• IdeaArchive
• Finer grained psuedo-id

KhymChanur: Currently, pseudo-id'ing is rather rough grained. On the skill side of things, there's only light and heavy pseudo-id: light only tells you if an item is good or bad, while heavy (gained at combat/magic skill level 11) tells also tells you if it's average, excellent/worthless, or a good/bad artifact. On the ID side of things, even with heavy pseudo-id, for non-artifacts there's only "average" and two levels of good/bad (good and excellent, cursed and worthless).

To make pseudo-id finer grained, there first needs to be more non-average id levels than good/excellent and cursed/worthless. I would propose six: somewhat good, good, very good, extremeley good, incredibly good, amazing, with a similar set of six for worse-than-average (and the names don't have to be what I listed, since I'm terrible at coming up with names). With six different levels of good, the algorithm of "does it have pluses" for "good" and "does it have egos" for "excellent" won't work, so it would have to be based on cost/value. For armor and weapons, the different between the true value and the average value for the item would determine it's pseudo-id level; for magic items, the value alone would determine it.

With more than two pseudo-id levels in place, how skill affects the limits of pseudo-id'ing can be increased more gradually. You would start out with the maximum/minimum being somewhat good/somewhat bad; anything above/below the maximum/minimum would be sensed as the maximum/minimum. At skill level 6, the max/min would change to good/bad, very good/very bad at 11, extremeley good/extremely bad at 16, incredibly good/indredibly bad at 21, and awseome/horrible at 26. The ability to psuedo-id artifacts could still be gained at skill level 11, like it is now, but my feeling is that it should take a little more skill than that.

ReenenLaurie: Yes, I think valueing it by money is much better, though this should be valid for magic and combat alike. Having six levels to both sides is also a good idea. One can still reserve {special}, and maybe add the second one to that. {Special, very valuable}

In fact, one could change it that there is two parts. {magic level, money value}

NeilStevens: There are two issues at work here. Make sure to keep them separate in your mind.

As for the first, I want the pseudo-id levels to be made entirely by money. It is neither useful nor desirable for the developers to have to maintain sensibly two independent scalar measures of item worth. The only practical way to go is to collapse them all into one value: price.

As for the second, what is the point of adding new levels of pseudo-id? That'll just make automatizer work far more tedious than it already is. Besides, identify is cheap, and by the time you get the finer-grained levels of pseudo-id, pseudo-id becomes completely worthless because identify is so cheap. So let's just stick with the current pseudo-id setup:

GreyCat: Bear in mind that parts of the game generate items (or rather, discard items after generation) based on whether an item qualifies as {good} or {excellent} by the existing definition. I haven't looked through the code lately to see where all those places are, but the item generation would have to be changed, perhaps quite significantly, if you make a change in how these things are defined.

NeilStevens: If we re-value every item power to ensure that they make sense, that'll be no problem.

ReenenLaurie: Nothing costs <= 0, as no shop will accept a cursed item. So your money-pseudoID, should consider the item as uncursed. Like a cursed weapon that can activate wraithform (man, I have played long ago if I can't remember the ego's name). Once you uncurse it it is worth a lot.

NeilStevens: That price cutoff is actually the differential from the base, unenchanted item. And oh yes, there will be items worth less than zero. Morgul weapons should be, for example.

NerdanelVampire: In a system where pseudo-id is related to the item value, I think there is well room for more than the current two levels of psuedo-id. In addition to to weak and strong we might have super-strong and hyper-strong, and id-speed that depends more un-staircasedly on Combat (or some other skill). I think the automatizer problem should be handled by greater-than and lesser-than symbols, and anyway an automatizer file is supposed to be written only once.

NeilStevens: No, the automatizer file is supposed to be edited regularly, if you choose to. How else to explain the rules you can generate by pushing $ when destroying an item?

And how do you address the point that, by the time one does get powerful enough to get the ultra fine grained pseudo id, it's worthless because all those characters will have access to effectively unlimited ID?

NerdanelVampire: I'm a big believer in generic carefully-crafted automatizer files such as found in Annals of Ea and Theme. They save a lot of work and prevent mistakes from changing requirements. Anyway, I think for $ the default should be to destroy all the items like this and those of same base type and lesser value. That's what you should want in most cases anyway. Say, if you destroy a "good" pike it is highly likely all the average and cursed pikes should be also destroyed but not necessarily excellent pikes. Many degrees of pseudo-id shouldn't be a problem here.

• NeilStevens: It's only not a problem if people work as you do, sure, but not everyone works as you do. As for "generic, carefully-crafted automatizer files," I don't know what those modules ship, but I doubt it's as long and carefully-crafted as mine is, but even that has its limits. How would such a file handle, for example, the constantly-shifting corpse squelching needs of a summoner? It just can't be done.

  ZasVid: I must say that automatizers shipped with these modules are really good. Good enough to make me not bother with adapting my ToME automatizer file (which took hours and hours and hours of work to become My Favourite Automatizer and now requires an average number of edits equaling one per new ToME version released and/or new series of similar characters) to all new things that these modules add. However, the fact that I would have to rewrite my automatizer almost from scratch for the modules to make it as convenient as in ToME is one of the reasons I usually end up playing ToME instead of modules (or Angband variants which have *at most* an auto-squelcher which is pretty inferior in ability when compared to the automatizer, but also easier to set up).

If pseudo-id of weapons and armor depends upon Combat there is no extra cost for a warrior type to get it. Depending on chosen values, the id progression doesn't necessarily have to go to very high levels to be of increasing use and additionally some characters might wish to save in equipment slots and go by pseudo-id only, thus bringing about differentiations in gameplay. In particular unbelievers, who are terrible at magical devices, wouldn't need to go to the end of the game carrying a huge pile of id scrolls but they could save the scrolls for something more likely to be useful.

Additionally, perhaps on very high levels pseudo-id could trigger just by walking over an item. I love the rare-as-hen's-teeth auto-id, but this might be a more accessible version of the thing. Alternatively, maybe on very high levels pseudo-id could sometimes result in true id, at least when wielding/wearing an item.

NeilStevens: Auto-id isn't rare at all, by the way. It's in a guaranteed item for crying out loud.

NerdanelVampire: As the said item isn't in the current game I think I can be excused for forgetting about it. I think there are currently exactly two ways to get auto-id, both of which entail unpleasant minuses and block better equipment, as well as are not guaranteed. The other way isn't even findable through normal *identifying* of objects. There is only one character class in the entire game that I think for whom getting auto-id is a particularly good idea, as much as I like the effect.

• Actius: If by "current game" you mean 2.something, I remember last year using the guaranteed auto-id item with my thaumaturgist for quite some time. In other words: personally, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

  NerdanelVampire: Oh, it indeed looks like I had forgotten something and my other way of auto-id was indeed fixed and not random. That particular dungeon just happens to be my least favorite in all the game, Nether Realm excepted, so I hadn't visited it for a while. As I have a liking for the particular quality the item has a significant minus for, I don't like the item too much. Indeed the quality acts directly against the purpose of auto-id. As for swap items, scrolls and staffs have the good quality that they cannot be forgotten on. Which of us that has played Vanilla has not tried to whack monsters with a shovel and wondered why they seem to be doing so badly all of a sudden? Since auto-id is a property that saves player keystrokes rather than directly increases survivability, I have to treat it as optional regardless of how much I like to have it.

  Actius: Believe it or not, but there's rather easy ways of dealing with each of the problems I think you're mentioning. If you want me to explain more, point me at some appropriate spoiler page(s) for the problems that bother you and I'll go through the gory (but trivial) details. (Just mark the pages and maybe express your frustration -- I'll see that in RecentChanges.)

TheFury: Loremasters should get AUTO_ID at some point, as should unbelievers.

JulesBean: Hmm I think NerdanelVampire is probably missing something. I hope I won't be considered too spoily if I say that AUTO_ID occurs as a guaranteed drop from the guardian of one of the optional dungeons. The item concerned has mild disadvantages but nothing that can't be avoided by swapping it in and out, (i.e. at the cost of one inventory slot). Personally I would get this item with all characters who (a) become powerful enough to kill the monster concerned and (b) don't get access to a radius ID effect in some way.

NerdanelVampire: I'm embarrassed... See the above reply.

ZasVid: Actually, what's the point of pseudo-ID at all? It only is a way to save you some cash or help you rate your loot when you're out of ID. The former stops being a helper not very far in the game, because you have lots of gold anyway and even if game is redesigned to make money matter, it shouldn't be done at the cost of cheap id, so pseudo-ID's barely important here. The latter may be even misleading sometimes because in a no way {excellent} Long Sword of Slay Dragon is better than e.g. {good} or even {average} Blade of Chaos. Changing it to a price-related labels would certainly help that and this is a bit more important aspect of pseudo-id (for those with restricted access to id). It's still only true for start- to mid- game as then you get identify a plenty.

I'd rather give an auto-id for combat/magic items when you have some high skill level in an appropriate skill, as later on the whole process of identyfing is primarily tedious. Well, actually it's tedious and nothing more.

NeilStevens: Later on, I normally have the automatizer set to destroy most items automatically, and destroy all {good} items of the rest of the types. Throw in the Stone of Lore and the Helm of Knowledge, and anyone can identify the remaining items.

ZasVid: Yeah, I do this too, but what's the point if anyone can do it and it only takes up time and keystrokes? Hoom... I get an impression that this discussion is all about something barely relevant in the game. Well, nevermind my rant.

Improving the Pseudo-id, Part Two

NerdanelVampire: Here are some of my newer thoughts on how to improve the pseudo-id. I think pseudo-id could be made to be more useful. Even though scrolls of identify are easy to get, it doesn't mean everyone should use them and similar magical means all the time. Variety is good. Some characters could wish to rely on the improved pseudo-id and save an equipment slot.

Pseudo-id depends on the sum of sneakiness and combat/magic. The accuracy comes in stairs as before, but there could well be more gradations of pseudo-id available with higher levels of skill. Speed of id increases smoothly with increasing skill.

On high levels of pseudo-id the character will have a chance of getting the pseudo-id of items just by walking over them.

On higher yet levels the character will have a chance of appraising on the fly the value of an item carried by a nearby monster. This might make rogues actually use their stealing ability and give everyone else a better idea which deadly monsters it could be worthwhile to try to kill. However, it could also lead to foolish temptations, when one learns for example that the nearby OOD great wyrm of power is carrying a {superb} ring.

On maximized levels the character will have a chance of getting the true id, at least when wielding/wearing an item. This will never on items carried by monsters.