Dungeon and item feelings.

[CyclopsSlayer]

1) Level Feelings - is there some reason for getting the feeling twice? Once as I enter a level and a repeat, usually, ~50 turns later.

2) Pseudo ID - Once I have learned a rune, say Slay Orc, the Sword of Slay Orc I find eventually identifies as (splendid) which I already knew from the time I saw the weapon on the floor. I can see where the feeling is of use on a previously unseen rune, but it seems rather redundant on a known rune.

3) is there a 'Feelings.spo' or such? Haven't played the vanilla branch, until v4, since Zangband came out decades ago... Both for Levels and Items? Some are self evident, but is dust and cobwebs better or worse than useless junk?

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by CyclopsSlayer

1) Level Feelings - is there some reason for getting the feeling twice? Once as I enter a level and a repeat, usually, ~50 turns later.

The first is the feeling of danger, provided by your adventurer's sixth sense for it. It basically tells you very broadly how tough the monsters are on this level.

The second tells you about loot, after you've spent some time on the level and have observed how shiny/rusty are the remaining fixtures, and the shards of broken stuff on the floor. It's a broad indication of the quality of FLOOR items (it tells you nothing about what the monsters will drop).

2) Pseudo ID - Once I have learned a rune, say Slay Orc, the Sword of Slay Orc I find eventually identifies as (splendid) which I already knew from the time I saw the weapon on the floor. I can see where the feeling is of use on a previously unseen rune, but it seems rather redundant on a known rune.

Ah yes - this is because slays are now pvals, and any pval pseudos as splendid I think. But don't worry about it - pseudo is coming out of v4 real soon now, as runes make it no longer necessary or helpful ...

3) is there a 'Feelings.spo' or such? Haven't played the vanilla branch, until v4, since Zangband came out decades ago... Both for Levels and Items? Some are self evident, but is dust and cobwebs better or worse than useless junk?

Does it matter :-; ? No, we don't list the level feelings in the help files - we could, but nobody's done it (they're not in V either). In fact dust and cobwebs signifies nothing at all (i.e. worse even than useless junk), but they're both so low as to be not worth worrying about.

[CyclopsSlayer]

Thanks for the reply!

So that explains the occasional varaince in the 2 level feelings.

As to pseudo-ID, I really only ever found it a big deal in Iron Man type games, so no tears lost there.

And to the level feelings yeah I knew they were both pretty useless, heh heh.
Once way back when someone listed the point values for the feelings and what items contributed to those points. That was in Vanilla circa Ben Harrison or even before? Ancient history... pre-Web as I remember getting a list via Archie/Veronica iirc.

[Magnate]

Wow - I suspect not many people remember archie!

We don't need to count specific things towards level feelings, because we use two things that weren't around in Ben's time - the monster power and the object power. So we just add up all the power ratings for objects and monsters on the level, and divide by some power of depth, and look up a feeling. At the moment it's quadratic, which works well for objects but less well for monsters. I tried cubic but that was worse, so I'm waiting until monster power evolves a bit more before fixing it. At the moment there are a *lot* of low-danger feelings in the early game and a lot of great-danger feelings in the endgame - this is kind of as it should be but the proportions are a bit off. One option to improve early game feelings is to give a special boost for uniques (as done for artifacts), but that might be too much info.

[myshkin]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Wow - I suspect not many people remember archie!

Hey, I was on an Internet Hunt-winning team thanks to gopher, archie, and veronica. Web? What's this newfangled web thing?

[wobbly]

It seems to me that the changes to item generation have broken the level feelings. I'm finding a lot of useful items on levels with "you feel there is not much interesting on this level" or something like that.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by wobbly

It seems to me that the changes to item generation have broken the level feelings. I'm finding a lot of useful items on levels with "you feel there is not much interesting on this level" or something like that.

This is inevitable, as the feelings rely on hard-coded values (of total item worth), so they'll need recalibrating every time item generation is made more or less stingy. It's probably time to run some stats when RC2 comes out and look again at the level feelings before release.

[PowerWyrm]

Feelings seem quite accurate now, especially after fixing the problem with low value artifacts. The only thing to remember is that the feeling depends on dlvl, so finding a westernesse at 50ft will probably give a higher feeling than at 4950ft.