Display player damage

[tasonir]

Also a significant majority of rolls are below median damage, it is not an even distribution, so you'd see a lot of weak hits and only rarely get the 75%+ range.

...

Do you know what a median is

Technically yes, but I forget it from time to time while not thinking. I'm not sure using median here would be clear, since it's heavily skewed. If you could do 0-100 damage, having "." be 0-10, ! be 11-20, !! be 21-45, and !!! be 46 to 100 is strange. Of course that's already how the damage works, it's just showing how odd the system is.

In any case I'd rather not mess with the text or ! system, and just add the number at the end.

[Styro]

I would really like to see damage information when looking at a weapon in my inventory. So looking at a longsword would tell me the standard damage is XdY, or a range like X-Y, and with my current skills and equipment it is YdZ. Or it could say that your skill improves accuracy by X% and damage by Y.

This type of information would be useful on all equipment. Armours could tell you what their average damage reduction would be. Rings of slaying could tell you how they affect accuracy and damage. Looking at an unequipped item could compare itself to your currently equipped item and tell you what the difference would be - a list could show what values you currently have (AC, EV, resistances, etc) and another column would show the new values if the current item were equipped. That way I do not have to memorize my numbers and keep swapping body armours to find out what all the values would be.

I believe that transparency is the best policy so as to minimize confusion and lower the learning curve for new players. I can understand if the devs want to prevent a numbers-maximizing meta-game, but the problem is that the meta-game already exists but the players are doing it blindly. That is why we have a spreadsheet to calculate these things and constant posts about what weapon or armour is better.

[Sandman25]

The patch was submitted to mantis.

[Sandman25]

Sorry, elliptic resolved the issue with "won't do" status

[duvessa]

There's still hope!

[Sandman25]

There's still hope!

Probably. Crawl is the best game I've ever played but it is not ideal for me and I feel tired of arguing to remove obvious flaws
Perhaps I will resume playing my own version some day but I am done with crawling for now. Thanks for support, everyone!

[tasonir]

There's still hope!

Probably. Crawl is the best game I've ever played but it is not ideal for me and I feel tired of arguing to remove obvious flaws
Perhaps I will resume playing my own version some day but I am done with crawling for now. Thanks for support, everyone!

I usually take a fairly long (ie, 1-3 months or so) break after each tournament, so I imagine plenty of other people will go on a break for a while too. Hope you'll play again some day

I would really like to see damage information when looking at a weapon in my inventory. So looking at a longsword would tell me the standard damage is XdY, or a range like X-Y, and with my current skills and equipment it is YdZ. Or it could say that your skill improves accuracy by X% and damage by Y.

The problem with this is that damage isn't a smooth curve at the moment, so it isn't a straight XdY roll, and if you gave the range X-Y, it would hide the fact that most of your attacks will skew towards the lower end of the range, and hitting for top damage is extremely rare. I'd like to see this kind of information displayed, but you'd probably have to simplify the damage formulas first. Making player damage actually 1dX (ie, a uniform distribution) would be a good first step, but it isn't exactly an easy task to make sure you aren't breaking corner cases, and it would mean rebalancing all player damage (max damage would have to go down to compensate) so it would take a lot of testing and tweaking...In short, it's actually a huge thing to ask and isn't terribly likely to happen.

[bananaken]

Huh, I really hope this feature doesn't end up forever on a "won't do" list. That's a pity if so..

The problem with this is that damage isn't a smooth curve at the moment, so it isn't a straight XdY roll, and if you gave the range X-Y, it would hide the fact that most of your attacks will skew towards the lower end of the range, and hitting for top damage is extremely rare.

Why not display two bits of information, then?

Turn this:

"You ... like kebab!!!!! (280 damage)"

Into this:

"You ... like kebab!!!!! (285 damage, 5 damage reduction)"

I think that would be enough information to at least tell you if you're doing near the top end of your damage or not and whether that will suffice to deal with a particular opponent. Tracking all the sources of an enemy's "damage reduction" shouldn't be too hard if you assign a unique variable to add up all the times player damage is reduced. I would think players wouldn't care much about other details in this case: complicated damage formulas, AC and GDR, elemental resists and what-not don't need to be taken into account when you just want to see whether damage > damage reduction.

XCOM:EU does something similar by displaying the "net damage" alongside the amount of damage mitigated by the enemy's damage reduction stat. For reference:



I understand this and Crawl are very different games. However, there's a few similarities in how damage is dished out, specially in mods like Long War that randomize damage. Knowing how much the enemy is reducing your damage relative to what you know you can dish out is useful for changing tactics.

[Sandman25]

Knowing how much the enemy is reducing your damage relative to what you know you can dish out is useful for changing tactics.

It is not obvious that devs want players have a way to see that current tactics is bad and should be changed.
There is another patch on mantis but this one got assigned by wheals so hopefully it will make it into the game some day. I will create windows executable based on 0.16.1 with these 2 patches and will post a link here since this is what I promised to tasonir

[Sandman25]

Here is modified 0.16.1 crawl.exe with 2 changes:
1) Displays damage done by player with melee/beam/missiles
2) Displays to-hit chance for spells

  Code:

Cast which spell? (? or * to list)
Aiming: Flame Tongue
Press: ? - help, Shift-Dir - straight line, f - jackal
Aim: a jackal (chance 53%)
The flame tongue hits the jackal.(damage 7)
You kill the jackal!
You hit the jackal.(damage 5); You punch the jackal.(damage 2)
You kill the jackal!
Aim: a kobold, wielding a whip (resting)
You throw a javelin.
The javelin hits the kobold!(damage 10)
You kill the kobold!

Just replace crawl.exe in your 0.16 directory. The file is for tiles Windows 64 only.

Edit. If someone wants to build it on their own, switch to 0.16 branch and apply patches from https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=9437 and https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=9593

[Berder]

I wonder if the devs would consider it too many numbers if each weapon just had the average amount of recently-dealt damage per turn listed on the description. That way you would have to go look for the number and it wouldn't clutter the display.

Or maybe for that purpose they would prefer another of those ridiculous **** displays that don't tell you what you need to know.

[dowan]

Thank you Sandman! I really like to see how much I hurt those pesky adventurers with my randomly selected spells. I've even been practicing a new spell, it's really cool

[Hirsch I]

I love you, Sandy!

[Tenaya]

Sorry if I missed it somewhere, but what is the maximum number of ! for a single attack and how are they assigned?

[Sandman25]

  Code:

You stick the kobold like a pincushion!!!!!!(damage 490)


[tasonir]

6!'s is the highest I've seen. Likely done with stabs, they are also possible in some extreme combinations of transmutations + chei. I did a bunch of them with the help of the double damage bug in the tournament, but they show up much more rarely without the double damage bug as well.

[Hirsch I]

I'm not managing to install the patch, how do I do it?

[Sandman25]

I'm not managing to install the patch, how do I do it?

Are you able to build crawl from source?

[Hirsch I]

yes I am.

[Sandman25]

Download patch from https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=9593, save it as foo.patch and then run "git apply foo.patch" from source directory. After that compile crawl as you usually do to generate executable.

[Fusha]

It's a huge shame this isn't being implemented, really. I always missed a proper damage feedback in crawl since the first day I started playing; watching the damage numbers slowly get bigger as you level up would feel so very rewarding, and therefore, fun.

It would even be completely in line with crawl's design goals (gameplay supporting painless interface and newbie support & clarity (playability without need for spoilers)). The rejected concepts list has "More numbers displayed lead to more cognitive load for all (but especially new or casual) players" as one of the reasons for rejecting this, but, really, this isn't applicable at all to something as simple and clear as how much damage your character just did to that rat with your club.

[Hirsch I]

@sandman, I tried that, but I'm getting an error "patch does not apply"

[Sandman25]

@sandman, I tried that, but I'm getting an error "patch does not apply"

Sorry, I am not expert in git command line (I usually use Egit plugin for eclipse which has user friendly UI), let me try to apply the patch to master branch and see if it works for me.

[Sandman25]

The patch worked for me (I tested it in game also), probably there is something wrong in your environment.

  Code:

$ git apply display_damage.patch
crawl-ref/source/display_damage.patch:54: trailing whitespace.

warning: 1 line adds whitespace errors.

Sandy@... ~/git/crawl/crawl-ref/source (master1)
$ c.sh
make -C rltiles all ARCH=x86_64-w64-mingw32 TILES=y
make[1]: Entering directory `/c/Users/Sandy/git/crawl/crawl-ref/source/rltiles'
make[1]: Leaving directory `/c/Users/Sandy/git/crawl/crawl-ref/source/rltiles'
    CXX beam.o
    CXX melee_attack.o
    CXX monster.o
    CXX ranged_attack.o
    GEN build.h
    GEN compflag.h
    CXX version.o
    LINK crawl.exe

Sandy@... ~/git/crawl/crawl-ref/source (master1)

[tannisroot]

I'm a new player and would appreciate this feature. In a game of with permadeath, I think information should be as forthcoming and transparent as possible.

[johlstei]

you can try "git am -3 foo.patch" to try to merge it, that may or may not work but it will try harder than git apply.

[Pollen_Golem]

You can have a clear, comprehensive, intuitive, accurate, and compact way of conveying damage before ac reduction if you include a cumulative distribution graphic on the right side, so you can immediately tell that, e.g. there's a 20% chance of doing <5 damage and a 90% chance of doing <30 damage. You can even make the graphic take resistances and ac reduction into account, if you're willing to have it change depending on the monster you're targeting.

Edit: It would be pretty easy to see exactly what +5 slaying does because it would just move the line 5 points to the right

[johlstei]

You can have a clear, comprehensive, intuitive, accurate, and compact way of conveying damage before ac reduction if you include a cumulative distribution graphic on the right side, so you can immediately tell that, e.g. there's a 20% chance of doing <5 damage and a 90% chance of doing <30 damage. You can even make the graphic take resistances and ac reduction into account, if you're willing to have it change depending on the monster you're targeting.

This is the only sane way of displaying damage in my eyes and it's still...not that sane. I would probably have it ignore brands because those make it harder/less clear.

[tannisroot]

If the question is "what weapon is best in most situations for my character?" why not simply flag/highlight/star it in inventory upon identification?

[Sandman25]

If the question is "what weapon is best in most situations for my character?" why not simply flag/highlight/star it in inventory upon identification?

Even without taking brands into account (holy, flaming, freezing, vampiric, electro etc.) best weapon vs monster with AC 0 can be really different from best weapon vs monster with AC 30.

[tannisroot]

If the question is "what weapon is best in most situations for my character?" why not simply flag/highlight/star it in inventory upon identification?

Even without taking brands into account (holy, flaming, freezing, vampiric, electro etc.) best weapon vs monster with AC 0 can be really different from best weapon vs monster with AC 30.

Good point. So for example a dagger might be best against AC 0 enemies but a heavy two handed weapon that otherwise would be very slow might be best against a heavily armored foe, correct?

[njvack]

Hey everyone, as advocating for a feature that's gotten a pretty clear dev answer, I'm Yiufing this one.

[Sandman25]

Good point. So for example a dagger might be best against AC 0 enemies but a heavy two handed weapon that otherwise would be very slow might be best against a heavily armored foe, correct?

Correct. I always try to have a flail (with 0 skill) or something with my stabbers when I have no choice and must fight Orc Warrior in plate and alike.

[Siegurt]

Good point. So for example a dagger might be best against AC 0 enemies but a heavy two handed weapon that otherwise would be very slow might be best against a heavily armored foe, correct?

Correct. I always try to have a flail (with 0 skill) or something with my stabbers when I have no choice and must fight Orc Warrior in plate and alike.

Similarly you want a big heavy-hitting weapon for things that blink away and heal (Like imps)
my personal favorite is a halberd (for reach), second choice is dire flail

[Hirsch I]

why a dire flail?

[Magipi]

There's still hope!

I can't figure out what those points refer to. The first one might mean the Girdle and Whatever nunchaku or whatever, but I can't imagine how that counts as dual wielding. The other two points: pass.
(By the way, this is often the problem with the learndb.)

[Sar]

Correct, Beogh ability and my guess would be that eating food is beneficial!

[Arrhythmia]

the Girdle and Whatever nunchaku

fr: exactly this

[Sandman25]

Similarly you want a big heavy-hitting weapon for things that blink away and heal (Like imps)
my personal favorite is a halberd (for reach), second choice is dire flail

The same here. Also I tend to have many more weapons in inventory just in case some of them will be cursed after killing mummies (I am playing 0.16 where they are still present).