Practice points gain output

[Gilrond]

Can you please modify the system message for practice points gain from "some practice points" to the exact amount? It shouldn't be a major change, and it will help players to better understand practice logic and choose optimal paths for training. Especially with all the latest changes (which are far from final as can be expected) it will be very helpful.

[bilbous]

It would also be nice to see total needed, say at the end of the bar, or a countdown number on the bar itself that decreases with each reward.

[Bonifarzia]

http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/flyspray/index.php?do=details&task_id=5500
Still has my vote.

It would also be nice to see total needed, say at the end of the bar

Mhm, Gilronds request looks less spoilerish, and much more needed.

[LigH]

It should possibly still be tracked in the bar graphs in the "Stats & Skills" window?

[bilbous]

Can you not already use the skill partial buy slider to determine this amount, albeit with some difficulty? How is it a spoiler to see your cumulative progress?

I think part of the problem with the bar graphs is that depending on the amount of practice you need you may not see the bar move very often despite knowing full well that you should be progressing. It is nigh on impossible to see if there is a progression bug preventing you from getting all the practice you should be.

The reason for having both the messages be more explicit and the bar countdown is because they may be two different algorithms that could be disconnected. Just because there is a method that determines the practice gained properly from an action doesn't mean it necessarily passes it properly to the method that tracks total gain for the character. Of course it is entirely possible that the code doesn't work this way and I am talking though my hat again.

I am only suggesting that bugs can appear in places you least suspect and that more information is better than less. Of course more code introduces more capacity for bugs so it is a conundrum

[Gilrond]

I don't really see anything "spoiler" like in providing total amount of practice needed for the next level. You can find out needed amount of progression points, so why not practice as well. But having the explicit message with points gained for some action is the minimal convenience that is lacking now.

Purely using visual progress bar is not useful as Bilbous pointed out, since it often can take you many actions until you'll see some movement in that progress bar, and you still have no idea how useful or helpful those actions were. The worst example was the case when magic rules were being updated, and practice was set to very slow pace after the first update. One had to cast some spell more than 30 times to see the progress. It was easy to assume something was simply bugged and broken, while seeing actual practice gain and total amount needed could right away point out the problem (that progress pace was set to extremely slow), and help report the issue and save developers and users unneeded frustration.

[Aiwendil]

Maybe it's too much of a spoiler if people could actually see how much less training they need after training some intelligence...or equipping +INT weapons. Or if they can find out which of the mental stats has the most positive effect on training.

But nice to see that the engine finally seems to support giving out more than one practice point at a time.

[Gilrond]

Why worry about "spoilers" here? Why not with progression points, which are affected by stats and you can see the difference? I really don't get it.

[Aiwendil]

Where was that sarcasm-mark thread?...I really need one it seems. I thought me posting in a thread about training is enough of a give-away that it's not meant as a serious post.

So..you expect something serious about boring traning? Okay...the client has already all infos needed to display number-statistics for training. So all you have to do is write a few lines of code to display them. Really not that hard...and for sure easier..and more likely to be successful than asking here in the forums for such a feature.

[Gilrond]

Yes, I agree. I tried to do some of those help tweaks already. If I only could make it compile / run every time after resolving all dependencies (and figuring out which ones are really needed) - would be even better I kind of got tired of fighting with unresolved runtime deps after following building instructions carefully for the static build.

But besides the point that it's doable with some code tweaks, not everyone can benefit from it, since not everyone is going to have fun with building it from source (and I suspect it's a majority). So for them at least, it's useful to have this information in the standard client.

[Aiwendil]

Okay...after this post I will feel very dirty.
But...despite some differences I had with some specific devs in the past it was never a problem for me to get any "reasonable" patch of me included in the PS code, even during the time I was banned (Okay, not anymore at least. The fights for easier player patch submission were fought years ago here in the forums. Nowadays I can do nothing but compliment the PS devs on their "openness" to patches). Just make sure you follow the PS coding guidelines, comment your code excessively and do something that is actually useful (And as mentioned devs have a slightly different view on what is useful than I do there is a good chance they won't see training improvements as a complete waste of time as I do )

So..once you made a svn patch (yeah...they kind of disliked my first simple diff-patches and prefer "svn diff" patches) just post it in the bugtracker then go to #planshift-build and poke a dev about it. Worked for me most of the time at least.

[Gilrond]

Good idea. I'll try experimenting with builds more, until they'll actually run. Finding help on building on the IRC didn't prove helpful though. Unless there are some specific times for that.

[Aiwendil]

If you build on linux feel free to poke me in IRC...usually not much of a problem to compile the client there.

If you are on windows on the other hand...I feel a bit sorry for you. And probably not much I coud do to help you there...looks like compiling there is really a bit more difficult.

If you are on a mac...give up. No...that's no trolling, but really just a suggestion to keep you from going insane.

In general the compiling guide is pretty helpful..just make sure you choose a "developer"-version at the top.

[Gilrond]

Thanks for offering help. I'll be building it on Debian testing, and if something will break badly I'll try the IRC