ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The purpose of the combat log is to provide a record of what happened, for those moments when the player goes "What just happened?". Unfortunately, there are some common circumstances when the log fails to record useful information.

• A sustained ability is somehow disabled by an enemy. The combat log often lists this as "Theplayer disabled Awesome Sustain.", which is both incorrect and uninformative.
• Damage is (partially/fully) absorbed by a shield. Being told that you took "0 arcane damage" leaves you clueless as to how strong the hit was.
• Damage is transferred to an enemy or converted into mana. Similar to damage shields, but there's more information to be shown here. How much damage did the enemy actually take? How much mana did I gain?
• Damage is mitigated by resistance. Taking "10 lightning, 10 cold damage (before resistances: 30 lightning, 10 cold)" makes the effect of resistances (and which ones you have) much more visible to the player. Applying this to allies and/or enemies would also be nice, but might be too much information.
• An ability doesn't have enough charges to hit all the valid targets. It's very confusing when a Wild Rune (cure physical) does not remove the blindness effect you used it for, because it seems like it fizzled and nothing happened. Similarly, there's no way to tell which shields Aegis boosted if you have several.

+1

Also apparently while you're blind you just don't see anything in the combat log. I was instakilled (or maybe it took 2-3 turns, not sure because the log showed nothing) by a caster and the combat log looked like that:



79 damage? I had 600 hp.
Any death like that when the player has no idea what killed him is really frustrating.

Also I think that "Smasher wanders around!" should not appear before "Smasher loses sight!" (unless I was confused).

The combat log should show heals as well.

The combat log seems to be not showing damage you take in a variety of circumstances. I can't pin anything down, or reliably recreate the problem, but it happens relatively often.

I'm fighting something, take a large chunk of damage (say 3-400 of my 1k hp) and will open the combat log to see what elemental damage I took so I can swap out some gear if needed. Often times, the combat log will show only a total of < 100 damage taken in this case and I have 0 clue as to what hit me so hard.

Is there a combat log file that I can dump out or anything to provide some examples when this happens, or do I have to take a screenshot every turn?

te4_log.txt in the exe directory does have some more detailed info, but not separated in turns and still incomplete.

I developed several adding to post this info on screen, and for a previous beta. It is not too hard to program in some cases, the but very difficult in others.

Adding to log versus on screen is simply choosing one of two commands.