Messages

226

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L5 30-Oct-2020 New Energy

« on: November 01, 2020, 10:53:45 am »

If a unit is unconscious, does the handcuffs breakout check still happen?

227

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: October 11, 2020, 08:58:55 pm »

There's a bug in localization:
GMTACTIC8: "Synthetic Dreams" -> The title of the song is "Rise". The artist is "Makeup and Vanity Set".
GMGEO11: "Vanity Set" -> The title of the song is "Solo Nobre Must Fall (Theme from Brigador)". The artist is "Makeup and Vanity Set".

228

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: October 01, 2020, 07:52:11 pm »

Question: Is there a way to see which tiles count as day, and which ones count as night? Does there exist a mod that would help with this?

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 30, 2020, 07:48:11 pm »

you seem to be more interested in pushing your idea for script changes. You are incapable of listening, or help, you only want to push your own vision, while not even really understanding how the current script works, or its ramifications (which can easily be judged from your answers). If you want to start fights, this forum is not the best place for it.
In short: script stays as it is. It is exactly how I want it to be. Case closed.
I will think about better phrasing, however.

Edit: it was you who was lying, sandbags do cut damage in half (*up to maximum resist of 50%).

Let's say your salary is 1000€. Your employer says that "they're increasing employee salaries by 50%, but only up to 1400€". What do you think this means? Every normal person would understand that this means that their salary would be increased by 50% to 1500€, but because of the 1400€ limit, their salary would only be increased to 1400€. This is normal English and this is how everyone would understand this sentence. I don't know what language you speak, but yeah, in English, this is how people would understand such a description.
I understand the formula perfectly well, but this formula simply isn't properly translated into item descriptions, and as such, yes, I can say that the description is lying because, quite simply, what's written is false in its meaning, that is, it differs from what actually happens. I'm not lying - you can ask anyone you want. "I have a value of 100 and I cut it in half, up to 60. What's the new value?". Everyone would answer "60". And this is the problem.
If me providing possible solutions to a problem offends you (pushing a vision? what?), then sorry, I'll be careful and refrain from doing so in the future.

Delian, your asking to change a core formula of the mod and all the balance derived from it. This is at the very least 100s of hours of additional work because each affected item must be edited individually. So every armor and resistance  gear would need to be redone. Well over a thousand  objects. And the gain is a minor improvement in clarity. If you want this your gonna have to do it yourself.

There are only 28 items that provide resistances. And I've already rebalanced them. For myself.

230

XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L4 15-Sep-2020 Mad Melee Massacre

« on: September 30, 2020, 09:14:32 am »

I like how challenging the melee update is, but I feel it makes it a bit too easy for enemies to retaliate (especially on Jack Sparrow difficulty, with enemies getting insane reactions boost). I think it would be a good idea to balance it, for instance, by making more (if not all) melee weapons interrupt reactions.

231

XPiratez / Re: A thread for little questions

« on: September 26, 2020, 06:33:28 pm »

Two questions:
1. How is an enemy able to shoot me from 40+ tiles away when they have only 9 night vision? I've attached a sav file where you can click an End Turn for demonstration.

2. How does the game determine which enemy is a sniper?

232

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 26, 2020, 01:18:45 pm »

You really think I'm gonna throw away my finely crafted formula in favor of yours, crude? It is like it is to avoid absurd situation where armor with shitty resistance, if equipped with enough items, will be better than armor custom-built to withstand a certain kind of damage; how much mileage do you really expect from fitting plate mail with barbed stockings? Or putting a crude gas mask on top of a decent 50% gas mask provided by armor? The answer, the difference should be negligible at best, and this is what this script allows. This hard floor is needed to keep things sane. The only solution, actually, is for you to deal with it.

Can you provide an example, where an armor with shitty resistance becomes better than a specialized armor, due to items? Also, I don't know about you but, the kind of air I breathe, it doesn't matter which gas mask the air came through, the filtration should be the same. If the mask is a part of the outfit, or if I'm holding one onto my face, the filtration should be the same, no?

Anyway, the problem remains. Currently, the items are lying to players since the resists that they provide don't match their descriptions (Floating Sandbags say they cut the damage in half, but they only reduce it by a quarter).

Here's some alternative solutions:
- Write different descriptions: Instead of saying "The shawl reduces the effects of Cold damage by 1/4, up to 50% final Resistance", say "At 250 Cold resist, the shawl will reduce it to 200". "At 100 Cutting resist, Shepherd's Staff will reduce it to 90". "At 100 Plasma Resist, Floating Sandbags will reduce it to 75", so you provide an example where the formula is applied on the most common armor resist value.
- Add a stacking penalty. Change the script so that when stacking occurs, a larger penalty is added. The first item has normal effect, the second item has only half effect, the third item has only a third, and so on.
- Make the resist application customizable. Change the script by adding a new per-item variable, for instance, RESIST_MODE, which allows you to specify the way in which the resists for this item is applied. Basically, this would allow you to use a different formula for each item. For instance, you could write a formula where an item has only half the effect if the resist is below a certain value, or you could write a formula that makes your current resist worse, or a formula where resists change by a static value instead of multiplication (a lighter in a blizzard won't have any effect, but it would warm you up on a cold day), etc.

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XPiratez / Re: [MAIN] XPiratez - L4 15-Sep-2020 Mad Melee Massacre

« on: September 25, 2020, 12:45:26 pm »

Is it just me, or does bootypedia in L4 not work anymore?

234

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 25, 2020, 11:06:23 am »

The formula was designed to reduce the effectiveness of multiple items stacking together, as requested by Dioxine.

You say so, but I don't see how the formula was achieving that. All it did was reduce the effectiveness of all the items.

For example:
With the original formula:
If I have 250% resist and one item with 50% reduction, and 50% minimum, then the reduction is by 100. If I used two items with 25% reduction and 50% minimum, then the reduction would be 50 for the first item, and 37.5 for the second item. So, reduction by 100 from one item, compared to reduction by 87.5 for two items, this means that the actual diminishing effect is 12.5%.

With the altered formula:
If I have 250% resist and one item with 50% reduction, and 50% minimum, then the reduction is by 125. If I used two items with 25% reduction and 50% minimum, then the reduction would be 62.5 for the first item, and ~47 for the second item. So, reduction by 125 from one item, compared to reduction by 109.4 for two items, this means that the actual diminishing effect is 12.5%.

In other words, even thought I altered the formula, the diminishing effect of stacking multiple items remains absolutely the same. So if "the formula was designed to reduce the effectiveness of multiple items stacking together", I have demonstrated that the altered formula does it by exactly the same amount. Now, if you want to increase the diminishing effect, there are several ways to achieve that.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 24, 2020, 07:29:09 pm »

It works a bit more complex than that. 3x "15% with a minimum of 30" in that algorithm would be  x = 0.3 + (y-0.3) * 0.85 * 0.85 * 0.85, where y is your basic resistance, dependant on armor worn, and x is your final resistance to that type of damage. Also lmao, order should not matter? Order does always matter. It's physical items, not mathematical constructs.
The fact you don't understand the formula, doesn't mean it's wrong. If you're that smart, maybe you will however know how to put it down in natural language in a way that would be concise, yet more precise  than it is. Your proposed 7 or 8% would also be a lie, since it depends on what kind of armor you wear. The other proposal (10 if it's 100) is on the other hand very vague (what if it isn't?).
So in short, you spammed my bug report board fighting windmills, instead of simply asking on some thread dedicated for questions, or creating a new thread. Not very nice.
All you had to do was to read INGAME description:

Sorry, it looks like I was a bit too hasty with my judgements. And sorry for spamming this thread - this problem really bothers me.
I have studied the algorithm a bit more and I understand it well now. However, the problem remains. The resistances provided by items don't match their descriptions. With the formula as it is, it's impossible to create descriptions (short of including the whole formula in every description) that would match the observed reductions.

The only solution is to change the formula to be simpler and more intuitive.

I've attached the script (Edit: Updated to L4) with the formula changed from:

Code: [Select]

CurrentResist = CurrentResist - (1 - ItemResist) * (CurrentResist - ItemMinimumResist) to

Code: [Select]

CurrentResist = Max(CurrentResist - (1 - ItemResist) * (CurrentResist), ItemMinimumResist), or more simply put,

Code: [Select]

CurrentResist = Max(CurrentResist * ItemResist, ItemMinimumResist)
With this, the descriptions now precisely match the damage reductions, since the ItemMinimumResist is no longer acting as a multiplier, but as a floor.
If my armor has 200 Cold Resist, and I put on a Fancy Shawl (says 25% reduction), it gets reduced to 150 Cold Resist.
If I already have 50 Cold Resist, then the item has no effect, because the reduction under ItemMinimumResist (50% for Shawl) isn't applied.
If I had two (stackable) shawls, then the reduction would be 200% * 0.75 * 0.75 = 112. So the diminishing returns are still there.
If I have 100 Plasma Resist (which is normally the case), and I put on Floating Sandbags (where it states that Plasma damage is "cut in half", the damage is now actually cut in half, whereas before it was actually only cut by a quarter.

I'm not sure why ItemMinimumResist served as a multiplier in the first place. It seemed like a really bad design choice, because it creates a lot of confusion, while providing no benefits compared to using it as a floor.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 15, 2020, 09:00:27 pm »

There's a bug in the terrain in front of Red Lantern Villa (LT_HOUSE_02G), where movement costs zero or half the normal TU.

237

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 10, 2020, 11:43:16 am »

OK, so what would be your counter-proposal... assuming the authors want to keep the algorithm the way it is.
What description would you write?

Personally, I wouldn't want to keep this algorithm in this shape. If you want to have diminishing returns, then I would change it so that resistances are multiplied. eg. 3 items with 15% decrease damage would stack like 0.85 * 0.85 * 0.85 = 0.61 (I can change the script code if you want). And then rebalance the resistances values on the items (assuming rebalancing would be needed).

If you want to write a description, well, currently, if I have no Cutting resistance on armor, and put on Shepherd's Staff, the Cutting resist granted is 10% (1 - (0.15 * 0.7)), so changing the description and writing that the staff grants 10% Cutting resist would be closer to the truth (altho it would still function very inconsistantly due to how minimum resists on items vary - the order of items shouldn't matter, but it does).

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 10, 2020, 01:32:11 am »

May I ask how you found out?
The game never communicates these percentages in any form... and the difference between 70% resistance and 77% resistance is practically indistinguishable from a slightly better or slightly worse RNG roll.

Edit: 70%, not 60%, 85-15=70

But removing all numbers from descriptions of such items sounds like a good idea to me

Math still fails me lol, yes, 70, not 60.
In the description of Shepherd's Staff it says "Wielding Shepherd's Staff as a weapon reduces Cutting damage taken by 15% (to a min res. of 30%)". This doesn't say much, so I tested it out by stunning an enemy and then giving it a cutting damage weapon. I tried stacking (it's funny that stacking the staves stacks the morale penalty, but not the resistances - another bug?), and seeing what the maximum damage taken was. Needless to say, I was very disappointed to find out that the damage reduction was not what I expected it to be. In most other games resistances stack in more logical ways. Well, later I found out that the script writes the actual resistance in the savegame file, so you can just read it from there. Anyway, 15%, 8%, the difference isn't much, but it's enough to turn a "possibly useful weapon" into "garbage".
Yeah, removing all the numbers, including damage, from the descriptions of all items would be the best, right? Players should choose their favorite weapons based on feelings

Cutting resistance is pretty noticeable since melee tends to be many small attacks that will kill you if they do any damage.  E.g. dogs won't hurt you at all in scale but can  kill you in a single turn in warrior.  (30 armor 80 cutting vs 30 armor 60 cutting)

Does wielding Shepherd's Staff help against dogs? It doesn't. Because the reduction is too small. So it's currently a useless item for this purpose. The purpose being, a swappable resistance item.

239

XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 09, 2020, 11:19:41 pm »

Well, the main problem is in the description an item of what it says it provides. If I have only one item, without any stacking or diminishing returns going on, the item saying it gives 15%, but actually gives only 8%... this can only be described as a bug, even if a visual one.

A player doesn't care about what goes on under the hood of the game. If the game tells them that they have 100% chance to hit something, and they miss, then they're going to get mad. And if such discrepancies keep happening, then eventually the player will ragequit and delete the game. That's why it's important to provide the players with correct information, which in this case, it is not. And I'd like to ask you to fix it. Either fix the function, or fix the description.

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XPiratez / Re: Bugs & Crash Reports

« on: September 09, 2020, 10:31:36 pm »

Not a bug. This is the function that all such resist items where designed around. Diminishing returns with a hard floor. Otherwise you can very easily reduce incoming  damage to below armor and therefore become immune to harm.

Diminishing returns? What are you talking about? There's no "Diminishing returns" in that function. Also, it's not a hard floor at all because this part of the function is bugged also. As it stands, this function is just badly written and confusing.