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.

[sylae]

From overmenshin@yahoo.co.uk on May 01, 2010 15:16:43

Hey, when do we get an updated release to fix this issue? ;)

Check the April build of Classic Blades of Exile ;)

(Yeah, annoying, I know... But compiling stuff on Windows is a pain, and compiling OBoE on Linux is currently impossible.) The code is provided with working project for two majors (open source) IDE : DevCpp and Code::Blocks. On the other end, if you don't have access to a Windows machine ... We'll get to Linux compiling one day or another ...

Chokboyz

[sylae]

From overmenshin@yahoo.co.uk on May 01, 2010 15:16:45

Hey, when do we get an updated release to fix this issue? ;)

Check the April build of Classic Blades of Exile ;)

(Yeah, annoying, I know... But compiling stuff on Windows is a pain, and compiling OBoE on Linux is currently impossible.) The code is provided with working project for two majors (open source) IDE : DevCpp and Code::Blocks. On the other end, if you don't have access to a Windows machine ... We'll get to Linux compiling one day or another ...

Chokboyz

[sylae]

From dle...@gmail.com on June 02, 2010 21:53:31 Fixed as of April build :)

[CelticMinstrel]

This is probably fixed due to major revisions in the handling of item abilities, but I haven't specifically verified it.