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IanKett
22-11-12, 13:08
It has already been stated that people would like to see a change with chat options and allow us to use /global /local to change chat but my suggestion is that we have tabs which will have been seen in other games to seperate channels and one specific channel would be great to see would be a combat log that actively updates us on what damage was caused, by what/who, what type of damage (fire, xray, energy, force) and what amount of damage.

ratakresch
22-11-12, 14:51
you can read out the logfiles for dmg report

IanKett
22-11-12, 18:02
you can read out the logfiles for dmg report

I'm talking about an ingame visual log right there to see as you engage in combat.

ratakresch
22-11-12, 20:04
were is the fun??? then we would rage like in WOW.... "oh my got he did 104040k dmg on m2" "i did dmg like 50430k" ... bla

not a good idea in my opinion

IanKett
22-11-12, 20:14
were is the fun??? then we would rage like in WOW.... "oh my got he did 104040k dmg on m2" "i did dmg like 50430k" ... bla

not a good idea in my opinion

I know that everyone seems to enjoy comparing ideal features with World of Warcraft but from your logic we should also remove seeing other peoples damage on enemies because you can compare damage that was easily too.

Ontop of the logic you defined, I never said see other players damage.

This is proposed so that players can identify how their resists work against what mobs and how their weapons work against what mobs.

ratakresch
22-11-12, 20:35
and i repeat myself. let's rework the dmg log files.

IanKett
22-11-12, 20:43
and i repeat myself. let's rework the dmg log files.

Rework is different from your previous, "you can read out the logfiles for dmg report".

Are the damagelogs created as a seperate file outside the game? Are they always active or do you need to do something like change a ini file?

ratakresch
22-11-12, 21:45
aktivate it

borl
23-11-12, 10:58
Yes, lets eschew the convenience of a simple UI element being added in order to mess about with log files like it's the previous century.

Ascension
23-11-12, 12:37
Great idea, nothing like having a conversation while killing multiple mobs and all your chat is flooded with notification of money earned from your kills

IanKett
23-11-12, 12:48
Great idea, nothing like having a conversation while killing multiple mobs and all your chat is flooded with notification of money earned from your kills

It's why I suggested adding a seperate tab with the purpose as a combat log, did you even read the original post?

Ascension
23-11-12, 13:04
It's why I suggested adding a seperate tab with the purpose as a combat log, did you even read the original post?

I did yes, I was agreeing with your post whole heartidly..?

IanKett
23-11-12, 13:05
I did yes, I was agreeing with your post whole heartidly..?

That's my fault, I guess I'm conditioned to bad posts that I expect people to argue stuff. Thank you for agreeing, It would be nice to put some ideal feature forwards for the game but people seem to NEED neocron to remain unique including the ancient systems.

CMaster
23-11-12, 13:45
I think a combat log would be far, far too busy to be of any use in Neocron. Imagine how fast it would scroll by when a couple of spiderbots were shooting you for example, even worse if you had a gat of your own, or you were AoEing say, a spider pit.
I'd also worry that it (even further) busts the illusion that Neocron is an FPS game. It isn't really of course, but the veil that makes out that it is does add something to the experience.
That said, no major objection (or especially strong support) for being able to split off the information part of chat from the remainder of the game.

As for existing damage logs:
add the line "ENABLELOGS = TRUE" to neocron.ini
They're rather complicated, but quite complete. You can use a bunch of tools to help interpret them as they are generated, including a Neocron-specific tool known as cronalyser

borl
23-11-12, 14:47
I think a combat log would be far, far too busy to be of any use in Neocron.

This is nothing some intelligent design couldn't render a non-issue. Wow is far 'busier' and the combat log is still of use in that.

There is a potential issue that this does enable though. It'd be quite an advantage in some situations to be able to stealth and switch armor types to mitigate whatever incoming damage your current opponent is dealing. Obviously the attacker could counter by switching ammo / weapon, if that option was available to them, but I'd be interested to know if this sort of gameplay is something the devs would want to encourage...

CMaster
23-11-12, 15:07
This is nothing some intelligent design couldn't render a non-issue. Wow is far 'busier' and the combat log is still of use in that.

I could be wrong, but I don't think automatic weapons are especially common in WoW? Being shot at by say, two spider bots, or stacking barrels up on chaos cave mobs would result in a combat log that is exceptionally fast scrolling, to the point where it wouldn't be useful to the player. There's also questions to be asked about which information to display - if you turn on the current logs, you'll see about 6 lines of info per hit (depending on a few factors). Not all of those would be desirable in a live update, but you have to pick which. These issues could all be worked around, but I think it would end up as a misleading/unhelpful abstraction by the time you'd actually got to the point where the logs were actually readable.

borl
23-11-12, 15:26
This is still pretty simple to solve with sensible data consolidation and presentation.

Edit: Although the more I think about this, the worse the ratio of effort to benefit seems, what with all the changes the client would need.

CMaster
23-11-12, 15:40
This is still pretty simple to solve with sensible data consolidation and presentation.

Not really simple. Rather fraught even.
Yes, you can consolidate the data.
But the more you do so, the more abstracted it is from what's going on and the less actually useful it is.
So, the rapid-fire weapons issue can be smoothed over, because all rapid-fire weapons are burst-based. So you could report the total damage for the burst, rather than the individual hits. However, what if you also wanted to provide some information about damage resistance - would you use an average value? The combination of resistances changing over time (and they almost all do) and the fact that not all shots in a burst hit mean that the damage from each burst is going to seem oddly inconsistent. What about when each hit applies a DoT effect? Report that for each hit, or just DoTs in a burst? What about DoTs over all? Report for each "tick", or just a summary at the end of each DoT? (Either way could get a mess when dealing with a heal + stacks from something like the AK). The AoE issue - summarize by just reporting total damage done - almost a minimum of useful info there - but imagine the number of reports you'd have to deal with otherwise. It's quite feasible for an APU to stack up 4 or 5 barells, each damaging 10 targets every "tick" - and some of those attacks may then lead to multiple targets DoTed.

Again, you can compress, consolidate, discard elements of this to get it to something that's actually processable by humans rather than moving at silly speed. But at the expense often of either removing any information that would actually be useful, or giving players rather misleading impressions about what's going on. My call on it is to say "stick with floaty damage numbers".

borl
23-11-12, 15:52
Apologies for the short reply, I'll expand on this later but I need to rush out. You are focussing on the consolidation aspect, and the idea of a scrolling log. Consider presentation also, maybe have a look at WoW addons such as Recount. Although this is why I made the point about adding complexity to the client. The main issue here is that a simple solution would be needed in order to be easy to implement in the client... but a more complex solution (in terms of modification to the client) would be required to actually be of any use. I flat out disagree that a solution is impossible though.

CMaster
23-11-12, 16:03
Apologies for the short reply, I'll expand on this later but I need to rush out. You are focussing on the consolidation aspect, and the idea of a scrolling log. Consider presentation also, maybe have a look at WoW addons such as Recount. Although this is why I made the point about adding complexity to the client. The main issue here is that a simple solution would be needed in order to be easy to implement in the client... but a more complex solution (in terms of modification to the client) would be required to actually be of any use. I flat out disagree that a solution is impossible though.

Yeah. I guess with filters, graphs, etc you could do a lot with it. Although it starts to feel more like doing statistical analysis than playing a pew-pew game. Course, it's then not easy to implement something like that well in the really clunky interface that is the Neocron RPOS.

Maybe a nice, long-term goal for Neocron devs (once worst of bug fixes and balancing is out of the way) would be a major interface overhaul, the target being more of an API that player-developed interfaces can connect to, than any "one true interface" itself.

borl
23-11-12, 16:34
Lets take a stab in the direction of as simple as possible to implement, just to see where we end up.

Uh... F13 now brings up a rpos menu item for simple stats gathered by the client locally. An item description style box which shows how much total (session/lifetime?) damage your character has taken, broken down by damage types. Nothing fancy. This would be good enough to help anyone work out what damage types they were taking from different mobs in PvE at a glance. I can't say I wouldn't use it from time to time.

borl
23-11-12, 16:36
I can't say I didn't have NC3 in mind more than NC2 CMaster :p