Setting skill ranges - a visual aid

[bonebox 36]

First off the following is based on the assumption that Alk uses standard pythag on the ingame coordinates for the character and mobs to figure distance for skills. Tell me if that's not the case Alk because all this will be bullshit and I'll rework it!

Second been able to figure this thanks to the whizzkid Immo who's now a memory reading scripter and has ingame coords in his current dev version of EB Tools that he kindly let me play with (cheers dude you's a star man!)

So the ingame coord system. Is a bit weird. It's both a perspective and the base frame is rotated, you can see it in the image below. The x and y run inline with the floor tiles:



In this screenshot my characters world coordinates are x:8141 y:14250. If I walk to the top left screen edge they become x:8087 y:15467. Pythag gives a distance of 1216. Screen edge middle bottom gives 450. The main variations on that are in the next image:



As you can see it's almost twice the range to the top of the screen edge than the bottom which means a range is not visually centred on the character, it's also not an ellipse. You can see the effects of perspective on the set of greeny yellow tiles the character is standing on, rather than being a diamond it's kind of distended towards the bottom. I've run the measurements through an image editor and plotted (roughly) the boundary this would give for a skill range of 450:



Notice it's not a circle or perfect ellipse and also not vertically centered. But it's more or less right, if pythag on world coords is what the bot does.

And for setting skills here's a 200 incremental scale:



It's actually explained something to me. I was wondering why my curses seemed to cast sometimes when I'd expect them to and not others. The pattern I failed to notice was they weren't casting as expected when mobs were approaching from above but were if they came from below. If they enter the screen from one of the top corners they are 1200 away, if they come from one of the bottom corners they're 650 - a big difference and not very intuitive in a visual sense.

And for the noobs looking for a simple answer to give a single skill good coverage over the visble screen 700-800 will do it

Edited May 7, 2014 by bonebox

[zeMagic 7]

If any of this info comes as a surprise for anyone (the coords), they should get back their money from the (not so) fancy school they attended

 

Jokes aside, very nice explanation nontheless! I think some people will benefit from this

[bonebox 36]

lol Ze yes agree the maths is trivial But it's more that it's not intuitive, I think maybe because the game is mostly fixed in it's viewing angle (I always have it at min zoom) it looks more like an isometric 3d game and it's easy to forget it's a full 3d environment it looks so flat. It was a surprise to me the extent of the boundary distortion and range variation to screen edges when I actually ran through it (and I'm a painfully expensively educated astrophysicist as my student loans still testify(!), you would think coordinate frames should be second nature to me! ) Maybe because I'd stupidly not really thought about it properly before, just knew it was about 700 to horizontal screen edge and based skills on that.

 

Hope it helps some though, no matter how intuitive you are there's no display ingame that gives an easy handle on distances and without thinking it through I think it's easy to assume a given range would be visually centred on your character. Hope i didn't give the impression of preaching on this, just did it for myself and thought it a worthwhile share mostly for the noobs!

Edited May 6, 2014 by bonebox

[zeMagic 7]

If you have ever designed a game that runs on a 3d grid like PoE, it wouldn't come as a surprise

It comes with certain challenges of course, but it makes sense

[kokosoida 21]

https://exiled-bot.net/community/index.php/topic/475-tool-skill-radius/

[bonebox 36]

Nice find kokosoida, not seen that! Not quite right though as it's treating the range as visually circular, only true if the view direction was perpendicular to the xy plane. That's part of my point, some people naturally assume that the range is visually symmetrical all around the character, it isn't, and it's not vertically centered either.

 

And the reason I think that's important to be aware of is using that tool for example you might set a skill range of 800 and think you've got the visible screen covered, then wonder why it doesn't seem to be working sometimes and perhaps not notice, like I didn't, that was happening in the upper corners where there are areas outside that range

Edited May 6, 2014 by bonebox