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Locke might know, though that doesn't mean he'll tell us if he does;) He'd be the perfect person to ask though, just have someone who's 'cool' with Locke ask him, or he'll write you a novel right before your eyes about how stupid you are to ask and how smart he is and how dumb we must be for editing the game and still knowing less than a legit player.



That or he'll just flat out say 'fuck you!'.......but he'd be the perfect person to ask.

he only has this reputation because he knows how to debate a topic and people will NEVER admit the POSSIBILITY that he's right.

actually.. its around 93-97 area, depending on your exp chart.



Actually its an exp thing, not levels........ :hump:

he only has this reputation because he knows how to debate a topic and people will NEVER admit the POSSIBILITY that he's right.



Of course there's also the other end, where he never realizes that by any remote chance, he could be wrong as well.

Of course there's also the other end, where he never realizes that by any remote chance, he could be wrong as well.

Most likely because I'm almost never wrong. In the cases where I have been wrong I've freely admitted it (but for whatever reason, people insist on playing the holier than thou card once they notice I've conceded, so the topic overall usually goes downhill fast).



To the original topic question--



No, I don't know the exp formula. I do know enough to tell you that it is table based (that is, an array of (integer) modifiers are used to adjust the exp needed depending on your current level). Sometime I'll get around to reverse engineering it, but, and this is the unfortunate part, whichever fuckjob at Metro did their "4.2 billion exp bug" fix decided it'd be really cool to fuck up the exp formula. If you look in something like MMUD Explorer or MMVIEW and look at the exp needed by a level 90 Ranger/Mystic and compare it to what a level 70 Ranger/Mystic needs you'll notice a new 4.2 billion exp bug-- now instead of never being able to exceed 4.2 billion exp total, you're now unable to exceed 4.2 billion exp needed per level (that is, once you need 4.1 billion exp from level A to level B, you'll wrap around and need a LOT less from level B to level C).



So reverse engineering the current formula is, in a word, useless. What's more, if Metro ever decides to try and fix it, they'll need to reproduce the bug or else severly modify the kind of exp high level scriptable monsters give.



FWIW, the old formula is still in the DLL, and that might be worth reverse engineering. Once translated back to something human readable (C, Pascal, etc), it should be possible to expand it to handle 64-bit integers (e.g. - refix the 4.2 billion bug). The problem there is that the same chucklehead who fixed the original 4-2 billion exp bug problem also mucked up the exp formula, so while interesting, a translated formula from the old code wouldn't match what we see at higher levels (it would, however, work at levels below 55-- IIRC it's around level 55 or later that the old formula and the new formula diverge).



I really hate most of the coders who have worked on MajorMUD. The ones who DO talk give the impression that they have no idea what they're talking about. The ones that don't talk end up screwing the game over even more than it already was. They simply have no idea what they're doing, in any way, shape or form. Blind leading the blind, that sort of thing... by the time someone who knows what they're doing DOES get hired on, they'll probably want to revert back to the code WCC sold to Metro and start over.

I've been doing some work on the exp formula actually, trying to figure it out. It has to be exponentially based formula. Heres the basic formula I came up with.



xp_tnl_2 = cost * 10

xp_tnl_3 = xp_tnl_2 * 2



xp_tnl_4 = xp_tnl_3 * (cost/100) * constant

xp_tnl_5 = xp_tnl_4 * constant

xp_tnl_6 = xp_tnl_5 * constant

etc..etc..



Heres what I have so far.. Now if you figure your cost is 100%.. then your cost goes down to 1. That eliminates your cost.



so if you do some subsituting and basical caculas, you figure:

xp_tnl_3 = cost*20



xp_tnl_4 = (cost*20) * constant



xp_tnl_5 = (cost*20) * constant^2

xp_tnl_6 = (cost*20) * constant^3



You'll notice a pattern emerging. Anyways, at level 3 where constant first shows up its equal to 11/6 or (1.8333333333333...)



but as your level increases, the constant drops to 1.71479, then 1.71426.. then 1.6249620, 1.624996..



Its a sliding graph, log(c) i think? I forgot alot of my last year of diffy-eq.



Anyways, any thoughts?

Without doing any calculations, I'll venture to guess it has something to do with logarithms.

he only has this reputation because he knows how to debate a topic and people will NEVER admit the POSSIBILITY that he's right.



Oh, I'll admit he's right..he's right a lot. He's right about 90% of all things mud related that we could possibly debate...but HE will NEVER admit the POSSIBILITY that he's NOT right.

Oh, I'll admit he's right..he's right a lot. He's right about 90% of all things mud related that we could possibly debate...but HE will NEVER admit the POSSIBILITY that he's NOT right.

He is also a fat worthless POS.



:worship: Dreimas is a god. His formula looks good ... and he will soon go down in Mud history. Something Locke has been trying to do his whole life.

:lol:

the core formula itself isnt too hard, or at least it didnt used to be (the last time i tried to figure it out was in like 1998)... I think it did indeed involve exponential increases, but the power term only changes every 2 levels (rather than every level). Dreimas, if you keep studying those constants, you'll see they go in sets of 2 like that. They're actually equal, it's just the formula is rounding (or probably just int-flooring) to an integer number.



The problem is, however, exactly what Locke described -- there's little "adjustments" (predefined constants) that come into the formula at various levels, this happens like 15 times and effects things enough that the core exponential formula alone won't tell you very much after like level 10. :(



If you read through old release notes, you'll occasionally see stuff like "Lowered experience tables after level 12", "Raised experience tables from levels 18 to 20", etc... WCC used to do this (even in the v1.0 days), and Metro did it as well... so by this point, the actual exp formula used by the game is probably some horrific 1000-line piece of spaghetti code.



Floating point math is also very inaccurate as numbers get higher, which introduces further oddities into the formula that make it hard to reverse-engineer.

Why do we hate Locke again? I forget sometimes.