Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 11111
Joined: Friday, 8th February 2013, 12:00
Display player damage
After several years of crawling I still have no idea what
"You slice the spiny frog zombie!!" means. Am I expected to count number of exclamation marks and compare it with "You slice the spiny frog zombie!!!" ?
Why is displaying player damage bad? Because players would sum the total and would know remaining HP of a monster? Have you never died to almost dead monster (probably with 1 HP remaining)? It is really easy provided you can miss or deal no damage several times in a row.
Most monsters have somewhat randomized HP so the damage is not even info leak. Top killer in 0.16 tournament is gnoll (HP 8-18) and you get more information from HP status (lightly wounded/heavily wounded/almost dead etc.) than from "info" that you already did 10 damage during 3 attacks. If you care about monsters with static HP, randomize it (I think it will be very easy to do, even I can create the patch).
Why is displaying player damage good? Ignoring recent bug, player can actually see effect of weapon/spell. I've been playing this way offline (I modified crawl source code) and I can tell you that it:
1) really helps to choose spells/weapons. You are not required to be a very experienced player to notice that dagger of electro does more damage than trident of nothing. Or that spear of pain is roughly equal to lajatang of speed with Necromancy 10. Or that +3 lajatang of speed is better than +6 lajatang of freezing. Or that Flame Tongue (level 1) does more damage than Throw Flame (level 2) at low spell power.
2) is fun. Trust me, I've seen something like "Large rock hits Orb of Fire and deals 113 damage" and "You deal 270 damage to sleeping Yaktaur".
3) makes obsolete those "!!!!!!" for stabbing and normal attacks. Seriously, how many symbols are there? Isn't it at least more user friendly to display "240-260" if you don't want to display exact amount?
PS. If you don't want to make the damage display by default, at least support a new option which could be used by some players.
Full Windows 64 bit version can be downloaded at https://www.dropbox.com/s/7ufdv1a2qbn6b ... 9.zip?dl=0
I play offline.