Definitely. It can take a really long time for the log to catch up to the present turn, especially in big battles I was just playing a monster zoo today, and something happened that I wasn't sure of so I decided to wait until the log caught up to where I was and it took about five minutes to get there. This wasn't way at the end of the battle either, this was in the middle.
I' m confused about the first Warlock skill. It seems to do an ordinary attack with some damage on top of that that isn't show. It would be nice if I could see what effect it was having, and what damage type is it and what have you.
This is a good point, It would be nice if the game told us the damage done by spells the way it does with weapons. The current system is a weird dichotomy.
Right, so. The problem with showing how much damage is dealt by which spell is in the way spells are stored in Dredmor's codebase. Let's take the most obvious spell - the fireball. Say you throw an Obvious Fireball at a group of enemies, and the ticker recorded spell damage. You won't get "enemy 1 took x damage from Obvious Fireball! enemy 2 took x damage from obvious fireball!" You'd get ONE enemy taking explosive damage from "Obvious Fireball". Everyone around them would be recorded as taking damage from "Fireball Effect", and then you'd spend the next few turns watching the ticker display a bunch of enemies being damaged by "flamefield 1". This is because nearly every spell in Dredmor is actually a collection of triggered subspells. Obvious Fireball is a missile which triggers two other spells centered at the impact point. Petrification deals damage with "Petrification Tick 1" through "Petrification Tick 7". Puissant Touch either triggers Puissant Hit Empowered or Puissant Hit Normal, depending if you're in your empowered form or not. The Rocket-Powered Punch deals most of its damage through Power Fist Hit and Power Fist Hit2. Tenebrous Rift deals most of its damage through Zalgo Blast 1 and Tentacular Doom, the latter of which also triggers another spell called Zalgo1, which itself calls corpse blast and nightmare! And the list goes on. Basically the spell database is set up to allow efficient access to may types of effects, not for those effects to have sensible, logical names that will not look hideously ugly or inelegant showing up on a ticker. Plus, if every time a monster took damage it was recorded on the ticker, Alchemical Toxin Cannister thrown into a zoo would probably crash the game. Or at least the ticker.
I'm pretty sure every time a monster takes damage it already is recorded on the ticker (or at least... If it does no damage.). Hence, this topic. I'm not sure how every spell is handled, but I remember Sandstorm from Egyptian Magic generating hundreds of redundant messages. I've even had messages appear for offscreen monsters running into traps. Also, the names of the effects isn't really a big deal. A little ambiguous, at worst, but I am all for adding spell damage to the ticker as well. I think the scrolling speed and lines visible is a bigger issue though. It's already too small as-is, it would definately need to have more lines if there is going to be more recorded.
