ToEE Suggestions Thread

Someone needs to fix the die roller. I'm totally sick of characters with +14 attack bonus missing four times in a row against AC 10.

Perhaps whoever added some of the items like the mithral shirt and the adamantine breastplate could also add in "small size" versions of them (for halflings and gnomes) and maybe a mithral breastplate and adamantine full plate too? Just to be a completist . . .

 

There already is adamantine full plate in the game. It's called dwarven plate.

I also created a suit of mithral plate, but I don't know if Allyx ever got around to adding it to any of the shops before he retired.

 

Alas, there is nothing to "fix" in the die roller. It is the standard call to a random number generator that returns a value between 0 and 1 (long string of decimals) that is then multiplied by the number of sides of the dice in order to generate the resulting 1-6 or what have you. This is a standard random number generator that has been around the gaming world since the dawn of the processor command that created them (back in the late 1970's). The random number generator takes a seed number (usually seeded by the internal clock at program startup) and keeps generating numbers infinitely and without processor control. When the call is made to obtain a number, it grabs whatever is in the register at the time and puts that into the variable to be used (while continuing the generation). Thus, it is as random as any computer can make the number.

Long series of bad rolls can happen just as often as long series of good rolls. If the die roll is linear (1dx) there is as much chance of any single number coming up as any other. Only when multiple dice are used (2dx, 3dx, etc.) do you get the bell curve that favors the middle (the more dice you have the higher the favor of the middle or mean number).

 

I know how the die roller is supposed to work, I've written them before.

While I was working on Fallout, I found that there was a problem in the randomizer that Tim Cain wrote and it was generating -n to n on calls instead of 0 to n. Luckily, it was caught and fixed in dev. I've heard that the randomizer for ToEE may have a similar problem.

 

Of course from this statement everyone automatically assumed that you had direct programming experience and a detailed knowledge of how the random number generator works and Tim Cain's past history with them. It was blantantly obvious.

If you have something to add to the game and the forum. Like a reason that the Random Number Generator isn't working properly or a proposed fix. By all means grab a keyboard and help out. Alot of people don't like the RNG both before and after the fixes by Troika. If you have some knowledge you would like to share it will be appreciated.

 

Looks like I showed up on "jump on the visitor" day!

Anyway, I'm not a .dll hacking expert - I mostly did scripting, back in the day. I saw in another thread that some .dll hacking had been going on, and since I'd heard that the RNG might be problematic - and I knew that I'd seen a bad RNG before from the same programmers - it seemed a request worth floating.

 

I don't think you're being jumped on Jesse - just being asked if you genuinely can help out with it if you have experience of sorting out RNGs as you said If the answer is no, no worries - it just dashes our hopes of some kind stranger taking pity and giving us a fix on a flyby visit

As far as I can work out from the documentation on the website of the mathematician who co-created the RNG, it might be that the output is giving numbers which are within too narrow a range. (There's a thread in general discussion where I have put up links to this). Though on second reading, I'm not certain whether the modified/updated version which was meant to fix this was used by Troika or not.

Certainly there is a new version of the RNG which post-dates ToEE but I'm not certain how compatible it is.

 

Well, in the interests of amity, here, let me start over.

I'm Jesse Heinig (as my username says!) and I really like what you guys have done with ToEE.

I did have the pleasure of working on Fallout with Tim Cain & co. back in the Interplay days. I was a scripter/designer. I never joined Troika and I didn't work on ToEE, just to be clear.

My skills lie mainly in type-checking (making sure that things follow the D&D standard), dialog and grammar, and scripting.

Since I didn't work on ToEE with Troika, I'm not entirely familiar with its format, so I am something of a modding noob.

I would be happy to take a look at the RNG but I'm not sure that it's something that I can fix. Hacking .dll files is a bit outside my usual range!

 

well as the game stands now if you kill anyone in hommlet , including the traders if you do it to early, then everyone else in hommlet will attack you on sight and that will never stop. you cant talk you way out of it or do anything to change it.

well Jesse if you can do it that would be great cause so far i dont think any of us have had any luck hacking the dll. but if not its all good

 

These are skills we certainly appreciate; we hope you'll stick around & help us out in any way you can. ShiningTed needs help scripting stuff for Keep on the Borderlands, and as Gaear pointed out elsewhere, ToEE is still not quite finished yet. The RNG is a source of much consternation...maybe you can hook up with someone *...Spellslinger...cough* to share your insight(s) for a possible solution.

 

Yes, the game includes a response to the butcher of Hommlet reputation, but what I am talking about is a response from the Militia and the village's protectors that would discourage attacks on the citizenry through a credible deterent, and would accurately reflect the most likely response of the people to a threat to the village instead of each villager responding in a disorganized and ineffective manner.

I think a Sherrif's posse would add much more to the game than a peasant farmer attacking your well armed and trained partywhen you next walk in to Hommlet.

By the way, Kudos to the modders for all of the great work that they've done, it's made this an awesome game that keeps getting better all of the time, instead of a game to play and forget.

 

In the RNG's defense, we just a had a combat in PNP D&D last night where the DM was rolling crit after crit for the bad guys while the party was having trouble hitting the broadside of the barn due to lousy die rolls. All rolls out in the open, so there wasn't any DM fiddling going on.

That said, the above sort of instance seems to happen a lot more commonly in ToEE.

 

I think a better RNG than what ToEE has right now is a pipe dream [ie., a fantastic notion or vain hope].