Nice victory Pent. You could say you single handedly defeated Oree

EDIT: HEY! One of your guys is called Irving Washington! Funny Catch-22 reference

It's funny though. At the moment we've been looking at cruddy leather boots. As soon as you change the materials to Mithril or Valpurium, the material strength and density interacts with the form modifier, and you get different results. I could spend ages plotting curves in four or five spaces.

Attached is yet another plot. I'll post code here tomorrow.

Ok I did some number crunching on boots of kicking, which turned out to be a highly non-linear use of my day. To summarise:
- The main cause of difference is the form modifier (20 for normal boots, 50 for boots of kicking (30 for broken boots!)).
- At the moment, enchanting a boot will improve the inflicted damage of the leg due to that boot, by exactly 1 point per enchantment level, regardless of config.

So this means that the effect of the enchantment is not so noticeable, especially in comparison to simply training your kicking skills and leg strength. You could say the enchantment acts like a kind of fine-tuning, which is the idea I think. The key to optimizing kicking is down to these factors (in no particular order):
- Leg Strength
- Weapon skill category training, specifically improving your "Level"
- Changing the boot material into something stronger and heavier
- Being born with higher base unarmed strength (it's always 150)
- Increasing your boot enchantment

My earlier research mistakes gave me the idea to allow the added damage to exponentiate by adding the enchantment of a boots of kicking to the leg strength attribute in the damage caculation.

What I can do is replace in bodypart.cpp:

  double Base = sqrt(5e-5 * WeaponStrength);

  if(Boot)
    Base += Boot->GetDamageBonus();

  KickDamage = Base * sqrt(1e-7 * GetAttribute(LEG_STRENGTH)) * GetHumanoidMaster()->GetCWeaponSkill(KICK)->GetBonus();

The following:

  double Base = sqrt(5e-5 * WeaponStrength);
	double BootOfKickingBonus = 0;

  if(Boot)
  {
    Base += Boot->GetDamageBonus();
		BootOfKickingBonus += ((Boot->GetConfig() == BOOT_OF_KICKING) && (Boot->GetDamageBonus() > 0)) ? (Boot->GetDamageBonus()) : 0;
  }

  KickDamage = Base * sqrt(1e-7 * (GetAttribute(LEG_STRENGTH) + BootOfKickingBonus)) * GetHumanoidMaster()->GetCWeaponSkill(KICK)->GetBonus();

Which should give the player a bigger boost toward the end. I don't know how this will affect the game balance. Negatively enchanted boots give a linear negative contribution for all types of boots otherwise there would be a crash. All other boots provide a linear gain in added damage. Feast your eyes on the figure below.

EDIT: I was right the first time, GetAttribute includes leg strength bonus by default... sigh.

Ok I agree.


I've read the list and I like everything you mentioned so just put it on the main branch. It is all stuff the devs left us, so it's a good starting point.

Can I work on the boots?

Could probably add a NetHack option to ivanconfig. At the moment it's a true/false question which is susequently and succinctly handled by game::GetMoveCommandKey() in game.cpp

We could get the user to scroll through a list of pre-cooked key bindings (NetHack, alternative...).
The other way would be to make it so the player can change their preferences for what keys they want to use. Offers a lot more flexibility, but a good way to break the game unless a function is created that checks the validity of the key binding options at the time of selection.

Does anyone have a spec for what the key bindings should be? Like a map from IVAN to NetHack?

There's something in CLIVAN that stops you from teleporting into a room if this device is present. I think it causes an explosion as well.

Funny, I'd never really noticed (though I never really played seriously with boots of kicking).

It begs the question, how to fix this?

Don't feel sad, I practically live just for those moments.

Yeah interesting... I guess it makes sense in a way, seeing as Sophos is L-. I suppose by that logic praying to f.ex. Loricatus yields a negative effect from Atavus upwards and from Infuscor downwards, with L and C type gods remaining with zero effect?

What happens if you read through all the books in order from L++ to C-- in one sitting?