Stair message bug

[intently]

Just attempted to ascend from 950 to 900 on an up staircase. My min depth was 900. Received messages:

You enter a maze of up staircases, but cannot find your way.
You emerge even deeper in the dungeon.

However, I actually emerged on 900, just as I wanted/expected. My min depth is still 900.

[bron]

This will happen if you took an up *shaft* instead of an up staircase. You take the stairs to 850 ft, but your min-depth is deeper than that, so the game pushes you lower and you get this message. I agree that it probably counts as a bug.

[intently]

Does an "up shaft" look like "<"?

[bron]

Yes, a "shaft" and a "staircase" look the same. They should be slightly different shades of the same color. You can alter their appearance and/or color by editing the lib/edit/terrain.txt file (I did).

[BlueFish]

Yes, a "shaft" and a "staircase" look the same. They should be slightly different shades of the same color. You can alter their appearance and/or color by editing the lib/edit/terrain.txt file (I did).

Good idea. What color did you use for the shaft?

[bron]

I chose to just use "white" (rather than "gray"). I found that making them red or something was obnoxious. YMMV. Using "white" means that they look the same as stairs when they are within your light radius, but are fairly easy to distinguish on the map when outside your light. Of course, I am extremely old school and use ascii characters and the "curses" interface, so I don't know if this would be different under some more modern interface. One of the main reasons I did this is that the default color choice caused the shafts to use the same color as the background when they were not illuminated, so they were invisible when not in view. I'm sure this is an artifact of using curses and main-gcu (and probably some quirk of my personal terminal settings).

# 0x52 --> up shaft (perm)

N:82:up shaft
G:<:w

# 0x53 --> down shaft (perm)

N:83:down shaft
G:>:w

I also altered the "chasm" definition, to make them easy to distinguish from quartz:

# 0x02 --> unused

N:2:chasm
G:$:w

The use of "$" is perhaps a little questionable, since I had to re-train my Angband instincts of trying to step on the $ to pick up the money, but fortunately Sil asks if you really want to do that before it drops you down the chasm.

I don't know anything about Windows, but on Linux you don't even have to recompile the code or anything after making these sorts of changes; they are put into effect the next time the game starts up.

[BlueFish]

I think it's that way on all platforms. I know it works like that in Windows, too, at least.

Personally I've changed my herb glyph to "%" and my violet molds to yellow molds just to make them as immediately obvious as possible. I'll recolor my shafts too, I think.