02-24-2004, 12:47 AM
I figure this is about the best forum here to post this.
The release of ATMA 5.04 is done and can be found on the official ATMA website at http://www.luminatrix.com/ATMA .
ATMA 5.04 introduces a few new features as well as bug fixes since 5.03:
BUG FIXES:
----------
1) Mercenary resist display has been fixed. ATMA was picking up the wrong entry in hirelings.txt especially for Expansion characters. This resulted in a wrong calculation for the mercenary resists.
2) IAS display for items with the IAS property (e.g Immortal King Stone Crusher) that have been socketed with IAS runes/jewels has been fixed. This was due to an error in the ATMA config files.
3) A bug in the loading code for player ears has been fixed. This occured when the name of the ear was of a certain length.
4) A stash allows you to drag/drop items from both the picture area as well as the tree list. A check is always made to ensure that the item being dragged into a stash is of the same version. However, this check was only done on the tree area and not the picture area which allowed one to drop 1.09 items into a 1.10 stash. If this happened, the stash is corrupt. This has now been fixed.
5) The display for jewels and charms now shows if they do not meet character level requirements.
6) There was a bug in the code that would sometimes cause the game to randomly delete an item especially if it was moved from an equipped slot into inventory. This was the infamous "disappearing item" bug and it was due to a flag not being reset on the item. This has now been fixed.
7) The background for the picture of an item in a stash is now colored to distinguish the quality of the item.
NEW FEATURE:
------------
ATMA 5.04 now includes a DropCalc which Thrugg and I (Hakai) have been working on. This calculator supports versions 1.07-1.10 and includes many features.
1) Full support for Diablo 1.07, 1.08, 1.09 and 1.10.
2) Correct scaling of creature mlvl and TC upgrade in Diablo 1.10 (Nightmare and Hell).
3) Sorting of results by name, probability or creature location.
4) Display of probabilities as fraction, percentage or odds.
5) Sorting of probabilities in ascending or descending order.
6) Ability to search by monster or by item
7) Full support for "players X" and character MF
8 ) Both item and monster search allow you to customize the parameters by which you choose to search
9) Changing either your MF or # of players requires the user to hit the "Search" button.
The DropCalc is provided "as-is" with a few caveats. The internal mechanics of the drop system is a very complicated one such that depending on certain "branch" points, the drop probabilites need to be computed differently. In mathematical lingo, a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) would need to be constructed to represent the drop sequence for each item. After doing an in-depth analysis of the drop tree, Thrugg and I came to the conclusion that all the other drop calculators out there are probably wrong. The problem is that depending on the path taken during a drop sequence, you can hit several branch points which will change the mechanism of the drop probability. Unfortunately, to properly calculate the final drop probability, you need to store the drop path for every contribution from a TC to every item it can drop. When this is done, you would need to compute your chances of the item being of a certain quality and then reconstruct the total probabilities for all items by going back up the tree and taking the number of picks at each level into account. What ATMA does right now is to compute the drop probability for any one possible drop of any creature. Trying to take the full number of drops into account will involve significantly more data storage and slow down the calculator by many factors. In the meantime, you as the user know that if Pindle has a 1:10000 chance of dropping item X on a given drop, he will have close to a 1:5000 of one per kill. Hence it is up to the user to correctly interprete the results especially when comparing two monsters (e.g Baal and Pindleskin) who have different drop mechanics.
Based on new info from Jarulf and Ruvanal, it has been discovered that Pindleskin and Threshsocket are not as "nerfed' as one would expect. The basic idea that Blizzard had to "nerf" Pindle and Threshsocket was to drastically reduce the odds of them dropping uniques and sets. In order to implement this, a new TC was created for them. Every TC has an associated bonus to the chances of unique/set/rare/magic items dropping and this is where Pindle and Thresh got hit hard.
Every TC is defined recursively in terms of "lower" TCs such that you need to traverse the drop tree to determine what item gets dropped. However, the game keeps a running check of the maximum bonuses. Because the TC that Pindleskin and Threshsocket drop from intersect paths with the TC that Snapchip and Frozenstein drop from, the Pindleskin TC gets it's bonuses upgraded to what Snapchip/Frozenstein would have. This means that Pindleskin drops exactly like those two while Threshsocket has a slightly worse chance than Pindle because his mlvl in Hell is 84 (this affects the chance for a given quality) as opposed to Pindleskin who is mlvl 86 in Hell.
The DropCalc is not a stand-alone app as it uses the same config and data files as ATMA. It makes no sense seperating them as you need to download everything anyway.
UPDATE:
-----------
I have just recently developed a new way of computing the probailities based on drop paths which does not add too much more to the original compute time. This method also takes into account the number of picks for a TC such that the final displayed drop chances are "per-kill" and not "per-drop" as I had it before. The new display will show the drop chances for the possible paths e.g for runes from Countess, there will be one entry from her regular drops and one from her Rune drop. I am still in the process of testing the numbers from this and will update when it is done.
--T
The release of ATMA 5.04 is done and can be found on the official ATMA website at http://www.luminatrix.com/ATMA .
ATMA 5.04 introduces a few new features as well as bug fixes since 5.03:
BUG FIXES:
----------
1) Mercenary resist display has been fixed. ATMA was picking up the wrong entry in hirelings.txt especially for Expansion characters. This resulted in a wrong calculation for the mercenary resists.
2) IAS display for items with the IAS property (e.g Immortal King Stone Crusher) that have been socketed with IAS runes/jewels has been fixed. This was due to an error in the ATMA config files.
3) A bug in the loading code for player ears has been fixed. This occured when the name of the ear was of a certain length.
4) A stash allows you to drag/drop items from both the picture area as well as the tree list. A check is always made to ensure that the item being dragged into a stash is of the same version. However, this check was only done on the tree area and not the picture area which allowed one to drop 1.09 items into a 1.10 stash. If this happened, the stash is corrupt. This has now been fixed.
5) The display for jewels and charms now shows if they do not meet character level requirements.
6) There was a bug in the code that would sometimes cause the game to randomly delete an item especially if it was moved from an equipped slot into inventory. This was the infamous "disappearing item" bug and it was due to a flag not being reset on the item. This has now been fixed.
7) The background for the picture of an item in a stash is now colored to distinguish the quality of the item.
NEW FEATURE:
------------
ATMA 5.04 now includes a DropCalc which Thrugg and I (Hakai) have been working on. This calculator supports versions 1.07-1.10 and includes many features.
1) Full support for Diablo 1.07, 1.08, 1.09 and 1.10.
2) Correct scaling of creature mlvl and TC upgrade in Diablo 1.10 (Nightmare and Hell).
3) Sorting of results by name, probability or creature location.
4) Display of probabilities as fraction, percentage or odds.
5) Sorting of probabilities in ascending or descending order.
6) Ability to search by monster or by item
7) Full support for "players X" and character MF
8 ) Both item and monster search allow you to customize the parameters by which you choose to search
9) Changing either your MF or # of players requires the user to hit the "Search" button.
The DropCalc is provided "as-is" with a few caveats. The internal mechanics of the drop system is a very complicated one such that depending on certain "branch" points, the drop probabilites need to be computed differently. In mathematical lingo, a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) would need to be constructed to represent the drop sequence for each item. After doing an in-depth analysis of the drop tree, Thrugg and I came to the conclusion that all the other drop calculators out there are probably wrong. The problem is that depending on the path taken during a drop sequence, you can hit several branch points which will change the mechanism of the drop probability. Unfortunately, to properly calculate the final drop probability, you need to store the drop path for every contribution from a TC to every item it can drop. When this is done, you would need to compute your chances of the item being of a certain quality and then reconstruct the total probabilities for all items by going back up the tree and taking the number of picks at each level into account. What ATMA does right now is to compute the drop probability for any one possible drop of any creature. Trying to take the full number of drops into account will involve significantly more data storage and slow down the calculator by many factors. In the meantime, you as the user know that if Pindle has a 1:10000 chance of dropping item X on a given drop, he will have close to a 1:5000 of one per kill. Hence it is up to the user to correctly interprete the results especially when comparing two monsters (e.g Baal and Pindleskin) who have different drop mechanics.
Based on new info from Jarulf and Ruvanal, it has been discovered that Pindleskin and Threshsocket are not as "nerfed' as one would expect. The basic idea that Blizzard had to "nerf" Pindle and Threshsocket was to drastically reduce the odds of them dropping uniques and sets. In order to implement this, a new TC was created for them. Every TC has an associated bonus to the chances of unique/set/rare/magic items dropping and this is where Pindle and Thresh got hit hard.
Every TC is defined recursively in terms of "lower" TCs such that you need to traverse the drop tree to determine what item gets dropped. However, the game keeps a running check of the maximum bonuses. Because the TC that Pindleskin and Threshsocket drop from intersect paths with the TC that Snapchip and Frozenstein drop from, the Pindleskin TC gets it's bonuses upgraded to what Snapchip/Frozenstein would have. This means that Pindleskin drops exactly like those two while Threshsocket has a slightly worse chance than Pindle because his mlvl in Hell is 84 (this affects the chance for a given quality) as opposed to Pindleskin who is mlvl 86 in Hell.
The DropCalc is not a stand-alone app as it uses the same config and data files as ATMA. It makes no sense seperating them as you need to download everything anyway.
UPDATE:
-----------
I have just recently developed a new way of computing the probailities based on drop paths which does not add too much more to the original compute time. This method also takes into account the number of picks for a TC such that the final displayed drop chances are "per-kill" and not "per-drop" as I had it before. The new display will show the drop chances for the possible paths e.g for runes from Countess, there will be one entry from her regular drops and one from her Rune drop. I am still in the process of testing the numbers from this and will update when it is done.
--T