on a randart - I am presuming that a randart will be produced basically by supercharging the ego generator and sticking on a funny name at the end)

A.

[Magnate]

Hmmm. The big assumption here is that the naming hierarchy that V uses is the right one. You can be very confident that the original devs did not think about a naming hierarchy when they were designing and naming their original ego types. They just thought it should be obvious that a weapon of BRAND_FOO should also have RESIST_FOO - they never considered whether that ought to be communicated in the name. This is even more certain for the *Slay* types.

Obviously, we're all used to it and that means it's comfortable, but it doesn't mean it's right.

The clearest example is high resists - people have been inscribing high resists onto things since the year dot. It's obviously something that should be higher in the naming hierarchy than it currently is. Ditto stats/blows/shots.

If someone wants to spend the time coding a reimplementation of V's naming hierarchy, I certainly won't stop them. As you say, it will ease any eventual transition of affixes into V.

But if I was going to do it, I'd do it so that it solved the problems of V's hierarchy instead of perpetuating them.

[Nomad]

The clearest example is high resists - people have been inscribing high resists onto things since the year dot. It's obviously something that should be higher in the naming hierarchy than it currently is. Ditto stats/blows/shots.

Well, stats/blows/shots are not so important to include in the ego's name because they can be seen from the pvals. Good point about the higher resists, though; I guess their unseen status is mostly an artefact of how they're coded as a randomised add-on in the old ego templates. They should probably rank above base 4 resists really.

(And of course abilities are rendered horribly complicated to rank by the fact that you couldn't care less if your ego has Feather Falling but you really want to know if it has Telepathy. Although I guess moving ESP to a pval system would shunt it into the stats category and solve one issue.)

[Magnate]

(And of course abilities are rendered horribly complicated to rank by the fact that you couldn't care less if your ego has Feather Falling but you really want to know if it has Telepathy. Although I guess moving ESP to a pval system would shunt it into the stats category and solve one issue.)

But even if we were to do that, your point is still excellent: however we categorise properties for the naming hierarchy, the values of different properties in a category will differ significantly.

Who'd have thought the naming would be the toughest thing to get right.

[GeoffHill]

Hmmm. The big assumption here is that the naming hierarchy that V uses is the right one. You can be very confident that the original devs did not think about a naming hierarchy when they were designing and naming their original ego types. They just thought it should be obvious that a weapon of BRAND_FOO should also have RESIST_FOO - they never considered whether that ought to be communicated in the name. This is even more certain for the *Slay* types.

Obviously, we're all used to it and that means it's comfortable, but it doesn't mean it's right.

The clearest example is high resists - people have been inscribing high resists onto things since the year dot. It's obviously something that should be higher in the naming hierarchy than it currently is. Ditto stats/blows/shots.

If someone wants to spend the time coding a reimplementation of V's naming hierarchy, I certainly won't stop them. As you say, it will ease any eventual transition of affixes into V.

But if I was going to do it, I'd do it so that it solved the problems of V's hierarchy instead of perpetuating them.

The general idea was that non artifacts should be useful, but not as good as a artifact. So you would find missing useful resist/brand etc because well... they weren't meant to be that great. I remember a bit of fuss when westernesse weapons came out because it could distract from the purity of the artifact system (namely that an artifact should be the only thing with sufficient complexity and multiple abilities such that non-artifacts didnt persist in slots). That was the general philosophy I recall.

[sethos]

I Think that the eventual solution will have to have some increase in the available "flavors" of items. Names should be a bit more indicative of what the items do (Iron shots, for example, do not indicate to me that they should slay demons)
I would suggest a few things:
Material names (mithril, adamant, Huge, etc) should only modify the basic stats of the item - Weight, dice, base ac, +tohit, +todam, +to AC.
Other names should somehow be indicative of what they do ( I much prefer the Of Protection to of sorcery.)

Brands could be listed at the start of names (flaming, freezing, venomous, electrified, acidic... meh - someone pull out a lexicon and outdo me... please)
and if there were more than one brand, you would only need one more name:
Elemental. Hell, elemental (or of the elements) could be used for all brands (sigh, again like NPP.) with everything listed under Inspect.

oh well. I'm not great at names or arrays, but mayhap I'll have a look and post more thoughts.

I still think that the * idea to indicate affixes not listed in the name would be good until this is all sorted out acceptably.
exception: I don't think that a * should be needed for an affix that only adds +tohit or +todam on weapons or +toAC to armor should merit a *, as those numbers are readily apparent by the short item info.

End rambling.

[jevansau]

I got a potion of Life at dl7 with the old version - but generally weapon and armor drops have been grim.
Certainly much much tougher than v3.
The quiver and stack size of 25 really hurts as a ranger. 100 arrows is pretty minimal to not be recalling to get more ammo all the time and that's 4 inventory slots. One odd thing I encountered was that there was a stack of 60 arrows for sale - when I bought these, they fitted into 1 inventory slot - still took up 3 inventory slots once added to the quiver though.
Can I suggest 40 as a quiver slot size.

Regards,
Jonathan

[BlueFish]

I got a potion of Life at dl7 with the old version - but generally weapon and armor drops have been grim.
Certainly much much tougher than v3.
The quiver and stack size of 25 really hurts as a ranger. 100 arrows is pretty minimal to not be recalling to get more ammo all the time and that's 4 inventory slots. One odd thing I encountered was that there was a stack of 60 arrows for sale - when I bought these, they fitted into 1 inventory slot - still took up 3 inventory slots once added to the quiver though.
Can I suggest 40 as a quiver slot size.

Regards,
Jonathan

I agree with this, I don't understand why a stack size of 25 is supposed to make the game more fun.