NEWS

After much procrastination, I have uploaded version 5.05 which:

1. Introduces the upgrade to version 1.11 for LoD. I believe all the changes for version 1.11 have been propagated but if you find anything different, please let me know.
2. Fixes a bug where some items from Standard LoD games could not be transferred.
3. Prevents multiple instances of 'single-carry' items e.g Gheed's Fortune from being muled.
4. Adds a component to the DropCalc where the party size can be input. This has significant consequences in Single Player drop calculations.

I will continue to work on this based on available time. One thing which I really need to fix in the DropCalc is excluding items which *cannot* have a particular quality such as "rare" charms. If I ever get the chance, I'll finish up the Enhanced Character Stats page (*knock on wood*)

A minor site update today to fix some broken links and update the top banner page. The counter is gone for now, but it may come back in the future. It was close to 200k hits.

I have uploaded a intermediate version (5.04e) which:

1. Fixes a bug in the DropCalc for boss superunique monsters in Nightmare and Hell modes where it was using the area level as the monster level
2. Fixes a bug in the DropCalc where creatures with the same internal names (e.g Flayers and Blowdart Flayers) had their results lumped together resulting in higher drop probabilities.
3. Fixes a bug where ethereal unique items did not have their required dexterity and strength reduced by 10 points.
4. Adds a data dump command line option for ".dup" files.
5. Removes the option to load 1.10s stash files since users were confused as to it's functionality.
6. Allows the user to dynamically configure the ATMA path in case the installation path is on a network drive.
7. Changes the default display for the DropCalc to use "As Odds".
8. Started work on an enhanced character stats page which will show things like MF, resists, IAS and so on.

Note that this is an intermediate release

I have uploaded a new version (5.04d) which:

1. Fixes a bug in the DropCalc for monsters in Normal mode where it was using the area level as the monster level
2. Adds new entries under the DropCalc Display menu to enable/disable the display of mlvl, ilvl and qlvl.
3. Fixes a security hole that was brought to my attention.

Note that this is an intermediate release as I have not gotten around to working on the Horadric Cube Module

The Countess can drop up to 3 runes, but she does so after she drops up to 5 other things. However, she can never drop more than 6 items at once. This makes things complicated with calculating drops. I'm not even sure how to apply the cap of 6 items to her drop chances in the DropCalc... so she may be a bit off for now. I have a fix but have not had time to implement it yet.

A few more site updates today as part of the migration to Diabloii.net. I updated the Home and Download pages for version 5.04c. I added a missing screenshot for the AutoGather page, and added a page for the fancy new Drop Calculator. Filled in some news and updated the FAQ on some common questions that have been asked. Semi-Fixed the page hit counter (its a hack, but it works for now). Its all looking good.

I have uploaded a new version (5.04c) which:

1. Fixes the bug with creatures in Tal Rasha's Tomb giving 7x the expected odds (thanks to Stormie for catching this)
2. Adds an entry under the Options menu to enable/disable using the item quality color as the background for items in stashes.

Also... Right-clicking on the Horadric Cube should give you an idea of what I'm working on now.

I finally got around to filling in some of the blanks for the new 5.04 release and getting ready for the ATMA site migration. We are now going to be hosted at Diabloii.net. This should give everyone better access and provide plenty of room for traffic.

The next steps will be to create a nice detailed page for the DropCalc, and update the ItemView screenshots with the beautiful item-specific colored backgrounds. I also notices that the AutoGather pic is missing... I'll add that too. Anything else you would like to see here? Drop us a line.

I decided to bite the bullet and load Normal creatures according to the level that spawns them. It's all done now. I have also updated the DropCalc to calculate drops "per kill" instead of "per drop". This has fix been uploaded and released as ATMA 5.04b.

For 1.10, I load the monsters differently in Normal than from NM/Hell. In Normal, I simply load all entries in monstats.txt while in NM/Hell, I load the creatures according to where they can be spawned. I forgot to put a check in Normal if the creature is enabled which is why you see some of those unknown creatures. I'll fix that. Typically, there should only be single entries for creatures in Normal. The multiple entries you see though is due to a few new creatures of the same name that were added as guest creatures. I suppose it would make more sense at this point to also load Normal creatures according to where they are spawned. I was resisting this at first since they will drop the same no matter where they are and I was trying to cut down on compute time/memory.... oh well.

ATMA 5.04 is released. It introduces a few new features as well as bug fixes since 5.03:

1. Mercenary resist display has been fixed. ATMA was picking up the wrong entry in hirelings.txt especially for Expansion characters. This resulted in a wrong calculation for the mercenary resists.
2. IAS display for items with the IAS property (e.g Immortal King Stone Crusher) that have been socketed with IAS runes/jewels has been fixed. This was due to an error in the ATMA config files.
3. A bug in the loading code for player ears has been fixed. This occured when the name of the ear was of a certain length.
4. A stash allows you to drag/drop items from both the picture area as well as the tree list. A check is always made to ensure that the item being dragged into a stash is of the same version. However, this check was only done on the tree area and not the picture area which allowed one to drop 1.09 items into a 1.10 stash. If this happened, the stash is corrupt. This has now been fixed.
5. The display for jewels and charms now shows if they do not meet character level requirements.
6. There was a bug in the code that would sometimes cause the game to randomly delete an item especially if it was moved from an equipped slot into inventory. This was the infamous "disappearing item" bug and it was due to a flag not being reset on the item. This has now been fixed.
7. The background for the picture of an item in a stash is now colored to distinguish the quality of the item (rare, unique, crafted, etc.)

ATMA 5.04 now includes a DropCalc which Thrugg and I (Hakai) have been working on. This calculator supports versions 1.07-1.10 and includes many features.

1. Full support for Diablo 1.07, 1.08, 1.09 and 1.10.
2. Correct scaling of creature mlvl and TC upgrade in Diablo 1.10 (Nightmare and Hell).
3. Sorting of results by name, probability or creature location.
4. Display of probabilities as fraction, percentage or odds.
5. Sorting of probabilities in ascending or descending order.
6. Ability to search by monster or by item
7. Full support for "players X" and character MF
8. Both item and monster search allow you to customize the parameters by which you choose to search
9. Changing either your MF or # of players requires the user to hit the "Search" button.

The DropCalc is provided "as-is" with a few caveats. The internal mechanics of the drop system is a very complicated one such that depending on certain "branch" points, the drop probabilites need to be computed differently. In mathematical lingo, a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) would need to be constructed to represent the drop sequence for each item. After doing an in-depth analysis of the drop tree, Thrugg and I came to the conclusion that all the other drop calculators out there are probably wrong. The problem is that depending on the path taken during a drop sequence, you can hit several branch points which will change the mechanism of the drop probability. Unfortunately, to properly calculate the final drop probability, you need to store the drop path for every contribution from a TC to every item it can drop. When this is done, you would need to compute your chances of the item being of a certain quality and then reconstruct the total probabilities for all items by going back up the tree and taking the number of picks at each level into account. What ATMA does right now is to compute the drop probability for any one possible drop of any creature. Trying to take the full number of drops into account will involve significantly more data storage and slow down the calculator by many factors. In the meantime, you as the user know that if Pindle has a 1:10000 chance of dropping item X on a given drop, he will have close to a 1:5000 of one per kill. Hence it is up to the user to correctly interprete the results especially when comparing two monsters (e.g Baal and Pindleskin) who have different drop mechanics.

Based on new info from Jarulf and Ruvanal, it has been discovered that Pindleskin and Threshsocket are not as "nerfed" as one would expect. The basic idea that Blizzard had to "nerf" Pindle and Threshsocket was to drastically reduce the odds of them dropping uniques and sets. In order to implement this, a new TC was created for them. Every TC has an associated bonus to the chances of unique/set/rare/magic items dropping and this is where Pindle and Thresh got hit hard.

Every TC is defined recursively in terms of "lower" TCs such that you need to traverse the drop tree to determine what item gets dropped. However, the game keeps a running check of the maximum bonuses. Because the TC that Pindleskin and Threshsocket drop from intersect paths with the TC that Snapchip and Frozenstein drop from, the Pindleskin TC gets it's bonuses upgraded to what Snapchip/Frozenstein would have. This means that Pindleskin drops exactly like those two while Threshsocket has a slightly worse chance than Pindle because his mlvl in Hell is 84 (this affects the chance for a given quality) as opposed to Pindleskin who is mlvl 86 in Hell.

With all that said and done, enjoy and let me know of any issues.

Good news on the DropCalc...

1. Copy+Paste of the data works now
2. Magic item search is functional
3. Minor error in Pindleskin/Threshsocket noticed by Thrugg is fixed
4. Clicking on the data column header sorts according to that column
5. Probability can also be displayed as odds i.e "1 : xxx"

I can't really think of anything else to add to it so I'll pass it on to Thrugg for QA. In the meantime, I'll continue trying to make the ComputeDrop() function faster if possible. Most of the time is spent in there because of the huge amount of data it has to crunch through. I suspect it's also because I'm running in debug mode which makes the code very slow. I'll have to test the non-debug mode to see how much faster it is.

After talking to Thrugg, I have decided to also add drop info for minions. In 1.10, minions behave differently since they now have the same mlvl as the boss. This significantly changes the TC they can drop from and strange things can happen e.g Eldritch's minions can drop Vortex Shield while he can't. The SuperUnique minion info is now in place so I have to work on the Unique minion info now.

The ATMA DropCalc is a monster in the sense that:

1. Handles 1.07 - 1.10
2. Correctly does TC upgrades for monsters in 1.10
3. Shows monster location in 1.10 (NM and Hell)
4. Deals with quest drops, champions, uniques, superuniques and bosses

I can now search on unique items... adding sets, rares and magic should be trivial. First thing I ran was Tyreal's .. pretty frightening what the drop odds are on that!

Merc resistances are currently displayed wrong. That is a most unusual bug that I have now fixed. I was not parsing the hireling data file correctly and it was picking the wrong entry for your merc. I've fixed this now and should be in the next release. Thanks.

Ugh. After much pain, I believe I have finished the 1.10 DropCalc module. All I need to do now is extend this for 1.07-1.09 and slap on a GUI. A small optimization change I just made reduces the runtime by roughly a factor of 3 which is pretty darn good so I'm happy. Anyway, on with the rest.

These are a bunch of issueswhich have been brought up countless times before and I'll give the same answers I always give. Here's a rundown:

1. The stash structure is based on a game file which describes the item hierarchy as defined by Blizzard. While this can be potentially modified to clean up the structure, I would rather not mess around with it... yet.
2. Color coding in the item display is not done because that is a Windows GUI issue I do not know how to deal with. I may be good at Windows programming but not that good. So, if you happen to have example code lying around for me to use, let me know.
3. I purposely fixed the size of the stash window because of other internal programming considerations.

I am also working on adding 3 modules: DropCalc, Cubing module, and ItemSearch module. After this, I think I'm done with any new modules. I might add a MonsterData module which gives a break down of all creature stats. After the DropCalc, it's pretty trivial.

Damn... just found a minor bug in the Ear Item code that can cause ATMA to barf depending on the length of the name of the ear's owner. I've fixed it now but it won't be in the release until I upload. Hopefully, you guys aren't too much into PvP yet.

Some more Tenshi news and some info: Very large stashes (1000+ items) can be very hard to open. Some experience with very large stashes have resulted in ATMA and computer crashes, so be warned.

Note that every stash has a version ID associated with it. Every file type in ATMA also has this. If you look in the lowest bar in the ATMA window, it tells you what version it is. When you create a stash, it asks you for the version and if you create a 1.09 stash and put 1.10 items in there, then you will end up with a corrupt stash. ATMA should check for this, but people have managed to find a way to do this which causes the corruption.

I figured out what was going on. There are two areas on a stash where you can drop an item. The first is the item tree on the left and the picture area on the right. This "picture" area is actually the same Object Class used for viewing d2i files. In the drag/drop code, I check for version incompatibility when you are dragging to the item tree but not the "picture" area which will then allow you to drop 1.10 items in a 1.09 stash. Anyway, I'll plug up that hole soon.

Thanks to TrenShadow, I may have figured out the source of those disappearing items. It is consistent with why equipping the item would make the item stay. This fix should be in version 5.04

The DropCalc and Cubing modules for 5.04 are going much slower than anticipated. I don't have enough time to sit down and do them because of R/L as well as my futile efforts in MFing. After seeing what some of the guys at the "other place" have found, I almost feel like hanging myself because of the crappy items I've found so far.

I also got off my lazy butt and finished Phase 2 of the site updates. It has some snazzy screen shots and an overview of all of ATMA's functions. There is also an updated FAQ (please read it), and what could almost pass as a manual. Enjoy.

ATMA 5.03 has now been uploaded to the ATMA website. Go get it.

ATMA 5.03 introduces and fixes quite a few things since 5.02 :

1. Creation of a "Utility" menu which puts all the utility functions in one place. Now the "File" menu only deals with load/save.
2. Introduction of a new .DUP format which will serve as a dupe database format. These files are like stashes with the exception that they are READ ONLY i.e there can be no interaction with them. These files are created from stash files and is a one time operation. However, the original stash is kept.
3. A menu option has been added to control the number of .ORG backup files you would like ATMA to create.
4. ATMA now supports command line arguments to parse and dump info about stashes and character files. The syntax is ATMA.exe -d [input file] [output file]
5. A new menu option to restore default options settings has been added.
6. Stricter checks are in place when attempting to mule to a dead merc. Some code has also been added to attempt recovery of items which are lost during drag/drop operations.
7. A bug with runes/runeworded items which would give "Bad Dead Bodies" in-game has been fixed. This was due to a flag, which indicates that the 96 bit GUID exists, that was being set.
8. The character quest page has been completed and an indication is given if the Cow King aka "Elvis" has been killed.
9. A bug in the AutoGather module which would add too many "\" to the path has been fixed.
10. The Vex rune display bug has been fixed.
11. The "Freezes Target" property display has been fixed to display the freeze chance.
12. The item version for 1.10 Standard items has been added.
13. Display for runeworded items has the runeword name and item type on seperate lines. The base item type for runeworded items is now displayed in grey like the game.
14. The data for ilvl, fingerprint and item version is all displayed in a uniform color.
15. Importing an item into a stash/mule will now force you to use the data format of the stash/mule to prevent users from attempting to load a 1.09 item directly into a 1.10 file and corrupting it.
16. The default version for new characters/stashes is now 1.10.
17. Item requirements are now highlighted in red if the character's base stats e.g DEX or STR is not high enough.
18. Property display and damage calculation for ethereal 1.07 weapons has now been fixed.
19. A bug relating to unchecking the GameEdit option for allowing adding/removing gems has been fixed. This used to have the unfortunate side-effect of unsocketing gemmed items.
20. Display of the "Hit Causes Monster to Flee" property has been fixed.
21. Character names may now be changed.
22. Runeword names are now properly translated.

Anyway, give it a whirl and let me know if anything crops up. Thanks.

After some tinkering, I added the command line option to do dumps for stashes and save files. Basically, the format is: ATMA -d [input file] [output file]

I will have to test this out later. I also made a few more cosmetic changes such as

1. Text color change for items you can't equip due to insufficient parameters e.g STR
2. Better error checking when equipping dead mercs
3. Fixed a few display issues for ethereal runeworded 1.07 items
4. Fixed the display text for the "Freezes Target +xxx" property
5. Added a new line in item description of runeworded items as per mn4nu's request regarding 1.10 FARA

I will do an update (Version 5.03) when I get the time to test out some of the new stuff. Version 5.04 which should (knock on wood) enable some of the cubing formulae will probably be a while. It is only the cube formulae that involve fixed end-result items that will be enabled like gem/rune upgrade.

I got off my lazy butt and started the implementation of the quests page too. It's mostly done but there are still a few things left to clean up. I guess this leaves the two major things that I wanted to implement which are cubing and a drop calc. I don't expect those to be done in anything less than 3 months anyway.