My long list of observations, questions, and interest in developments

Shortly after playing the new release and getting a good run, I wanted to save quit for the day, and I accidentally terminated my game as I quit. Then after my quick ire, I when to look around in the game files, something I've done a fair bit. I even replaced a lot of sounds with my own, like a Willhelm scream on the generic hit five sound effects. I also made the mace a flanged mace instead, because I think they look cooler and work better in real life. So when I opened the script with notepad++, oh boy what I did with those files.

I started with giving myself crazy armor and weapons like Pepsi sword and chain mail. My brother got interested with Ivan for the first time and asked me to mod the player character stats to be like a different species. After a lengthy bit of testing, I came to an unusual concussion with the stats in the game.

Leg and Arm Strength was seen to scale linearly, Endurance interestingly seemed to be exponential, and Dexterity, Agility, and Perception seemed to diminish or cap out in many ways.
Agility never seemed to prevent blows, even at ludicrous levels like over five hundred, same thing for blocking rate with Dexterity. Perception didn't spot traps significantly better than at normal levels.
Also, magic resistance does cap out.

I'm not sure if this is indeed the case with the formulas, but this makes his character not work as he wants a cat-man rouge that doesn't use armor.

Thus my brother and I are giving it a shot at modding the game files for real. My brother is pretty skilled with modding and for me not so much for me, but I have a few ideas and want to share them with you guys.

* How hard is it to add new creatures or humanoids to the game?
* How do my sprites look? If you like them, would you have any requests?
* I want to remake the chest armor to look more 3D.
* I also want to change the gloves and boots to cover the whole arms shoulders and legs instead. For the belts, I wanted to change them to a piece of armor that covers their groin.
* I think full helms should decrease Perception significantly, about ninety percent or less.
* I want to make armor much realistic by having much higher DV and has a more significant stat penalty. In turn, I want weapons and material hardness to matter much more when dealing with blocking damage: for example, a steel sword cutting through copper armor after a few solid hits.
* I also want these three damage types.
1. Slashing does the most damage, but it's weak vs. all armor.
2. Stabbing works well vs. flexible armor but not rigid armor.
3. Crushing/blunt works well vs. all armor, less so to rigid and least to padded armor. This damage would be the only way to knock out a full plated enemy and go in for the kill with a knife stab.
* It seems like duel-wielding is overpowered, which is why shields and two-handing are unpowered.
* The Long sword is the only sword that has ten roundness instead of fifteen.
* Maces are so huge! I was thinking of making hammers what normal maces are and remaking the current mace.
* Maces aren't good at blocking in real life.
* Where's the poleaxe?
* Whips aren't real weapons but that okay with me for the most part, but a suitable replacement would be a flail.
* I saw a bow in the sprite folder, how hard would it be to add bows to the game?
* If throwing is a skill, is it displaced in the game?
* Perception should be better at spotting traps and at some point, should always succeed.
* Willpower maybe should prevent body part from breaking at zero hit points?
* Charisma could be buffed by talking to the enemy to pacify them or neutral characters to join you.
* Does Mana stat make wands, holy books, or scrolls last longer?
* It would be cool if the player size and weight could change at the start or during the gameplay.
* Wisdom seems rather useless to me if it makes the gods hate you faster at higher levels of Wisdom. Also, I think Wisdom should do more than what it does.
* There's no rubber/insulators in the material list; it would be good for boots to make lighting magic not so dangerous.
* DV should block fire damage.
* I don't think magic resistance should cap out.
* For the overworld much like Zelda II. I think what would be cool if on each title you could explore a randomly generated environment based on the if it forset, grass, sand, or snow. That way, the player doesn't starve when they're out in the wild and wandering the world would have more of a point to it.
* Staffs are terribly heavy/hard to wield.
* Dagger and short swords seem more like short swords and arming swords.
* Wrestling from Dwarf Fortress would be a great add on, especially with the armor changes.
* Armor should be a skill just like weapons to block your weakest spots just like Dwarf Fortress and move around better.
* Why does bone rot?
* While normal axes aren't the best weapons in IRL, they could be suitable for applying to cut through wood walls and chop down trees.

Sorry if this seems like a whole lot of spam, but I think a lot these ideas would cool to add, and I would like to hear what you guys think and or clear up and misconceptions I have.

I won't go into too much detail since I haven't been involved in development for some time now, but on armour and weapons balancing, that's a long standing problem we've been struggling with, with multiple ideas tossed around. If you're that well acquainted with the code, I recommend you take a look around the development forum.

On that note, I'm moving this thread.

Lots of good ideas there. Some of the suggestions I’m pretty sure are already implemented. I’m on my phone so I can’t reply in depth.

I do like the idea of perception helping to discover traps. Also full helms hurting it

And I have always wanted the Zelda style world map

A new dev emerges, perhaps?

If you haven't seen it already, this is pretty useful.


Armor is really, really important in IVAN, so no armour at all would be pretty hard to pull off, but a cool challenge. I would give yourself at least searching and regeneration permanent status effects, they could make no armor run much easier.


Can you compile the code? If yes, then have a look at human.cpp and nonhuman.cpp, there you can define new creatures. If not, then you'll need to add creatures as variations to already existing types (like there is base kobold and then variant kobold warrior etc.)


Pretty cool! New sprites for the game would definitely be welcome. I Might ask you for some location sprites, if you're willing.


Do you mean sprites or code? Gloves/boots/belts already protect your arms/legs/groin, respectively.


That idea is a TODO for a long time, and still unimplemented.


I would be careful about balance. Armor is already very strong and balancing weapons vs armor precarious. Good luck.


There is no code for ranged weapons yet, so that would need to be added.


I'm not sure I understand?


Perception definitely could help with spotting traps, but I don't think there should be a level where it always succeeds. I always liked diminishing returns more than hard caps, but that's me.


Right now, it lets you use magic items (those with cooldown) more often.


Yes.


IDK if it makes the gods hate you faster. Wisdom greatly shortens the prayer timeout and increases power of prayers (damage of Legifer's explosion etc.)


There is rubber, it just doesn't do anything against electricity yet.


I don't think it does?


Yes, yes, yes.


That would be nice, yeah.

We'll see, all I've done so far is what I would call, pseudo programming. But I'm experienced at testing in games and having an understanding as to how code has to work.


No, I haven't, but that'll surely help. What I've learned is from the scripts, in-game, or the general wiki.


Yes, I gave him regeneration, I wasn't so sure about searching due to the search material query pop-up every once in a while.
By the way, I didn't know there was a search function in the game. But even so, I still feel that traps should still be passively spotted more reliably with higher Perception.


It should be, while searching at least, but traps at lower floors could be harder to spot?


Sure! But what do you have in mind, for the Black Market, perhaps?


The sprite, belts don't cover what's below them.


Could they work if they were coded the same as the wand of striking?


Forgive me, but that was a mistake. What I meant was if the throwing skill is displayed in-game menus, or if that skill is hidden or still unimplemented.



I'm not sure what you mean by a cool down? That it's a faster turn speed to use magic items? Or that the wand can recharge?


To my understanding, the Gods that are farther from the morality of the God you befriended will grow equally more hateful. As for the effectiveness, I believe that it's only based on the relationship with said God, but I can test that just to be sure.


Then the effect of (ElectricityResistance = 50; ) to the material work?


It has to, I did a test with fire resistance and shot oil lanterns with the Holy Banana of Oily Orpiv with over 100 resistance, regardless of if I used rings, cloak, or amulet, I would die or survive with 7 Hp every time.

Sorry about the really late reply!


It seems that you have mixed up SEARCHING and DETECTING. Searching helps you spot traps as it automatically searches your surroundings every turn. Detecting lets you detect material from time to time.

As a cat-man, he might also appreciate INFRA_VISION.


The problem is that wands basically just "throw damage" in a single direction and don't need to care about anything else, it's basically an energy attack. Ranged weapons would need to take into account both the launcher and the projectile (their material and other values), which might be a bit tricky, and then move the projectile in given direction, maybe give a chance to block the attack, and finally drop the projectile where it hits something.


I think throwing uses the weapon skill, ie. thrown dagger would use Small Swords, just as wielded dagger.


Wands don't have cooldown, only magic items like the horns or magic whistle do. They can only be used once in a while, and high Mana makes this while significantly shorter. Mana currently does nothing for wands.


Yes, but that has nothing to do with Wisdom. Praying to a god always makes other gods of different morality a bit angry.

Maybe high Wisdom could decrease the amount by which other gods get angry, though.


ElectricityResistance is basically a magical enchantment of the item protecting the wearer. Material does not grant any resistances to the player right now, but some materials make the item resistant to damage (eg. stone item won't burn, but it won't protect the player from fire damage).

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Resistances have diminishing returns, but no real cap. You'd just need to pile even more resistance on to decrease the damage further, I think.

Didn’t know mana helped lower the cool down period for magic items, cool!

That's pretty new, I think it was added in 0.55

Is it possible to train mana yet?

Yep, magic items train Mana, so using horns etc. will eventually increase your Mana.

No worries! We actually got stuck on the tutorial for compiling as it's way outdated and now uses CPP files instead of O files, or the files would say they were invalid. It would help if you can tell us how to compile the source code correctly. : )

Oh, that makes sense!

Yep, I gave him that too. Oddly there doesn't seem to be real night vision in the game. Infravision only sees hot things, not making the lighting look much brighter, which is how night vision would work.

I thought so, I wounder how hard it is to add new functions to the game. The only other way would be a melee weapon that when you throw it, it stays in your inventory, like a boomerang! Or if we still want a bow. We could make the bow a club weapon, and when you try to throw it, there's a function like the tag on thrown items that are marked for being picked up. That spawns an arrow item to throw, but the arrows only do any real damage when the bow is equipped.



So the wiki page here is wrong?



I didn't know horns were reuseable. I thought they worked like wands.



True, but it's not much of effect compared to most of the stats.

Nope, from testing, it does hard cap above 50-75 resistance. Even if I gave the player all the fire resistance items or gave them 1,000 fire resistance, it doesn't matter, it hard caps both ways or mixed. Unless lanterns and the Holy Banna Oily Orpiv don't do just fire damage when they explode.

The INSTALL should hopefully be up to date.

Depending on your OS, on Linux compiling is quite easy (that's what I'm using). There were also saome threads about using Visual Studio on Windows and about compiling on Mac.


Darkness is scary, as it should be.

If you want to circumvent this, you could give the player some emitation (ie. make the player glow ). That will simulate night vision, as there will be alaways at least a bit of light to see by.


Hmm...

Looking at the code, I can only see weapon skill, move ease (burden state), Dex and Per contribute to thrown to hit (see item.cpp line 160). So yeah, no throwing skill involved.

Oh, BTW, I noticed that your Perception is already used for searching, so you do get better at searching with higher Perception.