Better Weapon Info test

[6742385d2fde1voodoo47]

it still kind of gets lost between (or rather, below) all the other sidebar buttons. maybe would stand out more with an exclamation mark - not so smooth looking, but more of a chance people would notice.

[6742385d2fef9voodoo47]

anyway, I'm guessing the string file is done for the foreseeable future, so I think I'll update the CZ translation this weekend.

unless it isn't.

[6742385d300c7ZylonBane]

Yes, I can't think of anything else that needs to be added. Now you get to test the localization test mode.

Maybe I'll just turn the buttons into giant + and - signs.

[6742385d3029bvoodoo47]

whatever sign you think will make the button scream hey I'm important, click me NOW the most.

yeah, I've already tested it pretty thoroughly, and everything works fine, I had to do some extra adjustments to avoid weirdness and confusion (that modification level vs modifications change you already commented on), but the result is more than tolerable.

oh, is that modify requirement not changing after the first mod level issue fixed? yes, I see it is. very good.


one thing I forgot to mention - does durability correspond to the gun condition? if so, then I'm quite sure it's not working right (my laspistol cond 7 has durability of 99.5%, shotgun cond 9 has 99%).

[6742385d30626ZylonBane]

whatever sign you think will make the button scream hey I'm important, click me NOW the most.

Why the hell would I want that? It's NOT a "click me NOW" button. It's a "click me if you want to view more optional information" button.

does durability correspond to the gun condition?

If durability meant condition, it would say "Condition". Durability means exactly that: How durable the weapon is. A weapon with high durability will degrade slowly. A weapon with low durability will degrade quickly. This is explained in the readme.

The value displayed for Durability is 100.0 - Reliability->Degrade Rate (%). So Durability: 99% means the weapon has a Degrade Rate of 1, and will degrade by 1% every shot.

Sure, I could just display a "Degradation/shot" stat, but that would be excessively gamey, IMHO.

[6742385d3078cvoodoo47]

that was an exaggeration. the point is to make it not as easy to miss, if possible. guess plus/minus would do ok.

ah yes, the readme I didn't read yet. well, it's been a long day.

[6742385d30c1csarge945]

If durability meant condition, it would say "Condition". Durability means exactly that: How durable the weapon is. A weapon with high durability will degrade slowly. A weapon with low durability will degrade quickly. This is explained in the readme.

The value displayed for Durability is 100.0 - Reliability->Degrade Rate (%). So Durability: 99% means the weapon has a Degrade Rate of 1, and will degrade by 1% every shot.

Like it or not, in literally every other game that exists with item degredation, "durability" means the items current health.

You may disagree with this definition, but you have to follow established standards (even if they suck) or you will only confuse your audience.

I expect a deluge of bug reports from players saying "My weapon is broken but the durability value still says 99%!"

I would just use "Degredation Rate" and not display Durability at all.

[6742385d30fc1ZylonBane]

Like it or not, in literally every other game that exists with item degredation, "durability" means the items current health.

Quit your bullshit.

Anyway, that stat was originally labeled "Reliability", but you came up with a bonkers misinterpretation of what that word means, so Durability it is!

I would just use "Degredation Rate" and not display Durability at all.

Well let's open this up to the mob then shall we? Would y'all prefer the somewhat diegetic "Durability", or the on-the-nose "Degradation/shot", baring to the world SS2's simplistic abstraction of what would in reality be a complex electro-mechanical processs?

[6742385d312edsarge945]

Nice job deliberately misinterpreting the point.

I mean, yeah, technically not every single videogame that exists calls it Durability. But that's not the point I was making.

Maybe you'll understand the point if I spell it out slowly.

DURABILITY ALREADY EXISTS AS A CONCEPT IN COUNTLESS VIDEOGAMES WITH A SPECIFIC DEFINITION. The vast majority of people will have played at least one game where "Durability" means a very specific thing. You cannot have Durability with a completely different definition and expect people to understand.

https://www.giantbomb.com/durability/3015-2549/

Even if you can provide a handful of examples where it's called "Condition" or some bullshit, many, many more games call it Durability. Durability and Condition are used interchangeably but they mean the same thing everywhere. Except here.

Sometimes I feel like you're being intentionally dense/thick/argumentative. There's more to life than arguing with strangers on the internet. Maybe instead of "Proving people wrong" (which, uuh, a handful of cherry picked examples does not) you should actually understand the points people make?

I swear some people are allergic to valid criticism...

Whatever. It's your mod. Make it as obtuse as you want. I don't care anymore. I'm not the one who's going to be fielding the bug reports when Durability doesn't work the way everyone expects it to.
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[6742385d315aaZylonBane]

You cannot have Durability with a completely different definition and expect people to understand.

Oh but I can, because the definition I'm using is WHAT THE WORD ACTUALLY MEANS. Just because a bunch of semi-literate ESL game developers decided to use "durability" to mean "condition" doesn't make anyone beholden to that. Durability means "the ability to withstand wear, pressure, or damage". It does NOT mean how damaged something currently is. That's as weird as if someone decided to call hit points "endurance".

You seem strangely defensive of this objectively wrong usage. It's like you don't trust System Shock 2 players to be even the slightest bit smarter than the average bear.

There aren't a lot of synonyms for durability either. Toughness? Sturdiness? Reliabi-- oops, can't use that one. Nah, not really any good substitutes.

Ah well, bikeshedding is a helluva drug. As is saying "literally every" when what you actually mean is "lots".

[6742385d316b1voodoo47]

and I'm actually pondering about that one, CZ only has something that is usually used to determine how much a bag of milk is going to last before it spoils, and I don't want to get descriptive here if I can help it.

[6742385d31947sarge945]

Oh but I can, because the definition I'm using is WHAT THE WORD ACTUALLY MEANS. Just because a bunch of semi-literate ESL game developers decided to use "durability" to mean "condition" doesn't make anyone beholden to that. Durability means "the ability to withstand wear, pressure, or damage". It does NOT mean how damaged something currently is. That's as weird as if someone decided to call hit points "endurance".

Pedantry will just result in more bug reports, but whatever. You're obviously set on this, and nothing will change your mind.

When being technically correct goes up against the practical reality of a situation, practical reality always wins.

[6742385d31b69ZylonBane]

Download updated.
- Slightly rearranged stats to put weapon damage at top of stat list. It's the most important thing after all.
- Added support for displaying modified fire rate. No vanilla modifications do this, so this is just for third-party mod support.
- Changed More Info mode toggle button from >/< to +/-.
- Changed Durability stat to Degrade/Shot. I figured I'd take my own advice from up-thread and not make players do math to figure out the degrade rate. Plus the tiny degrade rate values displayed will be great to throw in the face of people who insist guns break after ten shots. Downside, won't be able to mock people who don't understand what "durability" means. Oh well.

[6742385d31c59voodoo47]

ok, "degrade/shot" is much easier to translate than durability, nice. big plus button also looking good.

[6742385d31ea9ZylonBane]

Download updated again! Will this be the last time?!?
- General cleanup of stat line generation code to make them all more similarly structured.
- All changeable stats now check for stat on gun to have been modified even if the gun hasn't been "Modified". Should work for inspecting the anomalous guns in vanilla with nonstandard stats.
- Fixed mistake where the More Info display for energy weapon capacity was mashing the modification and Maintenance bonuses together into a single bonus line.
- Indented text lines that wrap now have a hanging indent.
- Moved the current ammo display to the top stat, getting rid of the awkward two-line "Loaded" section. This was slightly non-trivial, because it uses the super-short names displayed in the bottom-right gun MFD (the ammo names were often too long, wrapping to the next line). But these are internally the projectile names, not the ammo names. Worm-using and energy weapons don't have projectile names, and prism-using weapons display either the effect of the projectile or nothing. So some goofy logic was necessary to always display a sensible name.
- Due to the above change, some string changes have been made:
   Added "Ammo"
   Added "Worms"
   Removed "Loaded"

[6742385d3206aNameless Voice]

I just learned an interesting thing - the flat melee damage bonus from Strength ignores the armour and resistances of the target.
It also gets the bonus from organ research, but no other bonuses.

So if you hit a researched spider with a laser rapier that does 13 base damage, with lethal weapon, energy 6, and strength 6, you will deal: ((13 * 1.3 * 1.35 / 2) + 6) * 1.25 = 21.7 damage, rather than the 17.2 you might expect.
(Or the 20.8 you would get if the strength bonus was applied to the base damage before all calculations.)

[6742385d32152ZylonBane]

Behold the power of muscles.

[6742385d32378ZylonBane]

I figured I'd test this at least once in vanilla SS2, since y'know, I should have been doing that this entire time. And surprise, every gun is showing up as having no settings. Checked the gamesys, and it's because every gun has its Base Gun Description->Number of Settings set to ZERO. In SCP they're all properly set to two, and I'd been using that value. Apparently this was an ADaOB change, since there's no record of SCP changing it.

So how does the game cycle gun settings if there's no valid data in Number of Settings? Well, according to SHKGAME.CPP, in function ShockSettingToggle(), the logic when called is:
- If equipped item isn't a gun, do nothing.
- If it's a psi amp, cycle through available powers in the current tier (not sure I knew about that functionality).
- If it's a melee weapon, do nothing.
- Finally, if it's a gun:

Code: [Select]

   curmode = GunGetSetting(gun);
   GunSetSetting(gun,!curmode);Yeah, it just mindlessly toggles the setting between 0 and 1. This means all gun-type weapons MUST have two settings. No more, no less. Ugh.

[6742385d32467voodoo47]

I can get this fixed throughout the entire SS2 ecosystem if need be.

also at this point, whoever is loading mods without SCP deserves to have problems.

[6742385d32582ZylonBane]

It's a completely pointless "fix", because the engine doesn't even use the value. I just have to update my code to also not use it.

And I misspoke in my previous post. Turns out... you changed it. D'oh.

[6742385d32684voodoo47]

muahaha (I think the values got garbled when the gamesys got converted to ND, and the decision was to change them to that). also no public linking of the SCP dev section (removed link).

[6742385d327afZylonBane]

Also fun fact, I'd forgotten that SCP modifies the name strings for some ammo types to remove the stack count, so when running under vanilla I have to programmatically strip those out. E.g. something like "%d shotgun shells" gets transformed to "Shotgun shells".

[6742385d328aavoodoo47]

yeah, I had to take care of this in a slightly awkward manner when fixing the CZ translation.

[6742385d32a88ZylonBane]

Download updated. For real last time this time maybe????
- Swapped order of Requirements and Ammo Types sections so Requirements comes first, since it's somewhat dynamic, and Ammo Types comes last, since it's completely static.
- Fixed bug with weapon icon not disappearing when MFD closed first time when running in vanilla. No idea why vanilla would be any different in this regard.
- Fixed determining how many settings a gun has in vanilla. It's two. It's always two.
- Added automatic fixup of vanilla ammo stack names to not include the stack count.

Note that the string fix code attempts to ensure that the first letter of the ammo name is always capitalized. E.g. "%d pizza bagels" becomes "Pizza bagels". But this uses Squirrel's built-in .toupper() method, which I'm pretty sure operates only in the ASCII space. So if running with localized strings, and the first character becomes a lowercase letter with a character value >128, it will remain lowercase. The engine has no concept of character encodings, so there's no practical way to determine which extended characters are uppercase and lowercase and how they correspond to each other.