How are fractions calculated in the game? How do you find the 'breakpoints'....

For example, If I have a ring of shock resistance 7......... How much shock damage would someone have to do to me before I mitigate 1 damage? Ok 2? 3? 4?

It's a game, do you really have to put that much thought into it?

yes

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Magical_Effects#Resistances_and_Weaknesses

That article does not deal with my question on fractions

Probably because it's not really all that important a topic. I would study that UESP page and then try doing my own math to answer the question, perhaps.

I would forget about it and start PLAYING the game, not think about it

People don't post if you don't like the question. Only post if you have the answer. Thank you.

As an example in RBP mod imperials have reflect damage 1....

Guess what if we are not rounding that means they have to receive 100 points of melee damage in order to for the reflect damage (which only works on melee) to kick in.

Even with a daedric 2 handed axe and 100 blunt with 100 strength you probably don't do 100 damage! per hit...

Exactly. Who gives a flying fadoodle over that kinda small stuff. If that's the only thing that interests you in this game. It's really not for you.

That's a little unfair to the OP, though. I'm sure he or she has plenty of other interests, but is stumped over this one little peculiarity. It's just that (to us) it seems not worth investigating.

Character building and optimization always interests me.

And again we are past the point where someone is helping me by showing me that it is not extremely important. If you wish to express anger at posters who don't play the game how you think it should be played then please create your own thread with that topic. It so happens that I AM interested in this question of mechanics and the topic of this thread is answering that question.

Thanks people!

You people have no scientific spirit! Some of us simply want to know how things work. Not for any practical application, but simply for the sake of knowing. "L'art pour l'art", except with knowledge instead of art.

@Witchblade

Unfortunately I don't have an answer, but I might have a way to find the answer. Get yourself a character with 100 Heavy Armor skill. On PC the easiest way to do so would be using the console, like this:

player.setav heavyarmor 100

On the consoles it would probably take some more work, but a Fortify Skill spell might also be able to do the trick (you don't need the skill to be permanently at 100 after all).

Now find a few pieces of heavy armor that have a fractional base AR. For example a Steel Cuirass has a base AR of 11,25. And with 100 Heavy Armor skill all pieces of heavy armor should give you their base AR. So you equip the cuirass and check how high your AR is. If it's 11 you know the game rounded down.

Then you take a Steel Shield which has a base AR of 13,5. Equip it (unequip the cuirass first) and check whether your AR is 13 or 14. Finally, equip Steel Greaves (base AR 6,75) and check whether you have 6 or 7 AR. Or maybe you could start with the greaves and if they get rounded down you don't need to bother with the shield and cuirass.

Either way, that should show you how the game rounds numbers. My pseudo-educated guess is that it rounds down all fractions. In which case you'd need to suffer 15 Shock Damage in order for your 7% Resist Shock to reduce the damage by 1 and suffer 29 Shock Damage in order for it to reduce the damage by 2.

I tested the armor and the .5 and .25 values round down....

Next I made a level 1,3,5,10 self damaging fire spell....

I created a ring of elements which gives 20 fire resist...


Unfortunately self targeted spells do not use resists! So I could not test

I have not specifically tested fractions, but from other tests on damage and resistance it appears the game does track fractions.

It rounds the number to a whole number for display but still seems to keep the fractions for most things.

Actually the difference is somewhat important. A low level character that has an AR of under 10 might take 4 of 5 pts on a goblin attack. But the same character with AR 15 will sometimes take 3. Not huge but still different. As far as total percentage damage of attack though it adds up to a dif of 20%.

As far as I know, both from what I've read on the wiki regarding many different calculations and what I've observed in-game:

1) The game uses decimals in its calculations. For instance, somebody went to the trouble of assigning steel greaves a base AR of 6.75. The ONLY reason to do that is if the game actually uses the decimals in its calculations.

2) When it displays values in places like the inventory menu, the game truncates them-- it doesn't round them. It simply lops the decimals off the end. So 10.1, 10.5 and 10.9 are all displayed as "10".

The Enhanced Economy mod has a bit about a toggleable option for costs for commodities being calculated with the fractions included, though it is noted they do not display. So that corroborates that the engine does all calculations with unrounded fractions but only displays root integer.

Since rounding the numbers only for display purposes would seemingly be unnecessary complication that would create added processing for virtually no gain, gpstr's observation that the game just truncates the display values sounds likely.

Don't let the detractors get to ya sWitchblade: any discussion of quantitative anolysis in a gaming forum is almost ALWAYS worthwhile

If you like this kinda topic, you'll love this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_root

So I am a little confused, do you really need to assign a decimal value to an armor rating to evaluate this question, or are we really just talking about how the system rounds generally? For instance if you take 10 pt base attack and your AR is 9 or 9% damage reduction I assume the system still deducts 1 pt from the 10 pt attack. If you have an AR of 15% does it round up damage reduction to subtract 2 pts from that same attack which is rounding up the fraction, or round down to only subtract 1? I thought I had tested this some time ago and found it rounded up, but my test might have been flawed as it was not done using the CS.

I believe that the game calculates decimals all the way through, so, for instance, if you take a 10 point attack with an AR of 9, you receive 91% of the damage, or 9.1 points. Then the game really does subtract 9.1 points from your total HP. If your AR is 15 instead, then you receive 85% of the damage, or 8.5 points, and 8.5 points are subtracted.

From a programming standpoint, it simply makes much more sense to do it that way-- it would require more code to have the game round off or truncate all values before applying them and would actually be easier for it to simply track them, decimals and all. There's really no need to round the values internally at all, so I doubt that the game does so. It would only do so when displaying them in places like the inventory screen.