Invisibility is broken.
issueid=3742 06-30-2015 09:33 PM
Ancient Member
Number of reported issues by Blasphemous: 110
Invisibility is broken.

My DE Mindcrafter died in Ice Queen Domain, on the battlefield.
I had a cloak of invisibility on and never attacked any monsters there.
Fire creatures won the battle and I was walking around collecting items.
Then all of a sudden, a fire giant king next to me decided to swing at this particular spot in the air FIVE times:

Code:
You pick up 560 gold pieces.
The fire giant king hits you. You block the fire giant king. 
The fire giant king hits you. The fire giant king hits you. 
The fire giant king hits you. You die...
Explain to me please, how is that fair?
I was intrinsically lucky and wore ankh so it's not luck related.
An invisible char at full HP gets randomly hit 5 times by a creature that doesn't even see invisible things and gets killed.
It would have probably been more than 5 but I ran out of HP.
Something has to be done about this because that's not how invisibility is supposed to work.
At the very least, maximum number of attacks should be 1 even if the attacker could normally attack several times in a turn.
Otherwise, we have a situation when invisible char has a 1/8 (or so) chance to get insta-gibbed because... because fuck it, let's make invisibility useless and blur the line between monsters that see invis and those that don't.
After all, what's the difference when the mechanics works like this?
Issue Details
Issue Number 3742
Project ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery)
Category Windows 7
Status Unconfirmed
Priority 4
Affected Version ADOM r57
Fixed Version (none)
Milestone (none)
Users able to reproduce bug 4
Users unable to reproduce bug 1
Assigned Users (none)
Tags (none)




07-02-2015 01:50 AM
Senior Member
Quote Originally Posted by JellySlayer
PCs don't get multiple attacks, ever, unless they're dual-wielding. Instead, they get reductions to the energy that attacks take via weapon skill, class powers, etc., which kind of works out to the same thing. And in the event that the PC is dual-wielding, yes, both attacks will strike at an invisible monster.

That's probably because invisibility in monsters is very rare (and see invis intrinsic is rather common). If there were fairly common monsters that had intrinsic invisibility, you'd probably see this happen fairly frequently. Think about it this way: As a PC, you probably see 10000 monsters in a game, and if you were invisible for an entire game, you might see a monster randomly bumping into you like this a handful of times. OTOH, the player only sees maybe 2-3 invisible monsters in the game before getting -SeeI, so based on the same statistics, you'd expect to have to play ~3000 games before randomly stumbling into an invisible monster a comparable number of times.
Okay look, lets go over this again:

Five hits from a giant while invisible is a developmental oversight. In all likelihood, the default situation is that when an actor moves into a tile occupied by a hostile, their attack function is called or some sort of very similar procedure. It's the exact same thing that happens when the target is visible. ADOM does not differentiate here. It's an example of code that isn't very detailed. Very, very likely, nobody said 'hey, I think fire giant kings should attack invisible pc's 5x. Probably nobody thought of this case at all.

You want to know why the pc doesn't 'bump' into monsters? Because there is no way of determining whether the player has figured out that there is a monster there. So ADOM does the sane thing and just attack()s. With enemy actors, we can know when the pc has been detected vs when Brownian motion is occurring. It makes sense to take advantage of that. Pc's don't bump into monsters because of technical limitations (game can't read player's mind). We can't fix that. But we can fix monster behavior.

You aren't thinking of any of this from a game design perspective, you keep trying to rationalize monster behavior in a way that is totally unrealistic. The situation is what it is because of the limitations of the medium and because of oversight, in all likelihood.

Quote Originally Posted by JellySlayer
Yeah, that means that 87.5% of the time a hostile monster is next to you, it won't hit you. That's a pretty powerful intrinsic. Back in the 1.1.1 is was the most powerful intrinsic by a wide margin, not only because you could bolt any monster lacking SeeI to death with impunity, but also because ~90% of the game's monsters you could simply walk right passed without ever having to engage them?
It is a powerful intrinsic, because that is what you would expect from being invisible. Teleportation is a powerful intrinsic too. On demand, it is much more powerful than invisibility. You don't even have to try to sneak past monsters, you can just teleport around them. And nobody has a problem with that because it's supposed to be powerful.

Quote Originally Posted by JellySlayer
How about we also greatly increase the rarity and danger level of potions/cloaks/spellbooks/rings of invisibility to reflect the strength of the intrinsic then?
Personally, I think that is a fine solution.

Quote Originally Posted by JellySlayer
On the realism point, just because the monster doesn't see you doesn't mean that it can't detect you. If you're wearing heavy metal armor and carrying two tonnes of gear in your backpack, then the monster can probably hear you even if it can't see you. Animals can probably smell you.
Look, do we really want to go down the 'realism' road? The 'animals' issue, where they can smell and hear you, isn't even related to the situation in question. If you want some sort of special case for bats and cats, fine, I think bats are already a special case, though. You're carrying heavy armor, but you also have superhuman strength and dexterity. That's why the whole realism argument is pointless. You are dealing with situations that would never come up in reality. I can't believe you are even trying to pair 'carrying tonnes of armor' (sometimes almost literally) and 'realism'.

Face it: you bring up realism when it helps your point, and that's the only reason you bring it up.

07-02-2015 01:11 PM
Ancient Member
Quote Originally Posted by JellySlayer
How about we also greatly increase the rarity and danger level of potions/cloaks/spellbooks/rings of invisibility to reflect the strength of the intrinsic then?
I'm all for that solution if it means that invisibility works like in 1.1.1.
Problem is, I have already suggested this in a separate RFE quite a while ago and it was rejected or at least the form I suggested was rejected.
Perhaps someone else would have more luck.

Quote Originally Posted by JellySlayer
On the realism point, just because the monster doesn't see you doesn't mean that it can't detect you. If you're wearing heavy metal armor and carrying two tonnes of gear in your backpack, then the monster can probably hear you even if it can't see you. Animals can probably smell you.
I realize this but the game doesn't imply that in any way.
I can give you an example of perma-invisible assassin, running with <500 stones of equipment (basically just the things he wears), no metal items, Dx at 50, stealth at 100, stealthy talent etc.
Arguably that char should reduce the number of features that give him away to monsters to a minimum.
In practice - he's no different from an overblown wizard casting invisibility, carrying 50k stones of items with SoA active and a bunch of eternium items worn.
Adom doesn't differentiate between the two cases.

Quote Originally Posted by JellySlayer
Energy consumption? No. Food consumption, yes, but food is a weak effect. Increasing the energy consumption of actions while invisible--say, making it act like stiff muscles--would be a good way to balance it though.
Yes I meant food consumption, my mistake.

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