Talk:QuickBASIC elemental

Stat Gains

On the forums, the guy who screenshotted a pic of fighting him showed the stats (5/6/9). I managed to get what he was wearing and moon sign bonuses and things, since I have no idea how to figure it out. Image and post. — Cool12309 (talk) 14:48, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Jorshua (#1574072) reports 3/5/11 stat gains with moxie sign bonus but no other bonuses. Also, it had between 76 and 94 HP with no ML running. Found on 20th adventure in the menagerie. --Farflier (talk) 22:26, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

a call for common sense

• we don't know anything about the ultra-rare mechanic. jick has said he designed it to be impossible to farm*. all the assumptions about how the mechanic works come from a ten year-old post by bashy. saying "this must be ultra-rare because..." simply doesn't work. there are no rules.
  • how can we know that the qbe is ultra-rare?
    1. jick tells us it is
  • how can we tell it's not ultra-rare?
    1. someone gets two in a day
• and that's it.
  • things that are irrelevant
    1. item image animation
    2. monster image animation
    3. item stats
    4. monster level
    5. adventure text
    6. item description
    7. every other goddamned thing you can think of.

*it's not, of course, but it is impossible to farm reliably and/or without expending tremendous resource. --Evilkolbot (talk) 16:46, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Um, two other ways, at least, to tell if it is an Ultra-Rare or not:

1. Lose to it and get the consolation ribbon
2. Smash that spreadsheet and get an ultimate wad

Just sayin' --Club (#66669) (Talk) 00:44, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Or, have a manuel, fight it, and not get any manuel stats. — Cool12309 (talk) 01:17, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

"someone gets two in a day" is not a valid qualifier. I and another player both got a Bakula on the same day (within three hours) a few weeks back.--[ [User:Cannonfire40|Cannonfire40]] (talk) 01:44, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

• my call was for humility. if something is vanishingly rare then people start shouting "ultra rare" and that's a very specific thing about which we know nothing.
• i missed the ribbon, though, good catch. i'd still say that's more "narrative consistency" than any indication if the mechanic to determine frequency. i hope jick coded it all as one flag and not in the way i would with a squillion unlinked and missable parts. one flag on the item from which everything else follows. he's very good at getting it all right either way, considering.
• the same with manuel factoids and ultimate wadness. they don't have anything to do with the mechanic as such. if it did have factoids that would suggest it wasn't, but, again, that's really nothing to do with how the game selects which adventure you get.
• i didn't say ultra-rares were one per day. i've never heard of one person getting two in a day. are you saying you can? there's nothing in the mechanic as surmised that suggests you can't. perhqps the step counter is mod 10k. i doubt it. too much of a small dataset for it to be worth stunt-burning turns as a non-ascending pastamancer. cool if you pulled it off, though.
• did anybody paste the text of the bug reply? have you seen it? --Evilkolbot (talk) 07:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Image Text

Near as I can read it, the image says (italics for parts I'm not confident in):

SUBM URDER A DVENT URE R PRINT "GRAAGH" END SUB W HILE I NKEY S=HWFND END

which translates to:

SUB MURDER ADVENTURER

PRINT "GRAAGH"

ENDSUB

WHILE INKEY

S=HWFND

END

Can someone make the leg text out better? --Club (#66669) (Talk) 17:45, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

I think it's actually:

SUB MURDER ADVENTURER

PRINT "GRAAGH"

ENDSUB

WHILE INKEY$ = 11 WEND

END

--Fig bucket (talk) 18:19, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

MURDERADVENTURER would be one word. Correct the 11 to ". Put WEND on its own line. Otherwise, that's correct. The subroutine is never called, and the rest just runs a do-nothing-until-key-pressed thing. Correct syntax is two quotes, but this works fine otherwise. Tested in QB64. (Man, I love QBasic.) --maharito (talk) 20:31, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

• I have never once used quickbasic. Is the 11 decimal? That would be the obscure "vertical tab" character, typed CTRL-K (in Unix, at least). Just the love of 11 coming through. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 00:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
• I checked into that also, but the correct syntax for the argument would be INKEY$ = CHR$(11) and that would basically do nothing unless you happened to have that very keyboard signal inputted at the time. (I wonder if the Home key would work.) --maharito (talk) 23:07, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
  • the 'while inkey$' statement only makes sense if you are waiting for input. inkey$ returns the key last pressed since you last checked it. if there isn't a key pressed it returns the null string. if you check for a value you'll only get a true response more than once if the user has the key you're checking for pressed down. which is useful occasionally i suppose. if you're just waiting until the user presses a key, then you need the statement 'while inkey$ = ""'. fig bucket was wrong about only needing a single double quote. if you're typing the code the ide will add a second one but loading a file from disc with only one will give an error. since this is tiny indistinct writing we can guess that either jick meant two single quotes (which doesn't work but is at least syntactically sensible) or a double quote with an implied second double quote. ref. it's a small gif, it's indistinct, and he had to write it very small. a little slack is warranted. --Evilkolbot (talk) 12:56, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
    • I was unable to find any kind of official QuickBasic (or Qbasic) manual, let alone an authoritative BNF grammar (the wikibooks ref is a nice tutorial, but does not detail syntax). The best thing I could find that gave any detail on parsing strings was here for Basmark QuickBasic, which seems to have spent a lot of effort on compatibility, and in 3.2.3 they claim that a newline will terminate a string without error. While a horrible practice (foreshadowing optional semi-colons in javascript..*shudder*), it didn't surprise me given the context, and it matched maharito's test (above). But, I've no personal experience with any particular version of QuickBasic myself, so if this is an extremely subtle language feature that depends on the precise implementation then an error or a mistaken/artistically-licensed pair of single quotes (or even an 11, as a wonderful number) is more likely. --Fig bucket (talk) 14:07, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

typo

13:44, 2013 July 16‎ Cool12309 (Talk | contribs)‎ . . (740 bytes) (-1)‎ . . (Undo revision 548636 by Club (talk) See image)

Sorry. In the small version of the image, it sure did look like the apostrophe was there. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 23:43, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

• No problem. Should it have a sic? — Cool12309 (talk) 12:25, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
  • No. There is no typo. Referring to the movements of something as "its movements" is correct. "it's" is short for "it is", and "it is movements" would be incorrect. --Vorzer (talk) 19:04, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

hit message

DECLARE SUB Attack 
 PRINT "Take this, Adventurer!" 
END SUB 
WHILE 1=2 
 Attack 
WEND

• this doesn't attack. is this a miss message? or am i missing a joke? --Evilkolbot (talk) 12:11, 13 August 2013 (UTC)