The burning question of today...

[scud]

AGH. Left a nearly completed level on my screen unsaved, 80% of a cells vault cleared and Vecna a pile of dust, and have just come back to discover that Angband has (for some reason) quit. AGH. Vanilla 3.3.2 is the only version I can remember that *ever* quits.

*****

Anyway...

I don't have immunity to fire. I don't recall ever getting anywhere near this CL/DL without fire immunity, and frankly I don't like it one little bit. I'm down to three copies of Exorcism and Dispelling in my pack, and just another four copies at home.

How does fire work? If I have 20 flammable books and 80 flammable arrows is it a 20% chance that a book will burn, or (given the books are over four slots and the arrows over one) an 80% chance, or... what? I have a feeling the answer is 'somewhere inbetween'.

I have a nice bow but it's not brilliant as an actual weapon. I guess the question is, would not carrying any ammo lead to an increase in book-burning?

[fizzix]

AGH. Left a nearly completed level on my screen unsaved, 80% of a cells vault cleared and Vecna a pile of dust, and have just come back to discover that Angband has (for some reason) quit. AGH. Vanilla 3.3.2 is the only version I can remember that *ever* quits.

Never seen the game auto-quit before. I've had it up for days at a time!

[Derakon]

Every single item in each stack has a chance of being destroyed. If you have 80 arrows and are hit by a fire attack, you're almost certainly going to lose several of them. Similarly, even if you have 5 copies of a book in your inventory, sufficiently bad luck could result in losing all of them in a single attack.

[scud]

So there's no safety in numbers: if I carry just a single flammable object it's no more or less likely to go *poof* than if it were one of a hundred flammable objects.

Right.

Now when's my bloody Thing Of Fire Immunity going to turn up? Every stat is at 180/*** and sustained, I've got base speed up to 32, my weapon does reasonable melée damage, but I demand more!

*****

Edit: fizzix, 3.3.2 will lock up on me probably every 10 hours of play so it's not a big problem. No obvious pattern to it, but it's definitely when the game is 'busy' - lots of breathers/drops etc going on. On this occasion I don't know quite what happened, but the application had actually closed in my absence.

*****

Edit edit: can't see any report for the recent application quit, but the hangs all appear to be as follows:

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Application Specific Information:
objc[13319]: garbage collection is OFF
Assertion failed: (timer > 0), function mon_inc_timed, file monster/mon-timed.c, line 247.

[Magnate]

So there's no safety in numbers: if I carry just a single flammable object it's no more or less likely to go *poof* than if it were one of a hundred flammable objects.

Right.

Not quite - the maths doesn't quite work like that.

Let's say for example that the chance of a book being burned up is 50%. If you have two books, the chance of each burning is 50%, so the outcomes look like this:

neither burned - 25%
one burned - 50%
both burned - 25%

So having two books gives a 75% chance that you'll have at least one left after a fire attack, compared with 50% if you have only one. Carrying spares *is* better if you have the capacity.

Edit edit: can't see any report for the recent application quit, but the hangs all appear to be as follows:

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Application Specific Information:
objc[13319]: garbage collection is OFF
Assertion failed: (timer > 0), function mon_inc_timed, file monster/mon-timed.c, line 247.

I'm afraid this is an obscure bug in 3.3.x that was found after release. It was fixed for 3.4.x

[scud]

So having two books gives a 75% chance that you'll have at least one left after a fire attack, compared with 50% if you have only one. Carrying spares *is* better if you have the capacity.

I understand the need for redundancy. Just wanted to check whether or not carrying 198 pieces of kindling in my quiver would, erm, 'draw fire'.

I'm afraid this is an obscure bug in 3.3.x that was found after release. It was fixed for 3.4.x

Not just me then. 'Ten hourly lock-ups' was probably overstating the problem, and I'd sooner stick with 3.3.2 because (AFAIK) the 3.4 game window rescales ASCII rather than resizes the window, and I like to see a lot more dungeon at any one time.