ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So: lots of information. Hard to figure out what's going on. Fun game to try to optimize. Game log is awesome. Game log is a morass.

How about this? Currently when you mouse over an item in the game log, it shows the character that did the damage. That is great. Maybe more detail?

How about instead of just saying "42 blight, 33 blight, 192 physical", when you mouse over each individual component, it shows you where that damage came from? Or, even better, a single mouseover: like before, a line shows the character who did the damage; but now, beside the character summary mouse-over box, it shows a little pie chart, or bar chart, and uses the symbols from your inventory or the associated talent symbol to identify where the 42 blight came from?

I started thinking about this when I saw the comment by an Angband developer that there's just too much stuff here. Trying to optimize damage/saves/etc. really is very hard; you have to be a math major, or be one of those crazy people working on the infinite dungeon scaling clockwork (the clockwork angels, they should be called).

With extremely complicated gameplay, the UI and reports have to be just as informational; but they have to be elegant and understandable. Once the mechanics to identify damage are in the secondary mouse-over box, the process of optimization can really begin as you start to get an understanding of how you kick and how you get kicked.

Then, the sky is the limit. Indications of which effects went critical and their chance. A reference chart showing the maximum damage you've ever done and how this hit compares. A chart showing what other items in your inventory could have done with similar critical rolls.

A lot of effort has been put into making the gameplay really rich. I think a little bit more could be put into reporting on how that richness is playing out.

Keep in mind that if a player doesn't understand what's happening, then it isn't happening.

It's just a black box where occasionally you die.

If @ sees that his occasional crits are really upping his damage, then he might think about trying for more crits and pumping the ol' Colonel Angus. The same for resistance penetration, or what damage an extra cat point bought or would buy him, and so forth. This is why I think the timer clock add-on is so great. It tries to give an understandable graphical *report* of what is happening on the numerical level, to make the game more real.

Just a thought. I know would be a lot of work, particularly because it's not just basic lua coding; it would have to be UI work, which is extra hard.

I just think making optimization choices could be visual and not just mathematical. Making things pretty and non-ascii is sort of the point of T4, right?

My name is Malcolm Reynolds and I endorse this message.

Well, doing everything you suggest would turn the combat log into a novel.
Also tracking the particular effect that created the damage would be a huge amount of work.

It might be possible to state things like: This damage was caused by a status effect, this was added to your attack by a sustain talent...

What situations is the combat log unclear?
Adding in loads of more information will just make it more impenetrable.

To start, "42 blight, 72 blight, 141 physical, 182 physical." That's pretty unclear. I've seen lists that are 15 long, with 10 small, 3 big and 2 huge items. At least mousing over "42 blight" and just showing the symbol where it came from (picture of your armor, say) would help understanding.

As for being a novel, no that's exactly the opposite of what I am hoping for. The game log is *currently* a novel (although a rather cryptic one). The point is to mouse over a line and see a visual. When you see a pie chart with sick-green for blight, red for fire, etc., you immediately take in information. A line of numbers is actually worse than a novel. It's like accounting. A chart is the opposite.

This is really just an extension of the current "hold control to see a comparison" kluge, which shows (-1) if equipping the new item would lower your strength by one.

I do think this would be a lot of work. But in the presentation, not in tracking things. As the damage is accreted in the fight code, it just adds something to a lua table ("blight", "42", "armor"), etc. And then the lua table is sent to the renderer of the game log.

The main point is this: if there are ten factors that go into damage (phys power; crit rate; resistance penetration; buffs; etc.), then optimizing that breakdown is really just guesswork unless you have a spreadsheet. (The spreadsheets of fast versus slow shooting (aim vs. rapid fire I think?) that were on here a year ago were great, but it shouldn't take a spreadsheet.)

I have to say, when I started seeing resistance penetration sometime in the b20s (just a guess), I threw my hands up a little bit. (When will we come up with resistance penetration resistance, I wondered.) There are too many things here to keep track of easily. If the point of this game is to get new, cooler equipment, then eventually who cares if you are stuck optimizing a 20x20 matrix with linear algebra and a spreadsheet? You just go with your gut, and take the item with the cooler name or the higher tier, even if the game mechanics four levels down make that a stupid choice.

All the work on making the gameplay rich is currently about 30% wasted I think. Unless the information is presented properly, it's just bloat. Visuals, instead of a list of numbers, is a great way to start to organize the bloat back into richness.

It never says just "42 blight, 72 blight, 141 physical, 182 physical."
So in what context is it displaying such information in a way that is unclear?

I'm not sure what you mean, it never says that?

I just loaded up my lvl 1 necromancer to double check what the game log says. (My winning reaver just got creamed when I went back and decided to try Atamathon: interesting question: why is he so much tougher than the final two sorcerers? His life is actually smaller. I feel like Atamathon has an integrated skill set which works well together, whereas the sorcerers have more complicated talents that they don't use intelligently in synergy. Anyway.)

The game log says

"Primae Noctis hits red crystal for 143 cold damage."

Had I had more damage effects going, it would have just listed out the numbers. That's what I mean when it says "42 blight, 29 blight, 193 physical, ..." It says that all the time.

Think of a reaver. The trick to playing a reaver is to have several people in melee range, and be shooting at something else. Because every time you cast a spell, you get a free melee attack. With all my equipment and buffs, etc., on every turn I had at least six, seven, eight damage numbers coming out, sometimes more. If you shoot the spell at and melee attack the same thing, they all combine into a long list. It was a mess. I had no idea what was doing what, overall. Just awesome, bloody, blighty loads of damage which made the final two bosses pretty much pushovers.

All I'm saying is that there has to be a graphical way to see what's happening, and to compare to other ways of doing damage. I think right now optimization of 10 parameters is a bit hard to do numerically in my head.

Your comments do suggest something, though. I suppose that one distillation of something I really want is an extension of the "press control to see changes" kluge.

How about this: it's like paradox mages for everyone! Hypothetical damage, we shall call it.

In the game log, you can click on a damage line. Then you can click on a weapon in your inventory. Then it runs a hypothetical damage attack on the same enemy with the new weapon or whatever, with the same crit rolls. And it reports it out, just like a normal damage line. And you say, holy cow, that would have done 30% more damage! I am an idiot! I really SHOULD be using that X instead of this Y!

I know you can get a similar effect under the C sheet showing your "damage" number...but this would include all of the resistances, etc., in the moment. Maybe you could also click on some element and hypothetically trigger a crit and see the results.

I don't know. Maybe that's about half of what I am trying inelegantly to get at.

But when you cast a spell as a reaver and make a free attack, you already know where this damage is coming from. It even displays in sequential order in the log. I can't think of many situations where it isn't clear where your damage is coming from.

"Sequential" order? What sequential order? Do I need to find a screen shot of a list which is 20 damages long for you? Do you normally only have a couple of damage numbers?

Let's just stipulate, shall we, that when I say that the damage logs are unclear to me, that to me they are unclear. I cannot be mistaken about my level of clarity. It is like being appeared redly to. It is, as an epistemologist would say, indubitable. And I am not an idiot. I will not recite my qualifications; but you have heard of Aristotle? Plato? Idiots.

So by the stipulation you agreed to, I find a "sequential" list of numbers cryptic, particularly if it goes past five numbers. Is my buff doing this? His debuff? My resistance penetration? My crit? Some benefit of my artifact shoes?

So, again, much or most of the work of generating rich gameplay is wasted if I cannot (a) understand what is happening or (b) optimize it.

Again, what I suggested, at a minimum, was this: if I can't see what a different weapon would do in similar circumstances, then I have to do linear algebra in Excel. A hypothetical damage indicator would be a start. Even better would be to expand the description past "42 blight, 39 blight, 129 physical, 43 fire, ..." in some purported sequence.

I guess I am just trying to hang onto this thread until I get a second opinion as to whether anyone else finds the damage numbers list output or the optimization process cryptic.

All weapons do damage under the same formulas. The only difference is if you find an odd weapon that says "damage type = Anything other then physical" At that point, you use the exact same formula, then put the appropriate element in place on top of it. As for other damage soruces, there really shouldn't be that many. Any on-hit effects from your weapon or weapons (X damage of element y on hit, for example) and any talents or sustains you use. I don't see any complex math, since all of that is the same from weapon to weapon, only base damage numbers on weapon and the on-hit effects (which are flat rate) would ever change. I've honestly never had an issue attempting to figure out what a weapons going to do, and I've only once been uncertain what an enemy did that killed me.

Next time you find an example like this, please, post the log and a link to a character dump. I honestly don't see how you could have damage numbers so complex you're having to resort to formulas in excel.

And as for 'optimization process' there really isn't anything more complex then looking at my build and saying "Okay, this build uses dagggers. I have these 2 daggers. I found a new one that has a higher base damage. What bonuses do I lose or gain for the higher base damage. Is it worth it? If yes, change, if no, discard." I've never had somethign so wildly and completely different that it's not actually apparent to the user which would be better and putting damage out.

MalReynolds wrote:"Sequential" order? What sequential order? Do I need to find a screen shot of a list which is 20 damages long for you? Do you normally only have a couple of damage numbers?

I am trying to squeeze an example out of you that contains more than just "42 blight, 39 blight, 129 physical, 43 fire, ...".
I understand that you don't understand the log in some situations, but without knowing what those situations are, I can't make any suggestions about a sensible way to clarify the information that is confusing you.

As for sequential order, it always does the on hand weapon base damage first, then the on hand bonuses damages, then the off hand... This is sequential.

I don't think reavers are displaying their damage sequentially. I just did a quick test in game and got something like this:

Overkill damage
corrupted strength damage, spell damage

It seems completely backwards to me, overkill shouldn't be first if it's triggered by damage that is listed after. Normally the game stops displaying damage when a target dies, so if you flurry a target and kill it by the 4th hit, the 5th and 6th don't display at all, but with a reaver, even if I 1 shot a target with a spell, the corrupted strength hit still displays (on the target which just died). But if corrupted strength triggers on a different target it appears later, as you would expect.

Usually things like flurry are easy to parse, but I can definitely see where OP is coming from with respect to reavers as overkill and corrupted strength seem to do something different.

In fact as I was testing and writing this post I just got something in this order:

overkill
spell damage
overkill

And again I just hit an enemy without killing it and it was:

spell damage, corrupted strength

So that's the order I would have expected, and it kinda seems like overkill is what makes it reverse. These tests were on a staff reaver I happened to have sitting around, so with only one corrupted strength hit on a single target it's about as simple as it gets. If it were a circumstance involving many enemies, AEs, overkill, DoTs, and corrupted strength I would find it plausible that the damage could become difficult to differentiate.

I'm just done a major overhaul of the combat log for 1.0.5. This doesn't give all of the popup functionality suggested at the top, but it does reduce spam and splits out damage from indirect damage effects.

For example, if a ghoul hits you with a rotting disease and then bites you at the same time, you may now get a combat message like The same applies for projectiles (like arrows or spell effects), map area effects, traps, etc., but not direct damage spells or melee attacks, which just say "Player(YOU) hits Monster for xx damage, xx damage, etc."

The other big change is that damage absorption and healing is shown in the log, it respects visibility (hidden sources of damage are generally referred to as "Something"), and anything affecting the player shows up. Healing (including damage affinity, life leeching, etc.) and damage absorption (including shields and redirected damage) should be much more clear.

The combat log only supports one tooltip per line. So doing something like back referencing the source of every damage number would be a bit problematic. Also, the actual method of producing damage is not maintained after it's resolved. (i.e. Did that 50 physical damage come from a bite or a sword strike?) Including this for every possible damage source, including various talents and weapons, would be quite a bit of extra work.

Almost all damage appearing in the Combat log is maintained in sequential order based on when it is applied, but goes through queue with a small delay (1 game tick) before being collated and presented on screen. Some talents have special messages that bypass this queue and so can appear out of order (usually before the damage they produce is displayed). The latest change has cleaned up many of these, but some special messages are deliberately separated to draw notice.

Adding more detail after this update is limited by verbosity (particularly for very complex fights), developer workload to put more detail in, and game speed (the combat log involves a lot of relatively slow string processing and i.o., and ToME already taxes the computers of a number of users as is.)

Awesome!
Thanks for the great work.

Can you give the player name a unique colour in the damage logs?