AVWW Beta 0.905 "Refined Gargantua" Released!

[keith.lamothe]

the new way of doing it actually helps me find errors rather than obscuring them

Two ways to program:

1) So that there are obviously no problems.

2) So that there are no obvious problems.

[x4000]

Wow that needs to be a bumper sticker.   

[Terraziel]

I didn't want to start a thread to ask about a patch that hasn't been released yet so here will have to do...

Anyhow, so now everything uses the new, lower-number scale. Everything has been converted down consistently, but now you see ice bats with 45 health instead of 1600 health, etc. And your fireball 1 now does 16 damage instead of 580.

What sort of accuracy are we getting on the lower numbers? ie if i had a +5% attack power increase would it show "16", "16.8", "16.80" etc

[Armanant]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point

I'm guessing Single precision, so... 16.800000? It's been a good few years since I've done that paper XD more than enough though!

[Terraziel]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point

I'm guessing Single precision, so... 16.800000? It's been a good few years since I've done that paper XD more than enough though!

Yes that is under the hood though, and this is an issue i keep forgetting to mention, but to take the cooldowns as an example, Plasma Bolt claims to have "0.5 White" and "0.5 Long Range", except A) if they were actually the same the game would compress it to "0.5 Long Range, White" or whatever, and B) if you add a -10% enchant on it becomes "0.5 Long Range" and "0.4 White". There is a lot of UI rounding going on

[Toll]

I wonder if that last bit isn't a bug. Remember that in the old days, casting speed was dependant on a stat, and with the removal of that stat everything was normalised around that stat being 5. Could it be that that stat still exists under the hood, and that the speed increase from that and the enchantments are additive instead of multiplicative? That would explain why casting speed is affected more than it "should" be by enchantments.

[Terraziel]

As per the patch notes, yes casting speed used to (well still does in our version) exist under the hood but they have just taken it out. so we shall see.

But more generally I'm pretty sure it's just a rounding issue, if we take Energy Pulse as an example

Base  = 3.0 White
-10% = 2.7 White
-25% = 2.3 White (actually 2.25)
-35% = 2.0 White (actually 1.95)

[x4000]

The visible precision we are showing is 1 decimal place in most cases, 0 decimal places in health bars that are not yours (otherwise those are about impossible to read). We could certainly do more precision in specific displays where it makes sense, we just have to make sure we are adding rather than removing clarity.

[Terraziel]

Well for spell damage I would imagine one decimal place is fine, it's probably just the cooldowns that need the extra, what with being the only place you find lots of numbers below 1.

EDIT: I'll do another one.

Previously, the internal casting speed of 5 that was attached to all players was making it so that their spells were firing at about 50% faster than the internal code values would indicate. This was of course expected, and was reflected on the GUI, but now that the internal modifier has been removed we've gone back through all the actual internal definitions and converted them to 50% faster so that the speed of spell fire rates should be the same as in the prior version.

Not to seem disagreeable, but cast speeds where only off by 25% not 50%, ie fireball had 1.0 in the data and 0.75 in-game. Energy Pulse went from 4 seconds to 3 seconds. etc. so if you actually have changed it by 50% that's an increase.

[x4000]

Alternatively, I could round -- for display purposes -- the cooldowns to one decimal place.  If something is different by lower than that amount, I don't really think it has any bearing on anything (we're talking 1-9ms difference here, nobody will notice the difference).  They ought to just collapse on down, is my thought.

[Terraziel]

Personally, I would still prefer the extra accuracy, all this does is make it less obvious that the numbers are different, it doesn't actually change the situation that, from the players perspective your cooldowns are most likely wrong, if not misleading.

I mean if we take a spell with 0.5 seconds as a base, anything under 10% won't show a change, and 11% would suddenly show a 20% decrease which doesn't exist, whilst DPS would be showing correct numbers that your displayed cooldowns have no relation to.

[x4000]

Personally, I would still prefer the extra accuracy, all this does is make it less obvious that the numbers are different, it doesn't actually change the situation that, from the players perspective your cooldowns are most likely wrong, if not misleading.

I mean if we take a spell with 0.5 seconds as a base, anything under 10% won't show a change, and 11% would suddenly show a 20% decrease which doesn't exist, whilst DPS would be showing correct numbers that your displayed cooldowns have no relation to.

Okay, sold.  I'm still rounding, but now to two decimal places rather than one, and the interface now shows one or two decimal places depending on the needed precision.  It does indeed help with clarity, I can already tell just by looking at it for a moment or two in practice.  Thanks.

[KDR_11k]

(we're talking 1-9ms difference here, nobody will notice the difference).  They ought to just collapse on down, is my thought.

1-99 actually, 0.01 is centiseconds.

[x4000]

Well, that's not quite how I meant it, but fair enough. 

[x4000]

New one!  http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10077.0.html