Giant strength and other abilities don't work properly

[sylae]

Original author: dle...@gmail.com (May 25, 2009 20:49:27)

1. Create an item with Giant Strength, Strength, Intelligence, or Dexterity
   at ability level 10.
2. Create a party and have a PC equip the item.
3. Enter melee with a monster or cast a spell; the efficacy of melee and
   spellcasting will not be properly affected

With Giant Strength, enhancement of melee damage should depend on ability
level, but instead depends on item level. This makes impossible to create
e.g. Gloves of Giant Strength without giving said gloves ridiculous damage
protection.

With Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence, no effect can be seen on
characters' damage, accuracy, or spellcasting power respectively, no matter
what the characters' stats or the ability level of the equipped items; i.e.
those three abilities don't actually do anything.

So far I've observed this in Classic BoE Beta 1 on Windows 2000, and in
Ormus' OBoE and the original BoE on both Windows 2000 and Linux (using Wine).

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/openexile/issues/detail?id=16

[sylae]

From celtic.m...@gmail.com on May 25, 2009 21:09:16
Are there any other abilities that depend on item level instead of ability level? Are
there any other abilities that appear to have no effect at all?

[sylae]

From overmenshin@yahoo.co.uk on May 25, 2009 21:26:48

With Giant Strength, enhancement of melee damage should depend on ability
level, but instead depends on item level. This makes impossible to create
e.g. Gloves of Giant Strength without giving said gloves ridiculous damage
protection.
This is a known bug, that i've forget to fix (i'll do it). By the way, if you know
of any other ability that wrongly depends on item level, i'll take ...

With Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence, no effect can be seen on
characters' damage, accuracy, or spellcasting power respectively, no matter
what the characters' stats or the ability level of the equipped items; i.e.
those three abilities don't actually do anything.
Those abilities have been implemented in CBoE Beta 1. The trick is that item ability
is not used with those (original behavior).

Having an equipped item with ability :
-Strength will give you the same (cumulative) bonus as having the Exceptional
Strength trait
-Intelligence will give you the same (cumulative) bonus as having the Magical
Aptitude trait
-Dexterity gives you a dexterity bonus (no equivalent trait)

To be more precise, here the skill_bonus array:
skill_bonus[21] = {-3,-3,-2,-1,0,0,1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3,3,4,4,4,5,5};
Your bonus is the index which match your skill value (e.g -1 for skill 3). Having an
item with Strength/Intelligence/Dexterity equipped add one to the value of the
skill_bonus when the correspondant skill is used.

Hope it's clearer,
Chokboyz

[sylae]

From overmenshin@yahoo.co.uk on May 25, 2009 21:47:03
The skill ability was also checking the item level. Both have been fixed.

[sylae]

From celtic.m...@gmail.com on May 26, 2009 01:42:43
Okay, I need to fix it yet, so I'll mark this as affecting the Mac version only.

[sylae]

From dle...@gmail.com on March 21, 2010 19:14:04
Update: as of 1.0/1.1, Skill and Giant Strength don't work at all; neither Item Level
nor Ability Level produce any effect.

Accuracy, on the other hand, works perfectly fine, and actually makes archery
worthwhile.

[sylae]

From celtic.m...@gmail.com on March 21, 2010 22:44:43
...I guess I'd better make note of that.

[sylae]

From overmenshin@yahoo.co.uk on March 22, 2010 01:30:00
I've just checked and the Skills and Giant Strength abilities are working.
I checked the code anyway and found that, when these were indeed adding bonus
damages, they were decreasing the chances of hitting ...
Of course, that has been fixed; thanks for pointing it out.

Chokboyz

Edit : note that in BoE, the first item with a given property is taken into account
when determining the strength of an ability, so having two rings of skills, one lvl
2 and one lvl 10 equipped, with the lvl 2 being first would count as lvl 2 skill
bonus.

[sylae]

From celtic.m...@gmail.com on March 23, 2010 19:19:48
That's definitely something that should be fixed. Just ensure that the skill taken is that
of the equipped item if it's an ability that requires equipping. (If it's an ability that
doesn't require equipping, I would expect it to be the some of all strengths...)

...I hope that makes sense?

[sylae]

From overmenshin@yahoo.co.uk on March 23, 2010 22:28:09
Are you speaking of the previous "edit:" comment ? If so, it would be pretty easy to
get the highest ability strength when sorting items so that having two rings of
Skill for example (equipped in that case) would get the strongest of the two having
an effect (i don't thing summing the strengths was in jeff's or boe's spirit, but
that largely open to discuss).
Rereading my previous comment, it may have been a little confusing : if the item
needs to be equipped, it is correctly checked (as an equipped item). The problem
happens with rings which (if i recall correctly) can be equipped by two.

And your comment perfectly mades sense ;)

Chokboyz

[sylae]

From celtic.m...@gmail.com on March 27, 2010 23:03:29
Oh, so if you had (for example) a ring with the Skill ability and armour with the Skill
ability, the effects will stack, but if you have two rings with the Skill ability, only the first
one found will have an effect?

[sylae]

From overmenshin@yahoo.co.uk on March 28, 2010 00:23:17
My bad, seems like my explanation was a little off.
Currently, the game checks if an item with ability X is equipped : the first
equipped item with the ability is chosen, whatever the ability strength is. So if
you have an armor and a ring of Skill equipped, the first in the item list will be
chosen when it comes to apply the effect.
Modifying the code, so that the strongest ability item is chosen seems to be quite
easy. Summing the strengths of all corresponding equipped items won't be much
harder, but i'm not sure it's in the spirit of BoE ; i think we should submit the
idea to the community first ...

Hope it's clearer,
Chokboyz

[sylae]

From celtic.m...@gmail.com on March 29, 2010 00:52:48
Well, I don't know about the spirit of BoE, but summing the strengths seems more logical to me.

Still, asking what others think is always good.

[sylae]

From dle...@gmail.com on April 02, 2010 01:32:02
IIRC the in-game rationale for not summing is that magical effects interfere with each
other. Also, summing would kind of radically change game balance. That said,
resistances do stack, so... It's ultimately up to you guys.

[sylae]

From dle...@gmail.com on April 18, 2010 14:16:21
Hey, when do we get an updated release to fix this issue? ;)

(Yeah, annoying, I know... But compiling stuff on Windows is a pain, and compiling
OBoE on Linux is currently impossible.)

[sylae]

From celtic.m...@gmail.com on April 20, 2010 15:46:33
I'm really not sure. At present the project is waiting on Chokboyz's wxWidgets-ification of the program.