Display player damage


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Post Sunday, 22nd March 2015, 19:36

Display player damage

I think now it's good time to start/resume discussion about "why crawl does not 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.

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Post Sunday, 22nd March 2015, 19:55

Re: Display player damage

I'm all for this idea because of 1). I mostly play melee/ranged characters and feel a bit envious that mage characters have that nifty spells screen with arbitrary "Power", "Range" etc. bars. I sometimes can't even fathom which weapon my character is better using.
Creating similar screen for melee/ranged weapons is a lot of work. Showing dealt damage - much less so.

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 00:41

Re: Display player damage

Sandman25 wrote: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.

Regardless of the overall decision, 'adding it as an option' absolutely will not happen.

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 07:38

Re: Display player damage

Curio wrote:I mostly play melee/ranged characters and feel a bit envious that mage characters have that nifty spells screen with arbitrary "Power", "Range" etc. bars.

The "power" bar only shows the power of the spell compared to the maximum power of the exactly same spell (I've actually seen people being confused by that and asking if, say, six-hastags spell X is better than four-hashtags spell Y), so it's of no use as a comparison tool either. Just helps you see that your enhancers do something, I guess (except when it doesn't).

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 08:08

Re: Display player damage

Sar wrote:
Curio wrote:I mostly play melee/ranged characters and feel a bit envious that mage characters have that nifty spells screen with arbitrary "Power", "Range" etc. bars.

The "power" bar only shows the power of the spell compared to the maximum power of the exactly same spell (I've actually seen people being confused by that and asking if, say, six-hastags spell X is better than four-hashtags spell Y), so it's of no use as a comparison tool either. Just helps you see that your enhancers do something, I guess (except when it doesn't).
The scale used for the hashes is also insane: 0, 10, 15, 25, 35, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200. It's really hard to get anything useful out of the spell power or spell hunger bars without spoilers. Displaying damage at least gives you something with immediately obvious meaning; players can see their current HP in crawl, so they know what damage is.

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 10:00

Re: Display player damage

I sincerely believe displaying damage done by every source, in the form "You dice the ogre like an onion!!! (XXX damage)" or "The bolt of fire hits the yaktaur (YYY damage)" will make the game easier to understand for new players.
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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 14:20

Re: Display player damage

In general, I agree with the sentiment of the OP. If there were one more number I'd show in Crawl, this is it. Understanding player damage is hard; damage is highly random, monsters have varying HP, and you rarely fight a whole bunch of the same monster in a row, so knowing "am I doing better than I was before?" is honestly difficult to know. And the sentiment "if you're killing stuff fast enough, don't worry" isn't super helpful at the stage in the game when you don't know what fast enough looks like.

There are some tricky edge cases; mainly, I think, they revolve around message spam from mass sources of damage (think L9 spells, torment, slouch) and damage over time (do you get a message every turn a poisoned monster is in LOS?) As the OP states, you can already kind of infer damage dealt from melee by the message, and I think showing a number in this case would be better than showing a weird obfuscated number.
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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 15:32

Re: Display player damage

I think this would flood the forums with messages trying to figure out what difference using different weapons makes. The numbers are too wild for human consumption.
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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 15:38

Re: Display player damage

mps wrote:I think this would flood the forums with messages trying to figure out what difference using different weapons makes. The numbers are too wild for human consumption.


What do you mean?
Do we currently have many posts about "Why am I sometimes doing !!! damage with GSC but never with Great Mace?" ?

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 15:48

Re: Display player damage

PleasingFungus wrote:
Sandman25 wrote: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.

Regardless of the overall decision, 'adding it as an option' absolutely will not happen.


True, it makes sense that players should not get extra info by changing some options.
I didn't expect so much support from players (thanks, everyone!) so I think probably we can have a reversed option, the default can be to display the damage but some players who don't like to be flooded with numbers can turn it off. This way they will not get any advantage by switching from default.

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 15:59

Re: Display player damage

I mean that my read of the damage system is that if you were looking just at the numbers, instead of your psychological impression from looking at exclamation points (which emphasizes high end outcomes), the difference between, say, long blades from one tier to another is not as obvious as you would expect based on experience playing other games. In particular, there's a large overlap in the interval of damage numbers you'll see and the difference appears only on the high end. At low skill levels, like weapon skill levels players who don't often make it to lair have essentially all the time, the difference on the high end is pretty small.
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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 16:49

Re: Display player damage

mps wrote:I mean that my read of the damage system is that if you were looking just at the numbers, instead of your psychological impression from looking at exclamation points (which emphasizes high end outcomes), the difference between, say, long blades from one tier to another is not as obvious as you would expect based on experience playing other games. In particular, there's a large overlap in the interval of damage numbers you'll see and the difference appears only on the high end. At low skill levels, like weapon skill levels players who don't often make it to lair have essentially all the time, the difference on the high end is pretty small.


IMHO exclamation marks are somewhat bad because they can lead to wrong conclusions. I mean I would prefer to see something like [5,8,7,6] for one weapon damage and [2,1,2,10] for another than [!, !, !, !] and [!, !, !, !!]. Notice the last "!!", it claims that the second weapon is better while it is probably a worse weapon (for instance, plain flail is the former and dagger with electro is the latter)

Edit. Please don't start arguing that dagger of electro is better, it is just an example. Player should be able to choose the best weapon without fsim, also he/she should be able to learn from current situation, without having played dozens of games with similar weapons.

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 19:09

Re: Display player damage

Sandman25 wrote:
mps wrote:I mean that my read of the damage system is that if you were looking just at the numbers, instead of your psychological impression from looking at exclamation points (which emphasizes high end outcomes), the difference between, say, long blades from one tier to another is not as obvious as you would expect based on experience playing other games. In particular, there's a large overlap in the interval of damage numbers you'll see and the difference appears only on the high end. At low skill levels, like weapon skill levels players who don't often make it to lair have essentially all the time, the difference on the high end is pretty small.


IMHO exclamation marks are somewhat bad because they can lead to wrong conclusions. I mean I would prefer to see something like [5,8,7,6] for one weapon damage and [2,1,2,10] for another than [!, !, !, !] and [!, !, !, !!]. Notice the last "!!", it claims that the second weapon is better while it is probably a worse weapon (for instance, plain flail is the former and dagger with electro is the latter)

Edit. Please don't start arguing that dagger of electro is better, it is just an example. Player should be able to choose the best weapon without fsim, also he/she should be able to learn from current situation, without having played dozens of games with similar weapons.

Technically those are [.,!,!,.] and [.,.,.,!] but I'm sure an example could be constructed that illuminated your point. (Where the number of !'s was out of alignment with the total damage done)
say [5,5,5,5] and [1,10,1,1] where clearly the former did more damage, but the latter would have more exclamation points.

However, this is a result due to a small sample size, and not one due to the type of feedback employed, to reverse things, the former could be a set of results from a +0 short sword, where the latter could be from a +0 halberd. Just as the ! can be misleading, going off a sample of four individual actual damage results could also be misleading, given an absence of other information.

In order to actually get a sense of how much damage a weapon does whether by exclamation or by literal number would require an observation over a period of time large enough to acquire a decent sample size, and since humans are bad at estimation based on observed samples (due to confirmation bias) the numbers would be just as misleading as not having them.

The fundamentally incorrect assumption here is that humans can observe a string of numbers and reasonably well extrapolate average/expected results from them. A secondarily, but also incorrect assumption is that said numbers would be highly relevant to playing the game. The fact is that the reason they're not displayed is because of just how little it makes a difference whether you optimize one slightly better weapon over another. Displaying damage numbers gives them a perceived importance that they just don't have. (As distinct from the amount of damage you *take* which is both directly observable, and important)
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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 19:25

Re: Display player damage

Siegurt wrote:In order to actually get a sense of how much damage a weapon does whether by exclamation or by literal number would require an observation over a period of time large enough to acquire a decent sample size, and since humans are bad at estimation based on observed samples (due to confirmation bias) the numbers would be just as misleading as not having them.

The fundamentally incorrect assumption here is that humans can observe a string of numbers and reasonably well extrapolate average/expected results from them. A secondarily, but also incorrect assumption is that said numbers would be highly relevant to playing the game. The fact is that the reason they're not displayed is because of just how little it makes a difference whether you optimize one slightly better weapon over another. Displaying damage numbers gives them a perceived importance that they just don't have. (As distinct from the amount of damage you *take* which is both directly observable, and important)


Humans are bad at estimating averages when the variance of a collection or sequence of random numbers is large and the distribution they are drawn from is far from normal. (I think the reason for this is mathematical, not just psychological, but anyway...)

It's strange, but apparently true, that the actual damage numbers have little practical impact on crawl combat tactics.
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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 19:33

Re: Display player damage

Siegurt wrote:In order to actually get a sense of how much damage a weapon does whether by exclamation or by literal number would require an observation over a period of time large enough to acquire a decent sample size, and since humans are bad at estimation based on observed samples (due to confirmation bias) the numbers would be just as misleading as not having them.

The fundamentally incorrect assumption here is that humans can observe a string of numbers and reasonably well extrapolate average/expected results from them. A secondarily, but also incorrect assumption is that said numbers would be highly relevant to playing the game. The fact is that the reason they're not displayed is because of just how little it makes a difference whether you optimize one slightly better weapon over another. Displaying damage numbers gives them a perceived importance that they just don't have. (As distinct from the amount of damage you *take* which is both directly observable, and important)


Yes, I know this limitation. When playing with my mod I actually was seeing something like "You cast Airstrike, roll 25 out of 7-63, Orc Warrior rolls 10 out of 1-13, gets 15 damage and has 23 HP left" but I realize it is not going to happen in standard crawl.
I think you agree that actual damage numbers are much better for extrapolation than number of exclamation marks. I am not even sure why I haven't muted them in my init.txt, they give no information for those who don't know the boundaries (I don't).

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 19:51

Re: Display player damage

I do not agree, I don't think they are better or worse for extrapolation.

I do think that exclamation marks are better at discouraging you from trying to extrapolate, which is better for playing the game.
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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 19:58

Re: Display player damage

Siegurt wrote:I do not agree, I don't think they are better or worse for extrapolation.

I do think that exclamation marks are better at discouraging you from trying to extrapolate, which is better for playing the game.


Do you use exclamation marks? Or would you prefer them to be removed to reduce spamming?

In my last game I was a hybrid with Bolt of Fire (3 enhancers, almost maxed skills and Int 33) and +9 Lajatang of Speed (Fighting 20, Staves 14, Str 17, Dex 12). Even in extended game I didn't know which tool dealt more damage. I tried them several hundred (!) times and I still don't know what was better because of lack of accurate feedback. "Good enough" is not an answer.

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 20:14

Re: Display player damage

I use exclamation marks as excitement generators, not as feedback on damage done.

If you can't decide when to use a melee weapon and when to use a ranged attack that hits multiple squares in a line, then you are pretty bad at tactics.

If both were killing things fast enough that you could survive normal combats, then they were close enough that it just doesn't matter at all which one you use in situations where they are tactically equivalent.
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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 20:28

Re: Display player damage

Siegurt wrote:If you can't decide when to use a melee weapon and when to use a ranged attack that hits multiple squares in a line, then you are pretty bad at tactics.


So if I have a single monster in LoS and it is adjacent to me, then I must use weaker melee weapon even when Bolt of Fire would one-shot it, right? :lol:

Let's just agree to disagree. I got your point, you think that new players should not spend their time on damage because they can be wrong and it is better to know nothing than to be wrong sometimes.

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 20:43

Re: Display player damage

I don't have high hopes that this will ever be added to crawl, but it's unfair to focus so much on the case (player melee/missile damage) with the most outliers. The places where this feature would be most useful, IMO, are things like monster damage and spell damage. In particular, you can already see the exact amount of damage dealt to the player during each action if you keep track of your regeneration (and didn't get some form of random healing that turn), since you are allowed to see your current HP. There's even a popular rcfile snippet that computes it automatically except it doesn't track healing. So showing damage and healing done to the player is not giving much additional information, and is much easier to parse than the existing information. I can see it helping unspoiled players against monsters that do (or seem like they might do) multiple instances of damage - I have encountered several players that thought spiny frog melee actually does more damage if you lack rPois, for example, and how many times have you seen people misunderstand af_cold?
Spell damage is quite stable for many of the spells that do damage (they usually have multiple dice) so those numbers are very easy to interpret. Of course this also means the damage is easier to figure out without it being given.

It's also really weird that the exclamation marks already give you an exact range for damage - if it's '!' and you are a spoiled player, you know it was more than 6 and less than 18 damage.

Unfortunately DCSS' design documents fail to specify a policy on this sort of thing. There is obviously a "numbers taboo" of some form, since information is often deliberately made more opaque (spell hunger, aptitudes) but it's also happened the other way around (spell success). The de facto policy on whether to hide information seems to be "whether the committer thinks it's important or not".

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Post Monday, 23rd March 2015, 23:10

Re: Display player damage

Siegurt wrote:A secondarily, but also incorrect assumption is that said numbers would be highly relevant to playing the game. [...] Displaying damage numbers gives them a perceived importance that they just don't have. (As distinct from the amount of damage you *take* which is both directly observable, and important)

Doubling the damage players dealt had a huge impact on winrates; basically doubling them as well. So a character who does more damage is much more likely to win. If it's easier for players to tell this weapon is 20% stronger, then their winrate should improve. So the numbers are relevant and do matter. Now, if players can overcome confirmation bias and actually tell that something is 20% stronger based on a string of numbers, that will depend on how rigorous the player is in actually averaging results over enough fights, but I'd certainly be willing to record 20 hits and take an average myself. You could also compare 10 !'s, 5 !!'s, and 3 !!!'s vs another set of data, but it's considerably less precise and you'd need far, far more data to be accurate.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 00:01

Re: Display player damage

If player damage was displayed, the double damage bug wouldn't have lasted as long as it did.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 00:18

Re: Display player damage

duvessa wrote:It's also really weird that the exclamation marks already give you an exact range for damage - if it's '!' and you are a spoiled player, you know it was more than 6 and less than 18 damage.


In hindsight, this is actually where I noticed the double damage the most - I often track extreme hits which have 5 !'s or 6!'s. I never noticed it on low end damage, but when my characters were nearing complete, I tend to see a decent amount of 5!'s and may get a 6! once...this tournament, I had characters putting out 6!'s damage every 10-20 fights or so, which I believe means they hit for > 288 damage.

In short, player damage is already displayed - it's just rounded into arbitrary ranges such as the one from 6 to 18. "Remove strange player damage rounding" might be a better thread title, if less obvious.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 03:45

Re: Display player damage

If damage varies insignificantly by weapon type why are there so many types of weapons? You coul really prune things down and the only thing you would lose would be the illusion of choice.
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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 07:35

Re: Display player damage

its worth noting that many players never knew the amount of exclamation points is not just an aestethic choice. I played this game almost every day for years, and never noticed. if you are going to show it, it should be in a clear, noticeable, way. numbers are the right choice, in my humble opinion.
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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 08:06

Re: Display player damage

I generally dislike numbers being displayed in games except where strictly necessary or unobtrusive. Crawl's interface now features lots of numbers on the sidebar but very few in the message window. Some numbers are fine as they correspond with quantities that have a real analogue, e.g., number of arrows in a stack or pieces of gold, some are 'gamey' but unobtrusive, "your Dodging skill increases to 17!" but overall they remain minimal enough that this window can be mostly read as a sort of narrative.

Now, I dislike the exclamation marks because they convey the numbers information in an opaque, kind of ugly way, but at least it's an abstract way, and at worst it's easy to ignore. This argument comes from a concern with immersion which might seem ridiculous to some of you in a game like Crawl, but I assure you that there are players who care about this.

Now all that being said such a change wouldn't ruin the game for me or anything. Crawl's verisimilitude is weak enough that you've already gotta be good at ignoring numbers and have a good imagination to support any sort of illusion. So don't take this as an exception to presenting damage numbers (yet) but a warning that conveying information by numbers instead of a meaningful sign (which in most games would be graphical but alas) is to move your game away from this ideal of immersion.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 08:42

Re: Display player damage

I never really spoiled myself on the exclamation marks but it didn't take me long to realize that their amount was proportional to your damage. Sure I had to ask to confirm it but it's not like this is the only sign that you're doing damage: blood splatters and other flavor text hint at you that you're doing massive damage. I don't like not knowing exactly how much my sweet stab critical did, though.. :cry:

As far as the proposed change: I agree with the OP, I'd just like to add that this change would also make it a little easier to judge how easy or hard it'll be to finish off monsters with varied HP. There's still a certain element of randomness since you have to take a whack at the monster to infer if your 10 dmg took off 1/2 or 3/4's of an enemy's health. I think this would be interesting (and potentially useful) information, but perhaps others could chime in on the implications.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 12:28

Re: Display player damage

duvessa wrote:Unfortunately DCSS' design documents fail to specify a policy on this sort of thing. There is obviously a "numbers taboo" of some form, since information is often deliberately made more opaque (spell hunger, aptitudes) but it's also happened the other way around (spell success). The de facto policy on whether to hide information seems to be "whether the committer thinks it's important or not".


I was really surprised when I saw hex success rate added (not that I'm complaining). I read somewhere that the idea of showing numbers is basically to not overwhelm newer players, thus only the bare-bones numbers (AC, EV, SH, HP, MP) are shown. One could argue that showing hex success rate or spell success rate in a dedicated place (II screen, or when targeting a monster when playing an enchanter) is non-overloading-information enough to show it.
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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 14:08

Re: Display player damage

bel wrote:I was really surprised when I saw hex success rate added (not that I'm complaining). I read somewhere that the idea of showing numbers is basically to not overwhelm newer players, thus only the bare-bones numbers (AC, EV, SH, HP, MP) are shown. One could argue that showing hex success rate or spell success rate in a dedicated place (II screen, or when targeting a monster when playing an enchanter) is non-overloading-information enough to show it.


I think numbers are fair game as long as they are understandable by someone who has not invested a lot of time in the game, that are intuitive to understand (if you display a number that is going to get rolled three times, compared against three other different numbers, divided by two, converted to roman numerals and back you might as well not show it) and that are relevant.

Generally, everybody knows how percentages work. On the other hand "Choko" and "Very good" are very vague, you can learn what they actually mean by spoiling yourself or playing a lot. Pips and percentages are better. Numbers are not always ideal either, for example, if MR is displayed as a number it is harder to get an idea of what constitutes a decent MR than seeing that 4 out of 5 pips are filled - seeing the enemy spell success chances are an excellent way to convey this too.

Generally, you don't want to display numbers that are going to get rolled against and checked unless they are very important (like AC or EV), displaying the chances of possible outcomes (like with MR) is generally more readable.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 16:50

Re: Display player damage

...how was "Choko" vague? The manual told you exactly what it corresponded to.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 18:03

Re: Display player damage

Devs,
I will work on the patch after current tournament ends unless you let me know that it will not be accepted in any form.

I am going to display damage for all sources like that: "Orc Priest is lightly wounded. (4 damage)"
Also new option "display_damage_to_monsters=true" by default, players can change it to false to get standard "Orc Priest is lightly wounded."
Thank you.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 18:06

Re: Display player damage

I always assumed that the exclamation points worked like spell power bars, and were not comparable between weapons, but showed how powerful your attack was over the possible range of attacks for that weapon. It is odd to me that the feedback for the two is so different.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 18:10

Re: Display player damage

For what it's worth I've seen a few people who thought the flavour messages for high-damage hits indicated critical hits. Of course, showing player damage would not change this, only getting rid of the messages would.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 18:42

Re: Display player damage

Sandman25 wrote:Devs,
I will work on the patch after current tournament ends unless you let me know that it will not be accepted in any form.

I am going to display damage for all sources like that: "Orc Priest is lightly wounded. (4 damage)"
Also new option "display_damage_to_monsters=true" by default, players can change it to false to get standard "Orc Priest is lightly wounded."
Thank you.

Even if it isn't accepted you should send it to me :)

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 18:49

Re: Display player damage

Sandman25 wrote:Devs,
I will work on the patch after current tournament ends unless you let me know that it will not be accepted in any form.

I am going to display damage for all sources like that: "Orc Priest is lightly wounded. (4 damage)"
Also new option "display_damage_to_monsters=true" by default, players can change it to false to get standard "Orc Priest is lightly wounded."
Thank you.


No point in coding it as an option, you were already explicitly told by a dev that making it an option would not happen. So that's just extra work - your custom version can use it without the option.
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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 18:58

Re: Display player damage

rchandra wrote:No point in coding it as an option, you were already explicitly told by a dev that making it an option would not happen. So that's just extra work - your custom version can use it without the option.


I suspect we will need the option (it is different from what I suggested before, now it does not give unfair advantage to players who switched from default) but you are right, there is little sense in extra work as long as I am not sure the patch will be accepted.

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Post Tuesday, 24th March 2015, 23:49

Re: Display player damage

Sandman25 wrote:Devs,
I will work on the patch after current tournament ends unless you let me know that it will not be accepted in any form.

I am going to display damage for all sources like that: "Orc Priest is lightly wounded. (4 damage)"
Also new option "display_damage_to_monsters=true" by default, players can change it to false to get standard "Orc Priest is lightly wounded."
Thank you.


Just as a ~flavor preservation~ measure, may I suggest keeping exclamation marks somehow. For example: whenever the "nastiest" damage message is used ("You slice X to ribbons!") it should have at least 1 exclamation mark there to make it more dramatic. Alternatively, some other way of making damaging hits dramatic would also work.

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 00:14

Re: Display player damage

bananaken wrote:Just as a ~flavor preservation~ measure, may I suggest keeping exclamation marks somehow. For example: whenever the "nastiest" damage message is used ("You slice X to ribbons!") it should have at least 1 exclamation mark there to make it more dramatic. Alternatively, some other way of making damaging hits dramatic would also work.


I am not going to remove anything, I will just append "(N damage)" to existing message so I guess you will be able to see something like "You ... like kebab!!!!! (280 damage)" for stabbing

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 00:35

Re: Display player damage

Oh, that's a shame. I thought for sure crawl was finally going to remove kebab.

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 12:16

Re: Display player damage

How about changing the "!!!" system ? I feel like it's hard to understand and therefore not so useful, yet it's good that it doesn't clutter up the interface as much as numbers.

I also think that knowing the actual amount of damage done is not as relevant as the efficiency of the attack on the monster. 10 damage is good vs a gnoll, not so much against an orb of fire.
I could think of something like displaying ! when you remove 25% of the monster hp, and get an additional ! each time you double the damage done.
You stab the bat !!!!!!! (max hp 4, damage dealt 200)
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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 13:07

Re: Display player damage

Maybe things could tell you how good a roll was compared to the median (the player can already tell how much max HP he took).

Average hits have no modifiers, worse or better hits say things like "you very weakly hit" "you critically hit"

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 14:24

Re: Display player damage

Pereza0 wrote:Maybe things could tell you how good a roll was compared to the median (the player can already tell how much max HP he took).

Average hits have no modifiers, worse or better hits say things like "you very weakly hit" "you critically hit"


So when attacking with GSC you will see "You hit Stone Giant. (15 damage)", "You hit Stone Giant! (30 damage)" but when attacking with dagger you will see "You hit Stone Giant!!! (15 damage)"? I like the idea, there could be 0-3 exclamation marks when you roll 0-25%, 26-50%, 51-75%, 76-100% of max base damage roll (which is easy to calculate IMHO).

Edit. It would also solve problem with (un)lucky rolls when you mistakenly think that the weapon is worse/better than it really is.
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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 15:02

Re: Display player damage

I was actually thinking about keeping both systems (though it can be kind of confusing).

Say, for example, you hit with a very highly enchanted whatever also with tons of slaying, get a mediocre roll, but still do high damage, you get a message along these lines "You weakly hit Stone Giant!!!!". Now say you hit something with a -10 dagger, you get the best roll possible but do terrible damage, you get "You critically hit Stone Giant"

Also, the calculation of the median should take the monster AC roll into account as well so that high AC rolls/low attack rolls and viceversa don't confuse the player.

It would also be something very useful for monsters hitting the player. If something that "weakly hits you" takes a fourth of your HP you should not risk another hit

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 15:10

Re: Display player damage

Pereza0 wrote:I was actually thinking about keeping both systems (though it can be kind of confusing).

Say, for example, you hit with a very highly enchanted whatever also with tons of slaying, get a mediocre roll, but still do high damage, you get a message along these lines "You weakly hit Stone Giant!!!!". Now say you hit something with a -10 dagger, you get the best roll possible but do terrible damage, you get "You critically hit Stone Giant"

Also, the calculation of the median should take the monster AC roll into account as well so that high AC rolls/low attack rolls and viceversa don't confuse the player.

It would also be something very useful for monsters hitting the player. If something that "weakly hits you" takes a fourth of your HP you should not risk another hit


I see, makes sense too. I especially like "weakly hits you".
I suspect nobody is going to calculate median damage, it is too complicated since it was easier to create fsim to get the data.
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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 15:26

Re: Display player damage

Wouldn't it be possible to obtain a decent approximation to the median damage by running a "fake" attack, in which every random number generated is replaced by the median value obtained through each generator?

I have no idea about how Crawl code works for the record, I just think it would be a cool feature to have and I don't think it feasible to constantly run simulations to get this info. Not implying actually implementing this would be easier either

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 15:32

Re: Display player damage

Pereza0 wrote:Wouldn't it be possible to obtain a decent approximation to the median damage by running a "fake" attack, in which every random number generated is replaced by the median value obtained through each generator?

I have no idea about how Crawl code works for the record, I just think it would be a cool feature to have and I don't think it feasible to constantly run simulations to get this info. Not implying actually implementing this would be easier either


If your attack is d20 and monster has AC 20, then this method would show you deal no damage.
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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 15:42

Re: Display player damage

Sandman25 wrote:If your attack is d20 and monster has AC 20, then this method would show you deal no damage.


Is that too bad? I mean, the median damage would probably be zero or near zero, since about half of attacks will deal that. So all "weak hits" and "regular hits"as displayed would deal no damage ("you hit the [] for no damage"), you would need a "strong hit" or "critical hit" to pass the check and do damage.

The problem with this though is that a couple of additional runs would be necessary to try to guess the shape of the bell I guess.

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 15:45

Re: Display player damage

Pereza0 wrote:Is that too bad? I mean, the median damage would probably be zero or near zero, since about half of attacks will deal that. So all "weak hits" and "regular hits"as displayed would deal no damage ("you hit the [] for no damage"), you would need a "strong hit" or "critical hit" to pass the check and do damage.


Yes, it is too bad. As far as I know crawl uses "it's better to show nothing than wrong data" paradigm.

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 19:07

Re: Display player damage

I don't think it's a good idea to tie the numeric damage results to completely changing the text string - there's a lot of ways to go with text strings and making them more complex is likely to be confusing/off putting to a lot of people. 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.

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Post Wednesday, 25th March 2015, 19:10

Re: Display player damage

tasonir wrote: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

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