Feature What to do about locations / monsters with identical names?

[Ryo_Sangnoir]

As came up in https://github.com/kolmafia/kolmafia/pull/1216

For items with identical names, we prefix with numbers to disambiguate, and return the one with the highest id if there's a question.

For monsters and locations, we name them so that they're unambiguous (e.g. Astronomer (obsolete) / Astronomer or Wartime Hippy Camp / The Hippy Camp). For monsters, also, we have the 3 ninja snowmen or the 3 frat boys.

With items like autumn-aton or locket / Manuel, we can know the actual names of monsters / locations. Should we try to keep to KoL names (perhaps with aliases)?

Also, how should we handle unknown locations / monsters? These are now visible: monsters in the locket and locations in autumn-aton. We register monsters from Manuel, but not from the locket.

One related issue: the property "autumnatonQuestLocation" contains a string for the KoL location name, and therefore doesn't uniquely identify the location.

 

[Veracity]

Using either Autumn-aton or locket in Relay Browser shows you duplicates.

vegetable gremlin
- one without tool
- one with tool

Hippy Camp
- pre war (with or without hippy disguise)
- verge of war (with or without frat disguise)

I wanted to send my Autumn-aton to the latter. I had to look at the HTML of the dropdown to decide which I wanted.

Several things we can do:

- When decorating the page in the relay browser, change the text of the dropdowns - both locket and autumnaton - to display our disambiguated names for the monster/location
- In user input, allow monster/snarfblat in brackets [] to precede the name. (Or standalone; did you know that for items/effects only the bracketed number is parsed? The “name” is essentially a comment)
- Sometimes we have location names that disagree with KoL’s because we didn’t know KoL’s. I just discovered an example:

Use a GameInformPowerPro magazine/walkthrough, KoL displays the video game “names” for the levels, different every time. We recognize the snarfblats and call them “Video Game Level 1”, etc. Autumn-aton tells us KoL’s name is “[FAQ-Dungeon Level 1]”, etc.

I have no objection to switching to unambiguous KoL names. Maybe have previous names as aliases.
Allow input using square bracketed IDs.
Keep our names for ambiguous KoL names.
Fix ambiguity in KoL dropdowns.
And if we save properties, have them be names that KoLmafia can use directly in user input.
And, sure - discover new monsters from the locket.

 

[lostcalpolydude]

- Sometimes we have location names that disagree with KoL’s because we didn’t know KoL’s. I just discovered an example:

Use a GameInformPowerPro magazine/walkthrough, KoL displays the video game “names” for the levels, different every time. We recognize the snarfblats and call them “Video Game Level 1”, etc. Autumn-aton tells us KoL’s name is “[FAQ-Dungeon Level 1]”, etc.

That one is my fault. The Florist Friar let us determine KoL's name for any place that uses adventure.php at least (with no basis for it, I'm guessing that's all the Autumn-aton shows too?). The location name having brackets seemed ridiculous enough that I didn't want to match it. I'm pretty sure those magazine locations are the only ones where I made that type of stance.

I think I also added code at the time to match old location names, but print out a warning if scripts ended up using them, with the intention of phasing out those old names after a few months or something. At this point I don't remember where that code was, or have any idea if it is still around at all.