Category talk:Dragons

I have a general question, and this seems like the best place for it. Do we want to represent the numbers that the game shows (rounded-off) or that the game uses (exact)?

As an example, quantities (above 10,000) and times (above 1 day) are rounded off if they become too big, but the unrounded values are still used. The clearest place this matters is the total amount of fish/wood after collecting for the full time. It's given to a single fish/wood, while if for higher levels the rounded off shown values are used to calculate it, the value becomes rather inaccurate.

I agree even the meaning of "shows" is not perfectly clear. Instead of the value in the Feed button, or Train window, it's possible to get the exact amount from the number deducted from the fish and wood totals, just as the exact battle statistics for Toothless, Barf and Belch, and partly Hookfang and Stormfly can be found in the costume section, instead of the battle menu.

The downside to accuracy is the longer time strings, making the page seem more cluttered, and the round-off errors in the game itself. For example, the amount of fish/wood needed is occasionally something like 317,249,984, where it is clear 317,250,000 was intended. The difference is always 4, 8, 16, etc. so it's due to a binary round-off problem within the game.

Apart from the binary rounding problem, it is possible to calculate a lot of values directly, without having to look for them at every dragon level. The fish/wood gathering per hour can be directly calculated from the single values given in the Book of Dragons, for example; the fish for release is the total amount of fish fed divided by four, etc. This makes filling in the dragon pages accurately much easier (and I'd be happy to write that up, and/or provide a program to calculate them).

Let me know what you would all prefer, so I can avoid making unnecessary/wrong changes providing extra work for others to undo.

JonathanNStewart (talk) 09:33, October 23, 2016 (UTC)