YAGBU?: item weights

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Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.adom (More info?)

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I was under the impression that, in ADOM, item weights were fixed. That
is, if I find an un-ID'd necklace that weighs 8s, it MUST be an amulet of
luck (thats the only 8s amulet listed in the GB)

Today, I found bracers weighing 18s. Must be bracers of speed... but they
turned out to be bracers of regen.

Is the GB wrong in this case? Or is item weight randomized to some
degree and the GB data is just a sample? (if its the latter, warning the
reader might prove helpful)

 

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Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.adom (More info?)

frobnoid <frobnoid@orders2.tmok.com> wrote:
> m
> i
> l
> d
> l
> y


> S
> p
> o
> i
> l
> y

> s
> p
> o
> i
> l
> y

> I was under the impression that, in ADOM, item weights were fixed. That
> is, if I find an un-ID'd necklace that weighs 8s, it MUST be an amulet of
> luck (thats the only 8s amulet listed in the GB)

> Today, I found bracers weighing 18s. Must be bracers of speed... but they
> turned out to be bracers of regen.

> Is the GB wrong in this case? Or is item weight randomized to some
> degree and the GB data is just a sample? (if its the latter, warning the
> reader might prove helpful)


Bracers and girdles are truly random (except girdle of weight, which
weighs 40s). There are only few types of them, and weight is associated
with "unidentified" descrioption

For other items the weight seems to be fixed and is a good hint.

brojek.

 

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Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.adom (More info?)

On Wed, 11 May 2005 23:06:12 -0500, frobnoid
<frobnoid@orders2.tmok.com> wrote:

>m
>i
>l
>d
>l
>y
>
>
>S
>p
>o
>i
>l
>y
>
>s
>p
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>
>I was under the impression that, in ADOM, item weights were fixed. That
>is, if I find an un-ID'd necklace that weighs 8s, it MUST be an amulet of
>luck (thats the only 8s amulet listed in the GB)
>
>Today, I found bracers weighing 18s. Must be bracers of speed... but they
>turned out to be bracers of regen.
>
> Is the GB wrong in this case? Or is item weight randomized to some
>degree and the GB data is just a sample? (if its the latter, warning the
>reader might prove helpful)
>
>

While there is definitely a degree of entropy in the weights between
games, I'm pretty sure that the weights throughout a single game
remain constant. That is, if an amulet of luck weighs 8s, all amulets
of luck for this game weigh 8s but this has no bearing on the next
game.

This is, at least, the assumption under which I play the game.

Cheers,

- Zachary Palmer

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[rat]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.adom (More info?)

On 2005-05-12, Przemyslaw Brojewski <brojek@kis.p.lodz.pl> wrote:
> frobnoid <frobnoid@orders2.tmok.com> wrote:
>> m
>> i
>> l
>> d
>> l
>> y
>
>
>> S
>> p
>> o
>> i
>> l
>> y
>
>> s
>> p
>> o
>> i
>> l
>> y
>
>> I was under the impression that, in ADOM, item weights were fixed. That
>> is, if I find an un-ID'd necklace that weighs 8s, it MUST be an amulet of
>> luck (thats the only 8s amulet listed in the GB)
>
>> Today, I found bracers weighing 18s. Must be bracers of speed... but they
>> turned out to be bracers of regen.
>
>> Is the GB wrong in this case? Or is item weight randomized to some
>> degree and the GB data is just a sample? (if its the latter, warning the
>> reader might prove helpful)
>
>
> Bracers and girdles are truly random (except girdle of weight, which
> weighs 40s). There are only few types of them, and weight is associated
> with "unidentified" descrioption

Not true. Leather girdles can be 5s or 15s (at least - maybe 30s too).
Strange girdles can be 7s or 40s. I'm pretty sure the same holds with
bracers. However, girdles of carrying are *always* 15s, as are girdles of
strength. Money belts are *always* 5s. I believe the same is true for
bracers, that they are weighted by type, not by appearance.

For what its worth, I would've said bracers of regeneration weighed 18s,
and a bit of googling lends credence. So perhaps the guidebook is wrong?

njm
>
> For other items the weight seems to be fixed and is a good hint.
>
> brojek.

 

[rat]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.adom (More info?)

On 2005-05-12, Zachary Palmer <zep01@bahj.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 11 May 2005 23:06:12 -0500, frobnoid
><frobnoid@orders2.tmok.com> wrote:
>
>>m
>>i
>>l
>>d
>>l
>>y
>>
>>
>>S
>>p
>>o
>>i
>>l
>>y
>>
>>s
>>p
>>o
>>i
>>l
>>y
>>
>>I was under the impression that, in ADOM, item weights were fixed. That
>>is, if I find an un-ID'd necklace that weighs 8s, it MUST be an amulet of
>>luck (thats the only 8s amulet listed in the GB)
>>
>>Today, I found bracers weighing 18s. Must be bracers of speed... but they
>>turned out to be bracers of regen.
>>
>> Is the GB wrong in this case? Or is item weight randomized to some
>>degree and the GB data is just a sample? (if its the latter, warning the
>>reader might prove helpful)
>>
> While there is definitely a degree of entropy in the weights between
> games, I'm pretty sure that the weights throughout a single game
> remain constant. That is, if an amulet of luck weighs 8s, all amulets
> of luck for this game weigh 8s but this has no bearing on the next
> game.

Some google-groupsing (groups.googling? whatever) here makes it pretty
clear. Amulets of luck are always 8s. Amulets of death ray resistance are
always 7s. Etc. The material doesn't affect the weight. Bracers of speed
are always 10s. Bracers of regeneration are always 18s. (Here google's *
comes in handy. Try a search for "bracers of speed * * * * 10s" vs.
"bracers of speed * * * * 18s" or "bracers of regeneration * * 10s" vs.
"bracers of regeneration * * 18s".) Etc. Again, the material doesn't
affect the weight: it's completely determined by the item type. As far
as I can tell, all items in the game that can have multiple unidentified
descriptions behave that way.

njm

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.adom (More info?)

rat@athei.st wrote:
> On 2005-05-12, Zachary Palmer <zep01@bahj.com> wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 11 May 2005 23:06:12 -0500, frobnoid
>><frobnoid@orders2.tmok.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>m
>>>i
>>>l
>>>d
>>>l
>>>y
>>>
>>>
>>>S
>>>p
>>>o
>>>i
>>>l
>>>y
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>>>s
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> Some google-groupsing (groups.googling? whatever) here makes it pretty
> clear. Amulets of luck are always 8s. Amulets of death ray resistance are
> always 7s. Etc. The material doesn't affect the weight. Bracers of speed
> are always 10s. Bracers of regeneration are always 18s. (Here google's *
> comes in handy. Try a search for "bracers of speed * * * * 10s" vs.
> "bracers of speed * * * * 18s" or "bracers of regeneration * * 10s" vs.
> "bracers of regeneration * * 18s".) Etc.
>
> Again, the material doesn't affect the weight: it's completely
> determined by the item type. As far as I can tell, all items in the
> game that can have multiple unidentified descriptions behave that way.

I'd put it slightly differently. Item descriptions and item materials
come in groups, and within each group all items have the same weight.
For example, potions can be partitioned into groups as follows (there
might be some more sub-partitioning, but I hope you get the picture).

Group 1
=======
types: water
descriptions: watery
weight: 4s

Group 2:
========
types: carrot juice
description: orange
weight: 4s

Group 3:
========
types: oil of rust removal
description: white
weight: 2s

Group 4:
========
types: balance, beauty, booze, charisma, dexterity, exchange,
gain attributes, healing, invisibility, learning, longevity,
mana, poison, potential <whatever>, strength, toughness,
visibility, willpower, youth
descriptions: gray, silvery, black, murky, muddy, golden, glowing,
swirly, clear, misty, purple, blazing, oily, clotted,
translucent, shiny, thick, light, viscous, heavy, speckled,
bubbly, sandy, smelly, pink, milky
weight: 4s

Group 5:
========
types: berzio, blindness, boost <whatever>, boost speed, confusion,
cure corruption, cure poison, deafness, education,
extra healing, insight, oil, quickling blood, raw chaos,
raw mana, sickness, stun recovery, training, troll blood,
ultra healing, uselessness, wonder
descriptions: brown, amber, blubbery, light blue, light red,
mercury, rusty, bright, thin, light green, turquoise,
light cyan, green, mottled, cyan, red, dull, blue, magenta,
slimy, opaque, flickering, sparkling, light magenta, icky,
light yellow, blood red, rainbow-hued, violet, shimmering
weight: 2s


So for example, a light yellow potion will *always* weigh 2s, and will
always be one of the item types listed.

OK, so this is not yet too interesting. It gets interesting for those
classes where there are different non-trivial groups with the same
weight, because then you can tell something from the description that
you cannot tell from the weight alone.

Consider wands for example. From play experience, my impression always
was that the "stone" type wands belong to a separate group from the
"wood" type wands, even if we consider instances of both which both
weigh 3s.

So for example wands of fireballs, earthquakes or poison (Guidebook
default descriptions: marble, stone, ivory) would never show up as
wooden wands (pine, cedar, and so on), and on the other hand wands of
knocking, digging or webbing (default descriptions: pine, oak, softwood)
would never have a stone-type description.

If this is true, then it is quite useful information since stone-type
wands are quite a bit more powerful on average than wooden ones.
Moreover, my anecdotal experience seems to suggest that they are more
resistant to fire.

Maybe someone with the level 50 weaponsmith power can shed a bit more
light on this issue. At this stage, all this is just a theory, and I
haven't really tried gathering data in an organized way. I'd be very
interested in contradicting evidence (like a marble wand of digging, or
a pine wand of fireballs).

Malte

 

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Malte Helmert (helmert@informatik.uni-freiburg.de) writes:
>>>
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<the significance of item weights vs. item unidentified descriptions>

> OK, so this is not yet too interesting. It gets interesting for those
> classes where there are different non-trivial groups with the same
> weight, because then you can tell something from the description that
> you cannot tell from the weight alone.
>
> Consider wands for example. From play experience, my impression always
> was that the "stone" type wands belong to a separate group from the
> "wood" type wands, even if we consider instances of both which both
> weigh 3s.
>
> So for example wands of fireballs, earthquakes or poison (Guidebook
> default descriptions: marble, stone, ivory) would never show up as
> wooden wands (pine, cedar, and so on), and on the other hand wands of
> knocking, digging or webbing (default descriptions: pine, oak,
> softwood) would never have a stone-type description.
>
> If this is true, then it is quite useful information since stone-type
> wands are quite a bit more powerful on average than wooden ones.
> Moreover, my anecdotal experience seems to suggest that they are more
> resistant to fire.
>
> Maybe someone with the level 50 weaponsmith power can shed a bit more
> light on this issue. At this stage, all this is just a theory, and I
> haven't really tried gathering data in an organized way. I'd be very
> interested in contradicting evidence (like a marble wand of digging,
> or a pine wand of fireballs).

Marble wands are always wands of fireballs. I think stone wands are always
wands of earthquakes. And for whatever it's worth, glass wands are always
wands of door creation, and I believe glowing wands are always wands of
wishing.

Something I can contribute that might actually be of use is my wand
selection in the Air Temple. The background charges will of course ignite
wands made of any kind of wood (including ironwood, whatever that is), but
the wands I can take in are always the same ones, and they're mostly
destructive. I can always take in teleportation and lightning, which are
both useless of course, but I can also always take in magic missiles, cold,
and fireballs, possibly fire as well, I can't remember. Far slaying, digging
and webbing, which could be handy, never go in. A look through the Guidebook
shows the descriptions of wands of the "Air Temple" bunch are either stone
or metal, whereas the "non-Air Temple" bunch are wood or, shall I say,
composed of materials of uncertain origin. Since the wands in each group are
always of the same type, that serves to corroborate Malte's theory.

I, for one, find that very interesting. What I used to do before going into
the Air Temple was look at the identified items screen (the '/' screen),
look at the unidentified description of my wands, and drop the ones that
couldn't make it. This theory, however, allows me to skip that tedium (and
it *is* tedium, given that my memory isn't photographic and I have to switch
many times between that screen and the inventory to see which wands I had
among the hundreds I'm usually carrying by then). Perhaps this is less
theory and more fact now. Bless your observant mind, Malte Helmert.

--
Curry Bucket's Controversial Web Presence:
The Pandora's Box of the Internet
http://chat.carleton.ca/~jsingh3/
or http://www.currybucket.cjb.net/

 

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Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.adom (More info?)

Josh Singh wrote:
> Malte Helmert (helmert@informatik.uni-freiburg.de) writes:
>
>>>>
>>>>>m
>>>>>i
>>>>>l
>>>>>d
>>>>>l
>>>>>y
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>S
>>>>>p
>>>>>o
>>>>>i
>>>>>l
>>>>>y
>>>>>
>>>>>s
>>>>>p
>>>>>o
>>>>>i
>>>>>l
>>>>>y
>>>>>
>
>
> <the significance of item weights vs. item unidentified descriptions>
>
> Marble wands are always wands of fireballs. I think stone wands are always
> wands of earthquakes. And for whatever it's worth, glass wands are always
> wands of door creation, and I believe glowing wands are always wands of
> wishing.

I used to believe that, but I don't think this is true all the time, at
least not for all those items. There seem to be some item association
that are very very common, but not guaranteed. For example, amulets of
chaos are obsidian amulets most of the time, but not always. As for
counterexamples to common associations like marble wands being wands of
fireballs, check this thread:

http://tinyurl.com/au8z6

This is all pretty poorly understood.

> Something I can contribute that might actually be of use is my wand
> selection in the Air Temple. The background charges will of course ignite
> wands made of any kind of wood (including ironwood, whatever that is), but

(More on ironwood here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironwood.)

> Perhaps this is less theory and more fact now. Bless your observant
> mind, Malte Helmert.

Don't forget that this is all speculation though, although it is based
on experience. Every theory needs to be put to a practical test to be
proven in the field. Also, it's not really useful as long as we don't
know what the item groups are.

Here's an idea: Everybody who's got a few winning (or very advanced)
saved games floating around is cordially invited to e-mail me a copy of
their "/" descriptions. That would allow going through those with an
automated script and get some real information. New versions preferred;
please note if it's not 1.1.1.

The problem here of course is that it's not so easy to screenshot the
"/" screen. One option would be playing ADOM in a window and then doing
cut and paste into a text editor, but that's not much fun since the list
consists of several pages. Maybe ADOM Sage can help?

Malte

 

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Malte Helmert <helmert@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
[ ... ]
> Here's an idea: Everybody who's got a few winning (or very advanced)
> saved games floating around is cordially invited to e-mail me a copy of
> their "/" descriptions. That would allow going through those with an
> automated script and get some real information. New versions preferred;
> please note if it's not 1.1.1.

Okay, too late for this today... I'll try to remember and do this later;
feel free to bounce this thread if you don't get an email within, say, the
next week.

> The problem here of course is that it's not so easy to screenshot the
> "/" screen. One option would be playing ADOM in a window and then doing
> cut and paste into a text editor, but that's not much fun since the list
> consists of several pages. Maybe ADOM Sage can help?

I'd assume that piping the output should do the trick, no?

Cheers, Gero

--
Gero Kunter (gero.kunter@epost.de)

 

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Gero Kunter wrote:
> Malte Helmert <helmert@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
> [ ... ]
>
>>Here's an idea: Everybody who's got a few winning (or very advanced)
>>saved games floating around is cordially invited to e-mail me a copy of
>>their "/" descriptions. That would allow going through those with an
>>automated script and get some real information. New versions preferred;
>>please note if it's not 1.1.1.
>
> Okay, too late for this today... I'll try to remember and do this later;
> feel free to bounce this thread if you don't get an email within, say, the
> next week.

Send 'em in, everybody! Only got one so far.

>>The problem here of course is that it's not so easy to screenshot the
>>"/" screen. One option would be playing ADOM in a window and then doing
>>cut and paste into a text editor, but that's not much fun since the list
>>consists of several pages. Maybe ADOM Sage can help?
>
> I'd assume that piping the output should do the trick, no?

Do you mean piping the output to tee or some such? That would include
ANSI escape sequences, but I guess I could deal with that.

If you manage to find an easy way of getting the data into a file,
please send the file to me and I can see if I can parse it. If yes, you
could post the instructions here so that it's less of a hassle for
everyone else.

Malte

 

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Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.adom (More info?)

On Thu, 19 May 2005 10:10:01 +0200, Malte Helmert wrote:

>> I'd assume that piping the output should do the trick, no?
>
> Do you mean piping the output to tee or some such? That would include ANSI
> escape sequences, but I guess I could deal with that.
>
> If you manage to find an easy way of getting the data into a file, please
> send the file to me and I can see if I can parse it. If yes, you could
> post the instructions here so that it's less of a hassle for everyone

The easy way to do this (for Linux users) is:
typescript adom.out
adom
^D

This produces a file, adom.out containing all the screen data between
running "tyepscript" and ^D.

 

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frobnoid wrote:

> On Thu, 19 May 2005 10:10:01 +0200, Malte Helmert wrote:
>
>>> I'd assume that piping the output should do the trick, no?
>>
>> Do you mean piping the output to tee or some such? That would
>> include ANSI escape sequences, but I guess I could deal with that.
>>
>> If you manage to find an easy way of getting the data into a file,
>> please send the file to me and I can see if I can parse it. If yes,
>> you could post the instructions here so that it's less of a hassle
>> for everyone
>
> The easy way to do this (for Linux users) is:
> typescript adom.out
> adom
> ^D
>
> This produces a file, adom.out containing all the screen data between
> running "tyepscript" and ^D.

It also presupposes that the program 'typescript' is installed. It is
not, on my system, and a quick search of the Debian package database
does not find anything which looks to match that name. Is there some
reason to expect it to be universal? For that matter, where could it be
found?

--
The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.

 

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On Thu, 19 May 2005 19:48:27 -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

> frobnoid wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 19 May 2005 10:10:01 +0200, Malte Helmert wrote:
>>
>>>> I'd assume that piping the output should do the trick, no?
>>>
>>> Do you mean piping the output to tee or some such? That would include
>>> ANSI escape sequences, but I guess I could deal with that.
>>>
>>> If you manage to find an easy way of getting the data into a file,
>>> please send the file to me and I can see if I can parse it. If yes, you
>>> could post the instructions here so that it's less of a hassle for
>>> everyone
>>
>> The easy way to do this (for Linux users) is:
>> typescript adom.out
>> adom
>> ^D
>>
>> This produces a file, adom.out containing all the screen data between
>> running "tyepscript" and ^D.
>
> It also presupposes that the program 'typescript' is installed. It is not,
> on my system, and a quick search of the Debian package database does not
> find anything which looks to match that name. Is there some reason to
> expect it to be universal? For that matter, where could it be found?

Whoops, that should be "script" (the default filename is "typescript",
which is why I get them confused). I suspect you'll find "script" no
problem.