I take it all back

[Wozar]

I will stop complaining - I just found these two things with a new character







You will hear no more complaining from me :-)

[scud]

The RNG was being rather ungenerous with that amulet's numbers, though.

[Derakon]

The modifiers on Trickery amulets are all depth-dependent, so it's not surprising that one found at 150' (67 levels out of depth!) would be somewhat anemic.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Wozar

I will stop complaining - I just found these two things with a new character

You will hear no more complaining from me :-)

That Trickery is insanely OoD. Those become native at 3500'. Getting one at 150' is just..... It has passed 67 OoD check in a row. What is the chance that would happen? Any coders that know how that works?

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

That Trickery is insanely OoD. Those become native at 3500'. Getting one at 150' is just..... It has passed 67 OoD check in a row. What is the chance that would happen? Any coders that know how that works?

There is one really weirdly random OOD boost in the object generation code:

    /* Occasional level boost */
    if ((level > 0) && one_in_(GREAT_OBJ))
    {
        /* What a bizarre calculation */
        level = 1 + (level * MAX_O_DEPTH / randint1(MAX_O_DEPTH));
    }

GREAT_OBJ is 20 and MAX_O_DEPTH is 127 so one in every 20 objects gets a potentially huge level boost - though they can then still come out as daggers or cloaks, of course. But it means that access to massively OOD objects is certainly possible.

This code is one of the reasons that non-monte-carlo stats collection is almost completely impossible in V. You'll all be pleased to note that it doesn't happen in Pyrel.

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Magnate

so one in every 20 objects gets a potentially huge level boost
....
You'll all be pleased to note that it doesn't happen in Pyrel.

Why would that be a good thing in Pyrel?

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Timo Pietilä

Why would that be a good thing in Pyrel?

Being able to derive item stats programmatically (i.e. without simulating millions of items) will be a huge plus for balancing.

Note that that doesn't mean that item generation in Pyrel doesn't give similar occasional massive random boosts - just that the formula isn't quite so ungrokably weird as in V. (Ladies and gentlemen I give you the critical hit formula as another example.)

[Derakon]

Oh geeze, yeah, crits in Angband are just bizarre.

I suspect we'll always have use for monte-carlo stats, but it'll be good to be able to just run some formulae and say "the expected frequency of this thing is X."

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Note that that doesn't mean that item generation in Pyrel doesn't give similar occasional massive random boosts - just that the formula isn't quite so ungrokably weird as in V.

OK. That sounds good.

[MattB]

Originally Posted by Magnate

Note that that doesn't mean that item generation in Pyrel doesn't give similar occasional massive random boosts - just that the formula isn't quite so ungrokably weird as in V.

Just had to google the word 'grok'...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok
...and what a fantastically wonderful word it is!
I thank you for bringing it into my life.