Rune-based ID just got a little better

[BlueFish]

It doesn't feel right to me that so many weapons that psuedo as "excellent" are now junk. Part of me prefers the old style weapons which even if they were a useless slay, at least had bonuses that meant they'd be serviceable weapons.

[bio_hazard]

Don't know if you still want general v4 comments in this thread, but a couple of small things

I can ID by use ammo by throwing it. A couple ammo issues. I ID'ed "Broken" bolts that were 1d5 (+1,+1). Seems like they should have been worse.
Also, things I ID by throwing show up as {fired}, maybe {used} instead?

when fighting an invisible monster, I get "it touches you." ("it" should be capitalized.

possibly an issue- maybe just rng. I enter a room and see 3 single scrolls on the floor within 2 tiles of each other, all three the same unknown scroll.

Haven't recreated my text issue. My guess is it is related to accented characters, since I'm sure it happened with Smeagol and Grishnak.

[bio_hazard]

Text Corruption

OK- got a save and some screen grabs.

I'm on OS-X 10.6.

In picture 1, I'm almost positive the box characters were not there until I clicked out of the Angband window to fire up the screen grab program.

The corruption gets worse the longer the messages go on.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/701987/V4-textcorrupt.zip

[Magnate]

Thanks for the zip - I'll check that out.

On pseudo, we've all agreed that it needs re-working. I'm thinking of trying Nomad's idea of summing affix levels and basing pseudo grade on that. But with rune-based ID, we need to re-think what's obvious and what gets sensed after time. I agree that less stuff needs to sense as "excellent" now.

On runes, we're thinking of separating out the non-magical flags so that they are all obvious, and leaving only the magical properties as runes. So all the "hates" flags would be obvious on everything, and won't show up as runes. We're not sure about "ignores" - personally I think they're magical, so should be runes.

Thanks for all the feedback.

[fizzix]

On pseudo, we've all agreed that it needs re-working. I'm thinking of trying Nomad's idea of summing affix levels and basing pseudo grade on that. But with rune-based ID, we need to re-think what's obvious and what gets sensed after time. I agree that less stuff needs to sense as "excellent" now.

I think the way to go about this initially is to use the highest rated affix. As in, good + excellent = excellent. good + good = good. Things change when an item has a poor or bad affix. Then it drops a level. So an item with an excellent and bad affix would be good.

The longer term solution would be to give a full power rating for each item, and set breakpoints there.

[Nomad]

The Inspect screen's looking a little overloaded with information now it lists both affixes and known vs unknown runes. Maybe both types of runes could be combined into a display single line with some colour coding to divide them? Something like this:

[TT][BC=black][COLOR=white]                                                                    
 Runes on this item: [COLOR="#FFFF00"]Fear Protection[/COLOR], [COLOR="#FFFF00"]Slow Digestion[/COLOR], [COLOR="#808080"]"ma"[/COLOR], [COLOR="#808080"]"wyngu"[/COLOR] 
                                                                    [/COLOR][/BC][/TT]

(If you wanted to get more fancy, you could even give each subset of known runes its own colour, like red for slays, green for resistances, dark green for immunities, yellow for abilities, etc.)

It also seems a little redundant to list affixes/properties now their effects are covered by extra details in the item description and the rune info, but I guess it's currently pretty handy for debugging purposes.

[Magnate]

(If you wanted to get more fancy, you could even give each subset of known runes its own colour, like red for slays, green for resistances, dark green for immunities, yellow for abilities, etc.)

I'm not a fan of lots of colours. Just putting known and unknown runes on the same line would be enough, imo. It's pretty obvious which is which - I don't think you need colours for that.

It also seems a little redundant to list affixes/properties now their effects are covered by extra details in the item description and the rune info, but I guess it's currently pretty handy for debugging purposes.

Yes - it was never planned to be in any released version of the affixes feature set. It's just to enable people to report exactly what affixes are on an item without having to use debug mode.

[Nomad]

On runes, we're thinking of separating out the non-magical flags so that they are all obvious, and leaving only the magical properties as runes. So all the "hates" flags would be obvious on everything, and won't show up as runes. We're not sure about "ignores" - personally I think they're magical, so should be runes.

I've just realised there's some knowledge leakage from seeing the 'ignores' as runes: you can tell what base four resist an item has from the fact it also has the corresponding ignore flag.

EDIT: also, I'm not sure the rune names are actually being generated from the N:3 rune list, or at least not from that exclusively: I'm getting rune names that I think must be based on the Latin-style scroll names, since the rune list doesn't have any seed names with x or q in.

[Magnate]

I've just realised there's some knowledge leakage from seeing the 'ignores' as runes: you can tell what base four resist an item has from the fact it also has the corresponding ignore flag.

I guess so, though I don't think it takes long to ID the base four resists anyway.

EDIT: also, I'm not sure the rune names are actually being generated from the N:3 rune list, or at least not from that exclusively: I'm getting rune names that I think must be based on the Latin-style scroll names, since the rune list doesn't have any seed names with x or q in.

I was wondering that too - it's going to take some careful debugging. We're definitely calling randname_make with RANDNAME_RUNE, but it's possible that something's going wrong at a lower level (i.e. the N:3 fragments aren't being read in to the right place, or something).

[rjtucke]

susceptible to damage adjective: "prone"?

As in _ACID_PRONE. Helps?

Love,
Ross