Damage Calculation (always visible)

[Gambit]

I was thinking more tooltip-esque

[Lord Ork]

I don't know how my message got lost. I wrote it, but I suppose I closed it without sending. I'll brief my points.

Nearly all the solutions proposed seems to complicate the interface, in my opinion. The tooltip would be very annoying when it appears when you are not trying to bring it. Substituting the simple 4-2 60% by a set of probabilities is antikiss. Having the calcs of all attacks on a single windows seems the best solution of it.

But I don't feel this feature very necessary. For beginners, calcs are too much information, 4-2 60% is what they need to know right now. Expert players can make their own calculations mentally, so 4-2 60% seems to be enough for them. I think the rest of players can lose enough time clicking on the windows.

Just my two cents.

[deoxy]

'Costly'? How could that possibly matter for a pop-up with a human involved? Besides, how costly can it be? It's only a variation on a Poisson distribution. Is Wesnoth calculating every possible combination of hit or miss?

That's the point?

You're right though the trivial case is of course not costly. What I meant is that it can be costly. Think about slow, drain, berserk and the like on higher HP combatants.

To say nothing of the Survival Xtreme stuff, where you can end up with a berserk attack with dozens of swings and thousands of HP on both sides. In such games, you simply don't use the Damage Calculations anymore, as you don't want to waste several minutes on each attack...

Yes, for most attacks, it's trivial, but for some... ouchie. There's a reason it's in a button.

That said, I think there's probably some optimization opportunities in there, as even the really ridiculous cases shouldn't be that bad, mathematically speaking.

[Matthias1217]

I, for one, almost never use the damage calc button. Mostly because either I can figure it out in my head faster than reading the chart, or I don't really need the calculation. When your fighting an elvish Marksman against an Orcish Warlord, the obvious choice is the ranged attack. But there might somewhere be a case where you have almost equal attacks and damage and hitpoints, in those cases you can press the button to find the calculations.

And, as pointed out earlier, you could have an option to hold the right click to see the calc, But this would not only be antiKISS but it would also make it way more difficult to play this game on an older machine. Just about every new release of Wesnoth makes the game just a little bit slower on my CPU, and this would make it extremely slower. Even if you could turn it off somehow it would overly complicate the game for only a little advantage.

[melinath]

And, as pointed out earlier, you could have an option to hold the right click to see the calc, But this would not only be antiKISS but it would also make it way more difficult to play this game on an older machine. Just about every new release of Wesnoth makes the game just a little bit slower on my CPU, and this would make it extremely slower. Even if you could turn it off somehow it would overly complicate the game for only a little advantage.

Right clicking seems to me like a wonderful solution. I don't see how it would make a computer run any slower than having to click the "Damage calculation" button... whether or not you activate it, the amount of work for the cpu should be exactly the same for both methods. In addition, in terms of user interface (though not necessarily programming) a right click is fairly intuitive and also easier.

Present: move to weapon. click on weapon. move to damage calculation. click on damage calculation. move to "close damage calculation". click on "close damage calculation." <=3 moves, 3 clicks
Right-click activation: move to weapon, right-click on weapon. <= 1 move, 1 click. (Assuming that releasing the button closes the dialogue.)

I would love to have this option! Damage calculation would be 3x easier at least! And since it's not automatic, again, it shouldn't hog resources more than the button, right?

[Lord Ork]

Not a bad option, although Wesnoth should look after a coherency on the interface. That is, second button should bring similar results used on different situations. So, if we right-click on the attack and see damage calculation, right clicking should bring information used on other elements.

If no, and we assign a different meaning each time the button is used, the interface would be messy and the player would never intuit what will happen when he press.

[Matthias1217]

And since it's not automatic, again, it shouldn't hog resources more than the button, right?

I don't know too much about how much more the CPU would be used, but even as it is, my computer does not handle floating text very well. Now you could say you should have the right cpu for the game, but if I had a nicer computer I would play 1st person shooter games instead. The thing I liked about Wesnoth when I got it was the fact that my cpu could run it fairly well, and I thing we should keep it that way.

And also if it were just a right click, it would be very easy to accidentally click it. And then it would have a nice fade in effect that would look great on other computers, but it would take a second or two to load on my cpu. And another thing, I hardly use the button because that can take sometime to load.

I have no problem with adding it, but please make sure to add a turn off switch in the preferences menu.

[taemyr]

You're right though the trivial case is of course not costly. What I meant is that it can be costly. Think about slow, drain, berserk and the like on higher HP combatants.

Isn't this calculation done anyway when the AI chooses attack option?

[Soliton]

You're right though the trivial case is of course not costly. What I meant is that it can be costly. Think about slow, drain, berserk and the like on higher HP combatants.

Isn't this calculation done anyway when the AI chooses attack option?

Yeah, after taking a closer look lately it seems the weapon choosing is complicated enough nowadays that maybe all of the calculations necessary are already done anyway. If you check the damage calculations it still takes again a while though which means either the calculations are just not cached or they're different. If the first is true it should be easy to improve and we don't need to worry about performance otherwise the problem remains.

[ancestral]

One thing that Civilization IV does that I kind of like is when you have a unit selected, if you hold down the alt key and hover the cursor over an enemy unit, it will show you the combat odds with text in the bottom left corner.

Screenshot in Civ IV showing how combat odds are displayed:

If something like this were to be implemented, I'm not sure where I would draw that on the screen. I kind of like how everything that's not in play is in the sidebar or in a new window, so my inclination would be to put it in the sidebar, though I question whether it would look "clean."

[azaethral]

I can think of one incarnation of this idea which would be very useful, but which wouldn't clutter the UI much at all. It involves calculating just one number each for the attacker and defender: the chance to kill. Knowing your chance to score a kill and chance to get killed would come in handy, especially in those times when you're trying to decide whether to risk a suicide attack to try and take out a wounded unit.

For this idea, it wouldn't be necessary to pop up a whole window, just a simple tooltip on mouseover would be enough. Or maybe an additional line for each of the attack types in the attack window.

I'm not sure if the damage calculations are done this way now, but the kill calculation should take into account the fact that a critically wounded unit is less likely to score a kill against a counterattacking foe than a healthy version of the same unit.

[5dPZ]

I can think of one incarnation of this idea which would be very useful, but which wouldn't clutter the UI much at all. It involves calculating just one number each for the attacker and defender: the chance to kill.

I actually came to this thread to post the same idea. Instead, I can just quote it -Thanks for bring it up.

[Lord Ork]

-Ahem-

I find this idea quite annoying. It complicates the interface, and give too much info not requested. KISS should apply also to the interface, I think. Maybe it should better show a brief statistic like % of death of each opponent. If you need more, press the button.

In my first post in this thread. So I must agree.

[azaethral]

In my first post in this thread. So I must agree.

In my defense, I did skim the thread before posting. But I suppose I'm not perfect

[Lord Ork]

No problem. A good idea is a good idea, no matter who posts it