With that out of the way, a couple of brief comments...
This is likely due to the fact that weapon speeds and damages were changed with the 11/10/98 patch that introduced the new weapons scale that we see during T2A and UOR. All archived information, as well as some research into weapons and armor values on our end, points to the same number of resources being required to create the items for the entire duration of T2A and UOR, which essentially rules out any modification to that part of the formula. There's still the possibility that overall durability was modified, but I suspect that if we applied the weapon statistics found on stratics archives with the formula you provided here, we would get identical numbers to the highest VDP values seen for items.nightshark wrote:Note that although these values do not match perfectly with what is listed here: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20010414 ... eapons.htm The values are always within +-3gp. And though the formula is so slightly off against the weapons in this link, the formula matches 100% with the weapons that are found in the demo. Remember that the link above was roughly 3 years after the demo, and it is possible that speed/hit point/ingot costs may have been slightly changed during that time for some weapons. For instance, the bardiche and executioners axe both have different speed values in the demo vs stratics, and the damage levels are ALL massively different.
Addressing only the bolded part, the working theory is that the 11/10/98 patch notes contained a particular line item which said the following:nightshark wrote:The blacksmithing skill is extremely bugged. When an item is created, the demo checks for whether the crafted item should be exceptional. The demo does not apply any flag to an exceptional item, but instead increases its durability by 20%, and then *tries* to apply an increased dice offset to the newly created weapon. It's interesting to note that the demo does not give a flat +4 dice offset to every exceptional weapon, but instead, the demo calculates the additional offset based on the existing damage of the weapon. For an exceptional halberd, 4 is added to the offset (sound familiar?), but for a katana, only 1 is added to the offset (partially since the demo katana is only 1d16). The major bug is that the new offset is not applied to the newly created weapon, but is instead applied to the smith hammer that was used to create it. This means that if you make 10 GM halberds with a smith hammer, the smith hammer will go from being 4d6+0 to 4d6+40. If you make 20, the smith hammer will be 4d6+80. This means you can create godly smith hammers in the demo and one shot other players/creatures with them.
This would obviously have been fixed, but the interesting part of that to me was the difference between a halberd and a katana's offset. It seems like katanas should not be given +4 damage on an exceptional craft, but rather only 1 additional damage. This would, however, be a major blow to crafting, as any katana that is might or above would now be better than a crafted one.
The belief is that the italicized part was intended to recognize that some of the highest damage non-bugged exceptional blacksmith weapons that were created before the weapons patch on 2/12/98 would lose some of their damage as part of the weapons adjustment, assuming that the +4 exceptional value that is found on later archives is applied evenly across all weapons.A retroactive weapons fixer will adjust weapons to fit the new weapons statistics going in. This code will attempt to transfer over your old weapons and adjust them to the correct weapons scale. It will fix one-hit weapons, "prepatch" weapons with outdated damage ratings, weapons with multiply applied magical bonuses, and similar problems. However, it may not function perfectly with all particular combinations of weapon abilities. In particular, exceptional quality weapons may lose some of their capability in the adjustment.
Now, it's certainly possible that the caveat was given as a catch all, or as a warning against weapons that were effectively getting nerfed. However, a comparison between the 2/12 to 11/10 weapon statistics and the post 11/10 weapon statistics shows that virtually every weapon received a significant speed or damage upgrade in the process. This suggest that all weapons were significantly upgraded during the patch, which would make the loss of effectiveness a strange point.
Of course this doesn't rule out other possibilities such as the retroactive fixer being coded in such a way that it couldn't tell an exceptional weapon from a non-exceptional one under certain conditions (e.g. looking at durability to determine whether something is or isn't exceptional), but we feel that the greatest number of factors that can be controlled for, are, with the theory described above.
You may not need to redouble at least some of the work on the blacksmithy script, as I've spent some time digging into that particular script myself. I have a series of posts here detailing some of the technical aspects of how we know that certain weapon/armor speeds, damages, and armor ratings are correct, and it is basically an analysis of the demo script itself. I have more technical documentation that I can send you via PM if you're interested in seeing it as well.nightshark wrote:As for blacksmithing, unfortunately the demo is not a good go-to for the values there, in my opinion. Craft systems in general in the demo appear to have been work in progress. The minimum value to craft are far off what they are on Stratics, and there are patch notes in 98/99 which state that some blacksmithing values have been changed. However the demo does say that the formula: avgDmg * speed is used to determine the min/max values for crafting.
I have, however, "decoded" what a lot of the variables in blacksmithing mean and plan to completely decode that script when I have more time. You can see the code here, it's WIP:
https://github.com/jackuoll/uodemo/blob ... ith.uosl.q
That repository will be updated with latest findings from the demo.