Bug: crash after Single Combat in 4.2.3

[robinjohnson]

I have a promising Paladin who is heading for my second win (first was a Ranger a couple of weeks ago.) I started Single Combat with a greater demonic quythulg. As soon as the fight ends the game crashes. If I start Angband again and open the savefile, I'm back at the start of the single combat. When I kill the quythulg, it crashes again.

I had a couple of similar issues earlier, with the game crashing on Recall and then carrying on from my last single combat when I opened it again, but this time there doesn't seem to any way to get out. Booooo.

[backwardsEric]

I have a promising Paladin who is heading for my second win (first was a Ranger a couple of weeks ago.) I started Single Combat with a greater demonic quythulg. As soon as the fight ends the game crashes. If I start Angband again and open the savefile, I'm back at the start of the single combat. When I kill the quythulg, it crashes again.

I had a couple of similar issues earlier, with the game crashing on Recall and then carrying on from my last single combat when I opened it again, but this time there doesn't seem to any way to get out. Booooo.

Posting the save file here (compress it with zip first) could help track down what went wrong. If you remember more about what led to final or earlier crashes, that would be helpful. Details that could be relevant are whether you had used Single Combat more than once on that level, saved previously on that level, and, if you had saved previously, was that while in Single Combat.

[robinjohnson]

I've attached the save file ("Robin"), which opens at the beginning of the single combat.

In the zip, there's also "Robin428844.new", which I think was partly created when the game tried to put me back in the dungeon level. If I try to open that, I get "Savefile corrupted - Couldn't load block monsters". There's also another one of those .new files, which was created similarly at a previous crash, which happened when I got "yanked upwards" by a Word of Recall spell. The game application just closes after the "--more--" without any message that I can see (it's possible it prints some something immediately before closing the window.)

I'm not sure whether I'd saved on that level previously - it's probable, as I was playing for 10 minutes or so at a time during work breaks - but I definitely never saved during Single Combat. I'd used Single Combat several times previously on that level and others. It was great for preventing summoning storms.

I'm now unsure quite of the order in which things happened (sorry, memory problems). It's possible that I DID get out of this Single Combat the first time I played it, and the game didn't crash till I Recalled again. There'd definitely been crashes before that, though, and I'm almost certain those happened on a different dungeon level.

I don't know if this is relevant, but at one point I spent hundreds of turns in Single "Combat" with a quythulg (it might have been this one, but I think it was a previous one) leaning on "." in order to heal and recharge my rings, which felt a bit dirty. If that's what killed me, it'd feel a little bit deserved.

I'm playing on Windows 10 with the official distribution, using the roguelike keyset.

(I don't suppose there's any way to get my character back? Thanks to everyone who works on the game, all the same. I hadn't played since 2-point-something till I got back into it this time; it's so much less grindy, and the classes feel a lot more different to each other, even late in the game.)

[Nick]

This should work fine now - the Single Combat is over, and you're back in town. The .new files are failed saves from when something has gone wrong, so it's not surprising they don't open. I don't think your recharging stunt had anything to do with the problems

backwardsEric - there were some extraneous chunks in the chunk_list that (2 extra level 76 known chunks and a level 74 known). Deleting those before exiting single combat, and setting chunk_list_max to 3 (for the regular and known level 76, and the Town) was all that was needed. There is clearly an infrequent bug in Single Combat (maybe to do with that segfault we saw recently), but I'm actually quite impressed at the game's ability to recover from it...

[robinjohnson]

This should work fine now - the Single Combat is over, and you're back in town

Amazing, thank you so much!

[kineahora]

This should work fine now - the Single Combat is over, and you're back in town. The .new files are failed saves from when something has gone wrong, so it's not surprising they don't open. I don't think your recharging stunt had anything to do with the problems

backwardsEric - there were some extraneous chunks in the chunk_list that (2 extra level 76 known chunks and a level 74 known). Deleting those before exiting single combat, and setting chunk_list_max to 3 (for the regular and known level 76, and the Town) was all that was needed. There is clearly an infrequent bug in Single Combat (maybe to do with that segfault we saw recently), but I'm actually quite impressed at the game's ability to recover from it...

That crash file I had posted the other week was also single-combat related.
This is almost certainly the newest part of the code and one that alters regular game play the most. Not surprising to me that bugs still need ironing...

Single combat is really a cool thing very new to the game and I think one of the best additions to the game, along with fractional speeds, since 1990.

[robinjohnson]

It's happening again. This is my first Single Combat on this level, which I've just arrived on. I got commanded to return by a Q and cast SC on it; I don't think I've killed any other monsters or found any objects.

It was crashing with Recall again earlier, on a level where I'd used SC multiple times. (I don't know if this is relevant, but there were three or four vaults on that level, so probably hundreds of objects in dozens of piles.) I was able to leave that level by the stairs, then Recall. I don't remember any more details.

[robinjohnson]

(oops, attachment made into a zip and attached successfully this time!)

[Nick]

Fixed version attached (I'm getting better at this).

You may find this doesn't happen if you use the latest nightly release from the releases page.

[robinjohnson]

You may find this doesn't happen if you use the latest nightly release

Thank you for doing that so quickly! And I'll try those nightly releases.

[Nick]

Thank you for doing that so quickly! And I'll try those nightly releases.

No worries. And please let us know if it's still crashing with the nightlies - I am hopeful that backwardsEric has fixed the problem.

[robinjohnson]

I had no trouble after I started using the nightlies, and went on to my second win :-)

One thing I'm noticing with my new hobbit rogue using the nightly build is that the second level feeling is happening MUCH later - and I think not at all on at least one level, even after I'd explored the whole thing. Did something change there?

[Nick]

I had no trouble after I started using the nightlies, and went on to my second win :-)

Excellent

One thing I'm noticing with my new hobbit rogue using the nightly build is that the second level feeling is happening MUCH later - and I think not at all on at least one level, even after I'd explored the whole thing. Did something change there?

Nothing has changed deliberately. The way this works is that there are a number of random floor grids specified as "feeling" grids, and when you've seen enough of them (a tenth), you get the feeling.

Has anyone else noticed any differences here?

[robinjohnson]

Nothing has changed deliberately. The way this works is that there are a number of random floor grids specified as "feeling" grids, and when you've seen enough of them (a tenth), you get the feeling.

Ah. In that case, it might be related to (my?) rogue-style play: detect objects, magic map, and creep around in the dark, so it's not necessary to actually see most squares of most rooms. That makes sense, but it's a little incongruous since rogues should be the who are best at casing out a joint for valuables!

[robinjohnson]

Ah. In that case, it might be related to (my?) rogue-style play

...actually, no; I'm convinced this isn't working as designed. As you can see from the attached screenshot, I've explored this whole level except for a couple of small dark patches in the northwest, and I still only have the first feeling. After taking the screenshot, I explored those patches too - still nothing. This is happening on pretty much every level.

I didn't have this experience finishing my old game, though. Apart from having started this game with the new version, differences in play style include having randarts on, and casting Object Detection/Detect Monsters/Detect Stairs and using scrolls of Magic Mapping a lot.

I wondered if one of the magical detections might be causing feeling grids to be "seen" without counting toward the feeling - but I tried a level without using them, and had the same problem, so it doesn't seem to be that.