Anyone have the damage parameters down to a science??

[Holy_Diver]

When it comes to adjusting bells and whistles, I prefer to approach matters from a more deterministic angle... but so far my piddling with this side of SoM has felt more like an art form than anything I can pin down. And this scares me, because I know I can't do an entire game this way.

For something like exp, it's easy. Give the simplest monster one exp, and all others are a multiple of that.

But what does one damage mean? Is it linear? Ultimately, all such systems have mathematical formulas, which are usually very ham handed at that. Are we even close to defining SoM's behavior formulaically? Has anyone done such required experiments?

At the least, I'd like to take this moment to file a formal application for any and all advice from those in the trenches

[dmpdesign]

This is a feature I havent toyed with much yet.

With DD, I have simply created all my maps, then all my events and populated dummy enemies where they will exist when im done.

The last thing I plan on doing is making them intelligent and figuring out how to balance their abilities with the expected player levels and gear when they are encountered.

[Holy_Diver]

You know, it would be nice if people could specialize in this. One odd thing about SoM I've noticed however, is the setup seems like no thought went into making the toolset team friendly. As it is, it would be virtually impossible to really designate roles to team members. Well, other than the stuff you wouldn't normally use SoM to do anyway.

Even if you decided to stop working on a map, and hand it off to a monster setup guy. The monster guy would have to be trusted not to muss up the map etc... and basically everything would become very stifled in general by the constant lockdowns.

[Holy_Diver]

Btw, if you were really serious about unraveling these numbers. The best strategy would probably be to use the player as a punching bag. Because at least you can see the players hp changes. Of course that assumes damage works the same both ways. The only other recourse would be to setup monsters with 1, 2, 3, 4hp, and so on... and try to extrapolate from there.

PS: If we ever do manage a perfect simulation, we'll have to figure out these numbers

[dmpdesign]

I am willing to setup a project file specifically to test this stuff....when im done with my game :)

I figure I can create a map with enemies of varying (in a pattern though) strength and see how they damage a player with 999 hp but no defense.

So in one map you could have an enemy with all 1s, one with only attack stats, one with only magic damage etc and see what happens to a defenseless character.

[Holy_Diver]

I seriously think the wisest route would be to do it before you finish your game.... it might seem like an investment. But really you might finish your game much sooner if you can really get a grasp of what the numbers mean.

[Holy_Diver]

I think I've been fortunate in just realizing none of my equip parameters should exceed 9! This is because I hexedited the exe file, so that the stat names are all five characters long. So that only leaves me 1 digit including a separator space (stats are: Sharp Broad Light Flame Earth Winds Water Shade)

I pretty much hexedited everything patch wise. You will see when I prepare my first test release.

I've been keeping all the numbers as small as possible so far, so I really like the idea of constraining equip stats to 1 digit. It definitely eliminates a lot of variables, in that I pretty much know where all the equipment will be stated at (it's not that hard when you only get 10 values to work with)

And really that's all I need to give the player the experience I want, and it will be easy for the player to compare equip stats.

To further put things in perspective, I'm using the multi-slot armor sets. So even the 4 slot armor can only have a maximum of 9 to it's stats. So any complete set that is less that those armors in a stat must add up to a total that is less than 9 (for all pieces in the set)

So far I pretty well like the way things feel. I might like to adjust the level up parameters manually some day, but what I have settled on feels pretty good. I don't mind the scale of the stat progression. So all I have to worry about is the monsters for now.

Hopefully strength amplifies attack power (rather than just adding to it linearly) otherwise this will become a very arcade game (my project) ...it is already very arcade like, in that you start with the best equip, and most equip is simply balanced against it's specialization. Though there are about 3 tiers of swords when it comes to light/shade damage.

^edited: I guess strength would have to be a multiplier because of the elemental aspects of the weapons (I'm too accustomed to games where the attack affinity is just a modifier)

I'm following your suggestion that the four elements are basically natural magic, and the white/black are unnatural (not addressable by the natural universe of man) ...so it is that pretty much all armor has defense against the elements, but only special armor can defend again white/black forces. Man forged weapons do not do elemental damage however.

[dmpdesign]

I would like to do Dark instead of Holy when I finish my game, my question is do you modify only the runtime .exe that is created when you finish the game or are you modifying something in SOM itself to get the 'shade' name to appear.

[Hguols]

Just edit the text in the GAME.EXE

....you'll still be dealing with "light/holy" stats with the original light/holy names in the parameters of SoM, but by editing the GAME.EXE, your players will never know the difference.

[Holy_Diver]

You might as well hexedit som_db.exe as well.

^Speaking of which. I've been playtesting my game from the main menu item lately (because it let's me save my game) ...but whenever I change to the second map (from the natural exit point) som_db.exe crashes. I kinda wish when testing that way the debug character setup would not be used, but anyway.... if I make the game start on the second map, no crashing when I walk between those levels.

Any thoughts?

PS: However the numbers work, they don't seem to be linear... which is kind of disappointing I'm afraid. I don't know if the weapon stats are linear, but the monster attack stats definitely don't seem to be. Ie. if you have a single attack set to 8 damage and a multi-attack set to 16, the multi-attack seems to do a lot more damage than double the normal attack.