[Nightlies] Bug: status messages about unseen monsters

[Nomad]

I'm playing the August 28th nightly (87c709c) and I seem to be getting messages about changes in the status of monsters that I can't actually see.

For instance, when a scared monster runs off to somewhere out of my LoS, I still get an "It is no longer afraid" message when it recovers from the fear. And standing inside of an empty moated room, I received an "It wakes up" message, followed shortly by a White beetle I'd previously detected asleep in the moat coming through the door. (I was playing a High elf, so no chance of it being something invisible, and I did a sweep of the room to make sure there were no Lurkers/Trappers.)

I don't know if this might be related to the 3.3 bug of getting messages when staves act on unseen monsters.

[Magnate]

I'm playing the August 28th nightly (87c709c) and I seem to be getting messages about changes in the status of monsters that I can't actually see.

For instance, when a scared monster runs off to somewhere out of my LoS, I still get an "It is no longer afraid" message when it recovers from the fear. And standing inside of an empty moated room, I received an "It wakes up" message, followed shortly by a White beetle I'd previously detected asleep in the moat coming through the door. (I was playing a High elf, so no chance of it being something invisible, and I did a sweep of the room to make sure there were no Lurkers/Trappers.)

I don't know if this might be related to the 3.3 bug of getting messages when staves act on unseen monsters.

Yes it is - thanks for the report. In order to make sure that devices which were IDd by use on unseen monsters give messages saying that they've been used, we needed to turn on status update messages for unseen monsters. So I expected the "It is no longer afraid" (and was wondering how to deal with that case), but I am a little surprised to note that you get "It wakes up" as well, since that's not dealt with by mon-timed.c - I'll have to look into why this one is now happening.

I don't yet have a solution for telling the game to print "something starts moving slower" when you zap it with an unID'd wand of slow monster, yet not print "it is no longer afraid". I'm sure there is one, but we probably have to come up a level of abstraction.

[CunningGabe]

So I expected the "It is no longer afraid" (and was wondering how to deal with that case), but I am a little surprised to note that you get "It wakes up" as well, since that's not dealt with by mon-timed.c - I'll have to look into why this one is now happening.

Actually, "It wakes up" is dealt with by mon-timed. Any time a call is made to increment or decrement a timer -- including every turn as status effects wear off and monsters gradually wake up -- that eventually yields a call to mon_set_timed.

[Magnate]

Actually, "It wakes up" is dealt with by mon-timed. Any time a call is made to increment or decrement a timer -- including every turn as status effects wear off and monsters gradually wake up -- that eventually yields a call to mon_set_timed.

Ah, thank you - now it all makes sense. I've updated #1515 to reflect the consequences of the 'fix' - any thoughts on how we might construct the if statement around the call to monster_desc() to differentiate between unseen monsters where we want a message and where we don't? Is it safe to assume that we only want a message if we're IDing an item? If that's the case, how do we pass that info into mon_set_timed()? Or should we generate the message elsewhere?