Re: [Crawl-ref-discuss] stepdown_value

[David P. <dp...@mi...>]

On Wed, 25 Jan 2012, Lorenzo Lami wrote:

I shouldn't really be answering this, but I don't like you getting no 
answer at all.

> Having a look at the source code, I noticed that the function found in
> stuff.cc
>
> stepdown_value(int base_value, int stepping, int first_step, int
> last_step, int ceiling_value)
>
> was commented like this:
> // I hope this permits easier/more experimentation with value stepdowns
> // in the code.  It really needs to be rewritten to accept arbitrary
> // (unevenly spaced) steppings.
>
> I had a closer look, and it turned out that stepdown_value is really
> just an approximation of the logarithm function with a piecewise linear
> function.
...
> I think it would be smoother to use real-valued functions for these
> purposes, and maybe use gaussian distributions (or some other
> real-valued distribution) for probability purposes. Do you think it
> could be useful?

Yes, I think so. I don't believe performance matters here, and having the 
logarithm should make it easier to understand what's going on; remove 
spoilers (players remembering cutoff points); and make it easier to adapt 
the parameters for new uses.

Thanks for looking into this,
David