Bugs and complaints on current master

[Nick]

I believe I have fixed or listed here the remaining bugs that I know of in current master.

This thread is for people to

1. Report new bugs or ones I have missed and
2. Make other complaints or feature requests.

Curses and traps are still not fully mature, and there are some other planned changes for 4.1, so jump in and opine on any of that, or anything else, too.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Yep, you've got everything that's on my list. Still trying to get you a "drops in walls" savefile.

Oh, and reiterating a feature request to bring back the trap detection line, at least as a game-play option. (I note, "FAAngband does this...")

Currently, my only complaint is not liking the new treatment of secret doors not being detectable except by walk-by. I think it makes tactical approaches to pits difficult, wastes time unnecessarily feeling around for doors, and unfairly benefits experienced players who already have a good idea of where secret doors are most likely to be.

Looking forward to, hopefully, seeing new terrain in the dungeon; like lava pits, water rooms, webs, hidden tree groves (ala FAAngband.) And to those who say trees don't grow underground, maybe its a shaft room with access to sunlight, or a giant mushroom forest like in Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth".

Maybe some of those one-time "special" levels from FAAngband too. "Drums in the deep...!!!" And "neutral" aligned "p", so that I can have a sop to my conscience about killing every single thing.

Thanks, Nick. Such a great job!

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Thought of one more thing I've reported, but it was rather arcane and non-important. The initial allocation of stats on point based creation - could this be made user-editable? New races and classes can now be made relatively easily by tweaking the edit files, but the stat allocation can turn out oddly for such new race or class.

On an even more arcane note about initial allocation of stats, this time impacting standard roller mode. I think it would be nice to see the rolled stats before choosing the class. This would make even the birth process a more interesting exercise, make the standard roller viable as a real option, and add spice to the game. The point-based system may be recommended, but I'm tired of always starting a new @ with identical stats as the previous. Come to think of it, it would also be an interesting option to have race rolled randomly. We are born with whatever race we are, but we can choose our profession based on our innate talents.

[Nick]

Yep, you've got everything that's on my list. Still trying to get you a "drops in walls" savefile.

Don't worry. My main task for a little is going to be dungeon generation, starting with some tidying up of how terrain behaves, which should fix objects falling in the wrong places.

Oh, and reiterating a feature request to bring back the trap detection line, at least as a game-play option. (I note, "FAAngband does this...")

Currently, my only complaint is not liking the new treatment of secret doors not being detectable except by walk-by. I think it makes tactical approaches to pits difficult, wastes time unnecessarily feeling around for doors, and unfairly benefits experienced players who already have a good idea of where secret doors are most likely to be.

My chief reason for not wanting to bring the trap-detect line back is that it was a massive hack to terrain handling which I was really glad to remove. What I would rather do is consider the purpose it was serving for you (and presumably other people), and introduce a feature that serves that purpose directly. FAangband only still has it because it's currently abandonware

There is still some thinking to do about the best way to handle detection of traps, doors and stairs. My baseline is I don't want it to be something that everyone has to do routinely, but I'm open to suggestions. One possibility is bringing back some sort of perception stat which improves detection at a distance, but in a fixed way (like infravision) rather than a random check.

Looking forward to, hopefully, seeing new terrain in the dungeon; like lava pits, water rooms, webs, hidden tree groves (ala FAAngband.) And to those who say trees don't grow underground, maybe its a shaft room with access to sunlight, or a giant mushroom forest like in Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth".

Maybe some of those one-time "special" levels from FAAngband too. "Drums in the deep...!!!" And "neutral" aligned "p", so that I can have a sop to my conscience about killing every single thing.

All these things are possible; some are more likely than others

[PowerDiver]

There is still some thinking to do about the best way to handle detection of traps, doors and stairs.

I haven't played any *bands for about a year, but I used to play my homebrew based on 3.0 often enough before that. One of the very few things I missed from 3.1+ was the trap detection marker. Then I had an inspiration. What is a dungeon level? I'd discussed that many times over the years, with never a decent answer, and suddenly I knew. A dungeon level can be defined to be the area that shows up for detection spells. I.e. any detection should apply to the entire level. No more green lines. [I don't remember the history, but for some period of time detections covered what was in a resizable window, which with appropriate font size and terminal size could cover everything so this is not precisely unprecedented.]

This is a pretty radical change, one that makes the game noticeably easier. Occasionally I felt guilty when dObj gave me massive information, but I never felt guilty for longer than a second or two. It is insanely annoying trying to keep track of what areas have been covered by which detections.

Eliminating detection spells entirely is a possibility, though I think priests should get some. If you keep any detection spells in the game, you owe it to yourself to playtest with full level detections.

[t4nk]

There is still disconnected stairs bug. And I think use after free too? At least address sanitizer was complaining about it relatively recently (last week or so, I think).

[Nick]

There is still disconnected stairs bug. And I think use after free too? At least address sanitizer was complaining about it relatively recently (last week or so, I think).

Excellent, thanks for those.

[Nick]

Eliminating detection spells entirely is a possibility, though I think priests should get some. If you keep any detection spells in the game, you owe it to yourself to playtest with full level detections.

That's an interesting thought. I'm currently having trouble with this issue because I can see a number of ways forward, and I have some sympathies with all of them. My only real definite is that routine trap detection is a bad thing. I guess some ideas will get tried out, and we'll see what seems to work best.

[Pete Mack]

Please do a sanitize build and play it for a while with more than a toy character. Use archery, and use verbose mode. I have seen crashes from the object code and from the trap code when an earthquake trap destroyed either itself or an out-of-view object.

[Nick]

Please do a sanitize build and play it for a while with more than a toy character. Use archery, and use verbose mode. I have seen crashes from the object code and from the trap code when an earthquake trap destroyed either itself or an out-of-view object.

If someone tells me how to do a sanitize build I will be happy to do this - bonus points for answers that don't involve completely changing the build system

Failing that, I can spam earthquake traps until one of them does the appropriate thing.

[Pete Mack]

An ordinary debug build will expose the bugs. It just won't label them for you. I believe CLANG is fully compatible with gcc make files.

[t4nk]

If someone tells me how to do a sanitize build I will be happy to do this - bonus points for answers that don't involve completely changing the build system

Failing that, I can spam earthquake traps until one of them does the appropriate thing.

I recall you use Linux? I think "./configure CLFAGS=-fsanitize=address LDFLAGS=-fsanitize=address [OTHER_OPTIONS]..." should work (if your compiler supports those, which I guess it does).
Although, I still don't know how Angband's build system works and just use makefiles
edit: (OTHER_OPTIONS are standard Angband's options, like --disable-curses, etc).

[AnonymousHero]

For ASAN/UBSAN/etc. IIRC what you need to do is to avoid use of "ld" for the linking step (just use "cc" or "clang" instead) and to get the -fsanitize flags into the compiler flags.

The "ld" thing is needed because ASAN/etc. need to link with libraries which won't be included if you use "ld".

[AnonymousHero]

An ordinary debug build will expose the bugs. It just won't label them for you. I believe CLANG is fully compatible with gcc make files.

This is incorrect. ASAN and UBSAN will find a huge number of bugs[1] that debug builds don't. (In fact, debug builds usually won't actually expose any more bugs, per se, although they might just by virtue of having a lower level of optimization.)

You pay for it with lower performance (usually anything from 1.5x-3x, sometimes even worse), but it shouldn't be a big deal. It's certainly nothing like as bad as valgrind.

[1] Assuming that there are in fact any bugs to be found.

[Pete Mack]

Debug builds set all values to 0xeeeeeeee in freed memory, and detects duplicate frees. It is a big win compared to, say, O2 for finding memory errors