The Tavern

I thought we already had a recent thread about this topic but I can't find it. So here:

Beside current weapon: dagger I'd also like to see a dagger's base damage.

Dagger cannot be displayed easily, the screen is shared by all monsters of this type (this is how it is coded currently).

Gosh it's almost like I'm requesting a code change

It's true you are requesting a code change, but the point was that this one line for the dagger would be as much work (or even more) than all the other changes combined. So it would make sense to do the other changes first, and then after that's done, consider if you want to display the current weapon as well. Personally I'd say just leave the current weapon off; this displays the monster's base stats, not it's current state. You also don't bump up speed if it's hasted, or damage of the monster is mighted, do you? Again those might be nice to have, but that comes later, after you have the base stats page done.

+1 for the idea in general, I'd really love this, but I'm afraid it might be considered giving useful information to the player, which is frowned upon

tasonir wrote:this displays the monster's base stats, not it's current state. You also don't bump up speed if it's hasted, or damage of the monster is mighted, do you?

I actually would want to see active Might and Haste listed on that screen, in a color that stands out.

The success chance for the monster hex is based on player MR, so it would change accordingly. Yes, I know you can hit the letter of the monster spell to see that information, but that's extra work for the player.

Yeah some numbers would be nice... though I wouldn't mind keeping the ++-- style of listing as well. Something like this:

Code:: AC: ++++-- [43] EV: +----- [8] MR: +++--- [70]

Damage looks fine, though if this went in it would be reeeeally nice to see the damage on player spells. Spellpower is such an opaque (and crap) mechanic with those ####..

Yes, I think some players would change their training when they saw how much XP it takes to slightly increase damage for spells.

this wont happen

Yes, we know. Hence CYC

the funny part is that you can already see most of these numbers if you use bots/learndb

Sandman25 wrote:Yes, we know. Hence CYC

I'm 99% sure I didn't post this thread to CYC.

Oh, I didn't know it. Sorry.

Rast wrote:
Sandman25 wrote:Yes, we know. Hence CYC

I'm 99% sure I didn't post this thread to CYC.

Yes, it was posted to GDD. I didn't post a note about the move because I figured you had meant to post in CYC—my bad.

Anyway:

Mod note: Moved to CYC.

You can still see the Hex % in the monster spell description.

Moving it to the xv screen is a good idea, patches welcome!

(I'll even set a dev environment up on my new computer just to review it >_>)

The screen as proposed would indicate that monster AC/EV are the same as player AC/EV (which as I understand, it unfortunately isn't).
Giving an absolute number for MR makes no sense without further explanation; this is a case where other representations (percentages, bar) are better.
The same goes for speed (so "average speed" is better, as it does not rely on players knowing that "10 = normal speed", or else use a relative system "same speed|slower|faster than you").
Hexes success chances in xv would be useful.
Damage is, once again, not as simple as suggested by the OP (there is a reason why Brogue displays monster damage as "can take up to 35% of your total health"; also think of AC, resistances).

In short: it is easy to demand something like this, and it actually not so hard to provide these numbers. I claim that would help only a small part of players, it would distract or even mislead the rest. Providing good feedback is much harder than just throwing a bunch of numbers on a screen.

Well, dpeg, not many people really know what the hell AC or especially EV mean for the player character either, so you probably don't have to worry about being inconsistent. A possible solution to the issue of MR would be to, you know, display player MR as a number too. I'm surprised how much you worry about displaying raw numbers when the first thing a new player is confronted with in trying to make a decision about what race to play is a huge table of numbers.

dpeg wrote:Giving an absolute number for MR makes no sense without further explanation; this is a case where other representations (percentages, bar) are better.

The bar representation hardly tells you anything because the bars are too coarse. Also the last 3 bar levels (+++.., ++++., +++++) all mean the same thing: virtually impossible to hex even if you're a specialist, unless you use ?vuln. Thankfully it's been obsoleted by the percentage system.

The same goes for speed (so "average speed" is better, as it does not rely on players knowing that "10 = normal speed", or else use a relative system "same speed|slower|faster than you").

I really wish it showed "same speed|slower|faster than you." I'm still not 100% sure exactly which enemies are faster than felids. Felids are speed 12, right? It doesn't say anywhere in learndb.

Damage is, once again, not as simple as suggested by the OP (there is a reason why Brogue displays monster damage as "can take up to 35% of your total health"; also think of AC, resistances).

I can mentally account for GDR and resistances. It is very useful to know that a komodo dragon can deal up to 34 damage, so if you are below 34 hp and don't have GDR you have to get away from it immediately by the strongest means possible. Yaks can deal 18, death yaks can deal 30. The only way I know this is from the bots in ##crawl. Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you precisely how much damage e.g. an orc warrior with a short sword can deal - if I knew that I could play better.

I claim that would help only a small part of players, it would distract or even mislead the rest. Providing good feedback is much harder than just throwing a bunch of numbers on a screen.

The thing is that I've always looked up the exact stats on every monster I'm unsure about, in ##crawl. I see lot of other players using the bots too. It would just be way more convenient to see that data in the game and not have to switch to irc to get it.

Well, mps, I really appreciate your contributions to making Crawl a better game. But then again, you know, I don't think you have much of a clue about how to do this apart from asking for more numbers and less content.

With that out of the way:
I am sure that a new player will not look at the table of aptitudes.
We have made aptitudes more parseable by going from a magnitude of percentages to a scale of -5...5.
Even if aptitudes were an abomination, that would not justify abominating the game further.
You forgot to appeal to the Berlin Interpretation!

Berder wrote:
The same goes for speed (so "average speed" is better, as it does not rely on players knowing that "10 = normal speed", or else use a relative system "same speed|slower|faster than you").

I really wish it showed "same speed|slower|faster than you." I'm still not 100% sure exactly which enemies are faster than felids. Felids are speed 12, right? It doesn't say anywhere in learndb.

+1 on "same speed|slower|faster than you." ; this is what I actually care about as a player: whether I can run away easily or need to use a consumable/stand and fight.
Though I'd like slightly more subtlety: "much slower|slower|same speed|faster|much faster", where the difference between faster and much faster is defined by Slow effect (If I can Slow an enemy and it will then be same or slightly slower speed as me, it's merely faster. If I can't, it's much faster), and the difference between slower and much slower is defined by Fast effect.

Felids are speed 12, yes. You can observe this from the fact that moving is shown as taking '0.8' turns (8 auts)

As much of an honor as it would be to submit my work for the approval of the guy who thinks using bars with unspecified, inscrutable, often meaningless scales is critical to keeping crawl from turning into a numbers fest like Final Fantasy II, I must respectfully decline.

I liked this:

I don't think you have much of a clue [...]

I am sure that a new player will not look at the table of aptitudes.

good tavern

mps wrote:I'm surprised how much you worry about displaying raw numbers when the first thing a new player is confronted with in trying to make a decision about what race to play is a huge table of numbers.

To be fair, they're numbers that the game deliberately made uninterpretable without spoilers in 0.8. This wouldn't be the case for, say, displaying monster hp.

I remember being a new player and I didn't really look at the apts to choose a race. It was more about general "feel" of it, like I was playing a lot of Trolls because Trolls are strong melee characters - even the wiki said so!

dpeg wrote:The same goes for speed (so "average speed" is better, as it does not rely on players knowing that "10 = normal speed", or else use a relative system "same speed|slower|faster than you").

I think players would figure out fairly quickly that 10 is normal speed when most of the monsters they encounter early are speed 10. But, yes, player move speed should be listed as a number too.

Damage is, once again, not as simple as suggested by the OP (there is a reason why Brogue displays monster damage as "can take up to 35% of your total health"; also think of AC, resistances).

Give players a little credit; we understand that there's some complexity to the monster damage formulas, and then it gets modified by player defenses. The important thing is that it gives players something to compare to: other monsters.

savageorange wrote:Felids are speed 12, yes. You can observe this from the fact that moving is shown as taking '0.8' turns (8 auts)

But you see, 10/0.8 = 12.5, not 12. So there may be some rounding shenanigans going on, or something. Are felids halfway in walking speed between a speed 12 enemy and a speed 13 enemy?

Berder wrote:
savageorange wrote:Felids are speed 12, yes. You can observe this from the fact that moving is shown as taking '0.8' turns (8 auts)

But you see, 10/0.8 = 12.5, not 12. So there may be some rounding shenanigans going on, or something. Are felids halfway in walking speed between a speed 12 enemy and a speed 13 enemy?

Yep, that's exactly what they are. It's dumb

Berder wrote:
savageorange wrote:Felids are speed 12, yes. You can observe this from the fact that moving is shown as taking '0.8' turns (8 auts)

But you see, 10/0.8 = 12.5, not 12. So there may be some rounding shenanigans going on, or something. Are felids halfway in walking speed between a speed 12 enemy and a speed 13 enemy?

i told you monsters and players work on a different speed system

About numbers: I would like to point out that discrete pips and bars are numbers too. If you are presenting "SomeStat: ###----" you are in fact presenting "SomeStat: 3/7". If the actual value of SomeStat is 127, it has now been scaled to 3. Of course, the player may be puzzled if they put on a ring {+SomeStat} and the number shown is still 3.

Why do we have rF:1/2/3 instead of rF: 50%/67%/80%?

Sprucery wrote:About numbers: I would like to point out that discrete pips and bars are numbers too. If you are presenting "SomeStat: ###----" you are in fact presenting "SomeStat: 3/7". If the actual value of SomeStat is 127, it has now been scaled to 3. Of course, the player may be puzzled if they put on a ring {+SomeStat} and the number shown is still 3.

These are not psychologically equal. Whether you think it's good or bad, the rough spatial relationship shown by a bar has more ambiguity than a number. If you take the position that comparing most stat numbers is relatively meaningless, that vagueness is a desirable quality.

Why do we have rF:1/2/3 instead of rF: 50%/67%/80%?

The former case is more ambiguous (single-digit number, eh), but this is not: it's easier to parse at a glance (and can also easily show equivalence with other bars like rC, simply by the fact of being aligned and of same length). Anything but percentages, please.

I think rF/rC display is okay. All resistances except MR work well with a bar display because that's actually how many levels they have.

Well, I'm not really advocating for a change, I know that numbers are not desired. And I agree that the bars are visually more pleasing than numbers.

But I still find it odd that the player is supposed to check from spoilers that one pip of rF means 50%, two means 67% and three pips is not immunity but 80% resistance.

Sorry, I don't want to derail this thread (which is about xv and not % screen).

Sprucery wrote:But I still find it odd that the player is supposed to check from spoilers that one pip of rF means 50%, two means 67% and three pips is not immunity but 80% resistance.

The value of AC, EV, SH, MR, int, dex, str, or any skill aren't linear either, but you don't expect the game to tell you the complete details. Pips are fine for something that has a few discrete values. They are not fine for something that has many more values than there are pips.

Rast wrote:
dpeg wrote:The same goes for speed (so "average speed" is better, as it does not rely on players knowing that "10 = normal speed", or else use a relative system "same speed|slower|faster than you").

I think players would figure out fairly quickly that 10 is normal speed when most of the monsters they encounter early are speed 10. But, yes, player move speed should be listed as a number too.

I am not claiming that our players are too stupid and we have to protect them from "complicated numbers". Of course they would get it.

edit: Regarding speed: this is a case where, in my opinion, the relative approach is just better than the absolute one: while speed 10 is "normal speed" and players would quickly get that, what if they now play a Centaur, a Naga or use running or ponderousness. It is much more effective to drop the numbers and say "this monster moves at your speed, or moves [much] faster" etc.
Try to look at it like this: is it clear what "your speed = 10, monster speed = 12" vs "your speed = 10, monster speed = 20" means? I claim it's not, unless we *also* provide the scale. Easier to write "slightly faster" vs "much faster".

My reservations are these:

I really believe that the more numbers you show, the harder it is for a new player to pick up, get into, and like the game. No idea if there's any research along these lines, but it's something I fully subscribe to. This means that while experienced players understandably ask for better (i.e. numerical feedback), following this call unabatedly would mean raising the entry threshold (in my opinion).
Not all numbers are equal. Some numbers are simply less relevant than others (and I am sure that Crawl is guilty both ways: hiding crucial numbers and displaying neglible numbers).
Some features use an internal scale that's not fit for display (for example, we might just not want to exhibit piety as a number between 0 and 200).
Moreover, a whole bunch of numbers need context: you cannot simply write "MR 15" -- it means nothing if you don't know the MR system. This is why it was a really good idea to display chances (these are percentages, so can be shown unambigously) and also why MR is given in words (which has its own problems, I know) and now as a bar.
Man power consideration: this would be a non-gameplay effort. There are already a number of these, and it adds up. Just like it is reasonable for players to ask for further interface improvements, some of these are too much work for what they gain. So like with UI, it is crucial to think in advance about which parameters should be shown, and in what way.

[I am not a psychologist, but I believe it is established that parsing numbers is an effort. Since for code everything is a number, there should be some effort about how to display this to the human user. I have watched commercial games which do not care about this, and it was messy.]

I've said it before: it is much easier to make game mechanics transparent when this has been a design goal from scratch. This is not the case for Crawl. Feedback, including numerical feedback, has been improved over the years ("improved" applies to exhibition and re-scaling; it should also apply to hiding where applicable, but I am not aware of examples).

Damage is, once again, not as simple as suggested by the OP (there is a reason why Brogue displays monster damage as "can take up to 35% of your total health"; also think of AC, resistances).

Give players a little credit; we understand that there's some complexity to the monster damage formulas, and then it gets modified by player defenses. The important thing is that it gives players something to compare to: other monsters.

Of your list, indicating spell damage is actually the other idea I could get behind (apart from the hex chance).

Displaying spell damage geneally (e.g. in ?/s) is pretty hard, in my opinion (no matter if you choose "3d8" or "36% maxHP) without injecting confusion: what about damage effects that apply similar damage, but have special rules? Like flight susceptibility, ignoring armour. However, in the xv screen we could the current character situation (e.g. not flying, susceptible to cold) and report that. So it might be worthwhile testing this. (The reason that speaks against this: players are now compelled to x-v every single slightly dangerous monster. Other games solve this by having few encounters. Crawl is not one of those games.]

[End note, and this does *not* apply to Rast: Obviously, I am also done with the "less content, more numbers" faction. Which is pretty small, but extremely vocal -- they even form thank networks! Someone said yesterday their goal is to have nothing but D:1 with a pack of jackals -- in a fully developed number sheet, I might add. That's an extreme position I don't even try to take serious. I hope this posting, and my previous one, indicates that I do take discussions about feedback serious.]

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dpeg wrote:I really believe that the more numbers you show, the harder it is for a new player to pick up, get into, and like the game. No idea if there's any research along these lines, but it's something I fully subscribe to. This means that while experienced players understandably ask for better (i.e. numerical feedback), following this call unabatedly would mean raising the entry threshold (in my opinion).

I agree that new players and experienced players need different things and I agree that new players should have higher priority. How about a new option like "display_numbers = false"? I am not skilled enough to work on new content (so no dev hours are wasted) but I am sure I can show AC/EV/MR in monsters description screen depending on the option. Is there a chance that the patch would be accepted?

I like the bars tbh, what am I supposed to do with numbers? I compare those numbers to other numbers. Guess what? You can do the same with bars. Imo it's much easier since it's simpler to remember and you have more obvious scale of low and high from the length of the max possible bar. Also a bar doesn't imply linearity as numbers tend to (at least in my mind).

You say you don't like the extra quantization that the bar gives, but are you really going to care whether a monster's EV is 10 or 12? Crawl combat system has so much spread in its randomness that it would take a lot of trials to clearly tell the difference. Add to that all the other factors that influence how hard it will be to kill the monster in question and the exact numbers are not that important.

In conclusion, given the complexity of the combat systems, I don't think there is any reason to have the exact numbers if you are merely eyeballing it. If you don't like eyeballing it and want the exact numbers to calculate distributions of expected hp or fun things like that, unfortunately you're quite a minority so I don't think the devs are going to cater to it

Just to pitch in my $0.02

Yes, there are different players with different preferences. New option would be ideal solution, both kinds of players can be happy and it does not take much effort to code/support (30 minutes will be enough for me to implement it I think).

Some indication of player and monster spell damage would be nice (min/max, or Xdy format, not taking defenses into account, just for comparative purposes)

I personally think the ##.. indicators for monster ev, ac, and mr are fine, combat is so random in crawl, I don't think fine differences warrant different tactics anyway, so a coarse indicator gets the job done well. The MR one is particularly unnecessary, since we can see hex success chance (A good example of a great presentation of exact numbers which is very useful to decision making)

Also, some indication of invocation power would be great. This actually would be fine on a ###... style scale, since what you're usually interested in is "How strong is this compared to how strong it could be, if I trained more" for invocations. Damaging invocations showing their damage range would be fantastic, obviously.

That weird final tiny text comment about thank networks is funny. If people agree with each other then... they will tend to agree with each other. It's not a conspiracy or something.

dpeg wrote: Someone said yesterday their goal is to have nothing but D:1 with a pack of jackals -- in a fully developed number sheet, I might add.

I made that joke about duvessa a couple days ago. That's pretty funny if someone posted it somewhere else, but obviously it's a joke.

dowan: You don't need to explain your jokes (hey, I got it), and I won't explain mine.

mps wrote:I'm surprised how much you worry about displaying raw numbers when the first thing a new player is confronted with in trying to make a decision about what race to play is a huge table of numbers.

The fact that players go outside the game to make decisions isn't a knock on opacity, it's a knack on crawl's presentation of said opacity. I think it's certainly true that Crawl does a bad job with some measures that are opaque, and it does an equally bad job with numbers it shows you directly. I don't think the answer is to just hand the player all the numbers. That doesn't actually solve the problem, it just changes it around.

There's a better UX solution to Crawl's presentation of information, I think we can all agree with that. But contextless numbers aren't the answer, and I get the feeling a proper solution would take a lot more nuance and work than any of the proposals being bandied about here.

Kramin42 wrote:I like the bars tbh, what am I supposed to do with numbers? I compare those numbers to other numbers. Guess what? You can do the same with bars. Imo it's much easier since it's simpler to remember and you have more obvious scale of low and high from the length of the max possible bar. Also a bar doesn't imply linearity as numbers tend to (at least in my mind).

You say you don't like the extra quantization that the bar gives, but are you really going to care whether a monster's EV is 10 or 12? Crawl combat system has so much spread in its randomness that it would take a lot of trials to clearly tell the difference. Add to that all the other factors that influence how hard it will be to kill the monster in question and the exact numbers are not that important.

In conclusion, given the complexity of the combat systems, I don't think there is any reason to have the exact numbers if you are merely eyeballing it. If you don't like eyeballing it and want the exact numbers to calculate distributions of expected hp or fun things like that, unfortunately you're quite a minority so I don't think the devs are going to cater to it

Just to pitch in my $0.02

While I honestly agree with the bars vs. numbers argument there's the exception that you can compare Damage to your HP, AC and EV to your own.

So for me say EV 40 would be much more informative than whatever pips are given since I could compare it to my own experiences. I wouldn't go to a spreadsheet - I have no idea what I would even do with those :3

Now monsters follow different rules. That's fine, but getting a number that's comparable to player AC/EV should be possible, right? It doesn't have to be 100% accurate. Or even 75% ~

Nowadays I don't care that much anymore, but for my first wins I painstakingly went to the bots for ever new monster I'd never seen before. If those entries had just been added to the xv screen I wouldn't have had to leave the game for it.

Heck, just adding a second screen accessible with v from xv with those entries would've been nice.

As for damage. Well, am I the only player that's mostly interested in 'Can this guy kill me in one turn?' - and thus max damage.

I'm in an interesting situation because I play offline only and almost always don't have access to the internet when I play, so stuff like the wiki, crawl db etc. are not available for me. I would love to have db level information available ingame, because most of the time when I see something unencountered in a new version I have to guess what it does and how dangerous it is.

I have quite a few deaths from this, and I am a good sport about it, but I don't really think it's something that everyone tolerates as well as I do...

Zwobot wrote:As for damage. Well, am I the only player that's mostly interested in 'Can this guy kill me in one turn?' - and thus max damage.

I also have had quite a few deaths, typically in V and Depths, where, if the game had told me, "This monster with this weapon can do up to X damage per attack. If it hits you and rolls high on damage and you roll low on AC, you will die.", I would have acted differently, and possibly not died.

Of course I could have gotten this information from the IRCbots or sourcediving, but I didn't. If it was in-game, there's a good chance I would have checked it.

Submitted a patch with AC/EV/MR numbers and hex success chance.

Edit. Difficulty crawl has been synchronized with trunk and the patch has been applied to it.

I dunno why some of you guys want hard numbers for everything?

I've played roguelikes for ages before branching into DCSS and in just Angband+it's variants, there was a significant distinction between survival or death, BECAUSE you knew the EXACT offensive numbers of any given weapon you had (they were shown).

And opposite for the 'hard numbers' is crawl's magic resistance system.
Everyone who has even a remote knowledge of the game, knows this: without it, you get fucked, MR+ = helps against orc wizards, MR++ = not enough, MR+++ = enough for most threats, MR++++ = enough for lich spells and sentinels mark.
Most of the players i know have lived through without knowing exact percentage of the chance of being paralyzed or something.

Numbers do help. No question about it.

Anyway, I think that just looking at monster should not be an immediate spoiler wiki peek.

The numbers are optional. If you don't want to see them, don't add display_numbers = true to your profile, it's not that hard

People are different.

Edit. In my last game I was marked with 1% chance, just replace it with paralysis and call it stupid death. When player sees that he has 1% chance to die he can cast Haste or even use a consumable.

To me, a perfect system would have both. The default screen would have bars. Then you would see with a quick glance, that ok, I'm not safe from Mark yet. Then there would be a toggle that would switch all bars to actual numbers. From there you could see if buying that +MR ring would make you safe from Mark.

The question that the bars don't give an answer for is how close you are to getting the next pip. With species getting MR bonuses with XL, this may be meaningful information.

That said, the current system is of course already very much better compared to the time when MR wasn't shown at all (except for the verbal description). And now that you see the success % of enemy spells there's much less need to know the actual MR number.

I would use the rcfile option.

Sprucery wrote:The question that the bars don't give an answer for is how close you are to getting the next pip. With species getting MR bonuses with XL, this may be meaningful information.

As I understand it, MR is still tracked as a number for all internal calculations, so there is nothing special about getting just enough for the next star, unlike the way getting another star of piety often is.

Psychologically, that 3rd star of MR is huge.

The Tavern

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