Bad ego names?

[Tobias]

l) a Pair of Sandals of Protection [2,+3]
     Dropped by a Cutpurse at 500 feet (level 10).
     
     Can be destroyed by acid, fire.
     Feather Falling.

Just got this in my first V4 game. 4 of 5 items found in the dungeon until now have protection, only this one has Feather Falling.
Why is it not named after FF?
also, what does tough mean?

[Derakon]

IIRC, tough means that it can't be destroyed by elemental attacks; protection means that it gets extra AC bonuses. Featherfall is such an irrelevant ability that the game thinks AC is more important, hence why these boots are named "of Protection" even though it's the featherfall that makes them stand out.

[Tobias]

Thanks Derakon,

Further comments on V4:
The Inspect screen feels very cluttered now, with all those extra effects and lines and runes and names.
Also it seems like I got a lot of very good drops, but no resists at all.

[Hariolor]

I won't go so far as the post title to say "bad" - but I will agree that the new descriptions feel jarring and cluttered, especially the common ones. I just started playing V4 this past weekend and was shocked that almost everything (figuratively if not literally) seemed to be "tough" or "of protection" or "cheap". This may just be a matter of adjustment, but a proliferation of the same description does make it tend to lose its interest.

Not to hijack, but relatedly - seeing huge numbers in the character stat screen is hard to make sense of (more help documentation will help with this in the future maybe). It's shocking to see values of 100+ for basic combat stats as it is, though....especially when i tend to miss most of my attacks even with a +15/+15 dagger, and manage to not damage enemies often even when I *do* hit. I think I like the new balance of combat, but it's a bit unintuitive for my new +15/+15 dagger to repeated whiff/bounce off of a large white snake, for example.

Love the new direction all the same - just some thoughts to add to the OP's.

[Tobias]

Dwarven Morning Star of Agility (2d6) (+0,+11) <+1, +3>
     +1 tunneling, light radius.
     +3 dexterity.

I assume +1 refers to dwarven and the +3 to dex. Probably only surprising if you assume that dwarven doesn't need a number.

Cheap Sword of Piety was in the squelch category for high resists.

What does silk do? sounds like no encumbrance, but it get squelched as good.

[Derakon]

IIRC silk armor is lighter but has worse AC. And of course it's only valid for soft armors.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Hariolor

I won't go so far as the post title to say "bad" - but I will agree that the new descriptions feel jarring and cluttered, especially the common ones. I just started playing V4 this past weekend and was shocked that almost everything (figuratively if not literally) seemed to be "tough" or "of protection" or "cheap". This may just be a matter of adjustment, but a proliferation of the same description does make it tend to lose its interest.

Not to hijack, but relatedly - seeing huge numbers in the character stat screen is hard to make sense of (more help documentation will help with this in the future maybe). It's shocking to see values of 100+ for basic combat stats as it is, though....especially when i tend to miss most of my attacks even with a +15/+15 dagger, and manage to not damage enemies often even when I *do* hit. I think I like the new balance of combat, but it's a bit unintuitive for my new +15/+15 dagger to repeated whiff/bounce off of a large white snake, for example.

Love the new direction all the same - just some thoughts to add to the OP's.

Ok, the numbers thing is just a shift in perception. Those numbers no longer refer to additions to die rolls for hitting or for damage. They mean something else entirely. I know this will feel weird to people used to playing V, but it's a necessary paradigm shift and should feel intuitive eventually. The lack of documentation is a fair point - it won't feel intuitive until we have some ;-)

On the names, we reached a consensus a while ago that the naming of magic items could be improved - ISTR someone offered to code something up (Nomad?). So I haven't done anything in the meantime, because I think it's going to be a complete departure from the existing code, not just tweaking.

On the inspect screen, please be reassured that it currently contains a lot more clutter than is ultimately intended. The affixes will be hidden once the naming is satisfactory and I find a way to inspect them in debug mode. The runes will just display the unknown rune names, since everyone agreed there was no point listing known runes as well as all the known properties. The combat info will eventually get split out into a separate screen - I need some help on the UI for this, because we don't want everyone having to add keystrokes to look at combat info, but we also don't want to proliferate top-level commands. Ideally you'd automatically get the inspect screen for any item while browsing inv or equip, with a single keypress to get combat info (as well as other context commands like use, wear, drop etc.). But this requires the inv listing, context menu and inspect info to share the screen, which isn't currently possible.

[Nomad]

Originally Posted by Magnate

On the names, we reached a consensus a while ago that the naming of magic items could be improved - ISTR someone offered to code something up (Nomad?). So I haven't done anything in the meantime, because I think it's going to be a complete departure from the existing code, not just tweaking.

Yeah, I was working on this, but I have to admit I've fallen behind on the current development and haven't had a chance to play since before the finesse/prowess stuff was introduced. So I'm a bit lost as to what's even going on at the moment, and I'm not sure when I'm going to get the free time to catch up and get back to doing some coding. It's certainly still on my to-do list, but if anyone else wants to take a crack at improving item naming before I get round to it, please do go ahead.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Nomad

Yeah, I was working on this, but I have to admit I've fallen behind on the current development and haven't had a chance to play since before the finesse/prowess stuff was introduced. So I'm a bit lost as to what's even going on at the moment, and I'm not sure when I'm going to get the free time to catch up and get back to doing some coding. It's certainly still on my to-do list, but if anyone else wants to take a crack at improving item naming before I get round to it, please do go ahead.

No worries, the entire devteam has had a nasty dose of RL recently, so there's been very little activity since Derakon's blitz before xmas (with the honourable exception of Blubaron, who continues to do great work on the input layer).

If it's any consolation, I'm certain that the new combat changes are completely orthogonal to the naming issue: affixes which boost finesse instead of to-hit or prowess instead of to-dam are no better or worse named than they ever were. They also haven't touched any of the code which deals with naming, so any half-done changes can easily be applied to the latest version.

[CunningGabe]

Originally Posted by Magnate

On the inspect screen, please be reassured that it currently contains a lot more clutter than is ultimately intended. The affixes will be hidden once the naming is satisfactory and I find a way to inspect them in debug mode.

I think the way to do this is to add a new object description mode in obj-info.c and to add a debug 'I' command that uses this mode. I might take a crack at that soon. We could then easily add other useful debugging information without contaminating the standard UI.

(Pardon the necro!)