First Post: Introduction and test

[LostTemplar]

It's purely aesthetics though, I grant.

Good thing may be to remove "experience" number from char dump, just leave "level" with fractions e.g. level: 45.6178, and leave all calculations related to level draining the same.

[ghengiz]

Originally Posted by LostTemplar

Good thing may be to remove "experience" number from char dump, just leave "level" with fractions e.g. level: 45.6178, and leave all calculations related to level draining the same.

good idea!

[Derakon]

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

[ghengiz]

Originally Posted by Derakon

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

lost templar specifically proposed to use the fractional level in char dumps.
During a game, it makes sense to just leave the display of the amount of experience as it is now, so the player can see immediatly how much experience s/he gains...

edit: of course, if doing the difference of the experience points after and before the kill is too much hassle, there is always the 'l'ook command

[LostTemplar]

So how do you tell how much experience monsters give? Killing a Time Hound at your current level gets you .001 closer to the next level?

Something like this or maybe remove it form description. I propose to hide experience from player.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by LostTemplar

Something like this or maybe remove it form description. I propose to hide experience from player.

Generally speaking Vanilla aims for more transparency, not less. The experience information is in the edit files; why shouldn't it be in the UI as well? What do we gain from hiding how much experience the player gets?

[LostTemplar]

What do we gain from hiding how much experience the player gets?

Nothing but free space on main screen and dump. BTW it was your thought, that there is something wrong with millions exp points.

Transparency is good, but useless information is not so good,
e.g. "fight (+90 +63)" is a piece of useless info in a dump, since you have exact dmg/round in weapon description. Experience is allmost the same, the only function of it is to show, how far it is to next level, so it can be merged in as level fraction without any information loss.

[debo]

I used to play a shareware PC dungeon-crawler called Moraff's World back when I was a tyke, and that game had some epic quantities for experience as you approached the endgame. I think at some point the display would actually roll over to using scientific notation when things became totally unmanageable

Example:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...d1/MWDevil.JPG

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by LostTemplar

Transparency is good, but useless information is not so good,
e.g. "fight (+90 +63)" is a piece of useless info in a dump, since you have exact dmg/round in weapon description. Experience is allmost the same, the only function of it is to show, how far it is to next level, so it can be merged in as level fraction without any information loss.

I think you're oversimplifying -- experience also shows you how useful it is to fight e.g. Time Hounds (and IMO we want those guys to be as tempting to fight as possible because they're right bastards), how much you have to regain before you get your level back (why bother returning to town for a potion when your next kill will get you fully-restored?), how much less valuable a kill is at level X+1 vs. at level X for the same monster, and so on.

Basically I think that the ailment here isn't that bad, and the cure introduces more complexities than it does simplifications.

As for the Fight stat, in v4 at least it will help players discern how much of their combat ability comes from level vs. stats vs. equipment. The character screen has these four fields on it:

Finesse: X
Prowess: Y
Fight: (+A, +B)
Melee: (+C, +D)

Where A = X + stat bonuses to finesse, and C = A + weapon bonuses to finesse. This kind of thing makes it easier for the player to figure out what's going on, which has nontrivial utility.