Issues on current master

[Nick]

Basically the gist is:

1. Calculate the number of steps removed from the player for each square (any delays introduced by this calculation were imperceptible, but my map sizes were about 1/3 the area of angband maps)
2. From a given point, construct a path toward the player by picking an adjacent square with fewer steps remaining to reach the player
3. In ambiguous cases, choose the square which minimises both vertical and horizontal differences

Currently it does 1 and 2 (and I'm not sure about 3). As currently implemented it's really a first attempt - my aim is to get the foundation correct and then build.

[Nick]

my game is crashing regularly when i go down the stairs from DL99 -> 100.

Thanks - another thing to test.

[Nick]

New build up on the nightlies page, with improvements to monster pathfinding. Unlikely to be perfect yet, but I'd appreciate some feedback on which bits of monster behaviour are working and which bits aren't.

[Nomad]

The slow randart generation issue definitely needs a fix. In my first game with the latest nightly it took nearly a minute and a half and generated a 310 MB randart.log file.

[Gwarl]

Could the randart duplication thing have something to do with affixes?

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned but off-weapon slays are prioritised incorrectly, i.e. if I have a poison brand and an off weapon *slay dragon* I will poison the great hell wyrm rather than fiercely smiting him.

Also this one isn't new but rods don't count as magic items for gnomish identification and it's more annoying now I can't identify them with scrolls.

[Nick]

The randart duplication is AFAIK fixed. I know what is causing the slow generation - it's that I have put in a succession of hacks to try and get a proper distribution of tvals while still generating the randarts one at a time in order from artifact.txt. Once I accept reality and actually do a sensible scheme for generating the whole set, we should be fine.

[Sky]

... pfftt...

ok, so i downloaded the last nightly you posted, angband-win-4.0.3-712-gbcd30cf, and i judiciously played the whole thing, i just beat sauron, went back to refill, then down to DL99, stairs .. and crash.

what i did before, because the same thing happened in the *previous* nightly, is that i started the game, wizarded a lev 50 warrior, jumped to DL99, beat sauron senseless, and went down the stairs successfully to DL100.

so something must have happened to the file between turn 1 and now that made it impossible to reach DL100, because it's not a problem with the build itself.

[Nomad]

ok, so i downloaded the last nightly you posted, angband-win-4.0.3-712-gbcd30cf, and i judiciously played the whole thing, i just beat sauron, went back to refill, then down to DL99, stairs .. and crash.

what i did before, because the same thing happened in the *previous* nightly, is that i started the game, wizarded a lev 50 warrior, jumped to DL99, beat sauron senseless, and went down the stairs successfully to DL100.

so something must have happened to the file between turn 1 and now that made it impossible to reach DL100, because it's not a problem with the build itself.

Could be randarts vs. standarts - did you have randarts switched on in the game that crashed at 99 and then just stick with the default options for the test game?

[Nick]

... pfftt...

ok, so i downloaded the last nightly you posted, angband-win-4.0.3-712-gbcd30cf, and i judiciously played the whole thing, i just beat sauron, went back to refill, then down to DL99, stairs .. and crash.

what i did before, because the same thing happened in the *previous* nightly, is that i started the game, wizarded a lev 50 warrior, jumped to DL99, beat sauron senseless, and went down the stairs successfully to DL100.

so something must have happened to the file between turn 1 and now that made it impossible to reach DL100, because it's not a problem with the build itself.

OK, thanks. I haven't looked at that problem yet; Ill let you know when I do a build with a fix in it.

[Sky]

i have re-tested it now. i wizarded a new randart character, and i managed to do DL99 -> sauron -> DL100 -> morgoth, so the build works, in a way.

it must be a bug that occurs over time, something that i do during normal gameplay creates a overflow which then causes the bug ..
which is *possibly* an issue with the dungeon level number-character allocation, or with morgoth, because as far as i know those are the only things which change at DL100.

possibly turn count? my turn counts are always very high ..

[Pete Mack]

@Sky--the usual cause is failure to generate the special artifacts. It really helps to get a debug build and a crash dump (running under the debugger if necessary) when something like this happens. Just knowing the subroutine and line number usually is enough to figure out the bug.

[Sky]

ok, if you mean the crown and grond, i can say no because i wizarded them as well and it didnt prevent me from doing DL99->100.

as for the crash dump, how do i go about generating one? all i get is the windows error message that a app has crashed with a very vague set of addresses.

[Pete Mack]

If you run a debug build* in the gdb debugger, you can get a stack trace with 'backtrack' command. Just repro it in the bar and the bug is likely to be easy to figure out. (unless it fails with a memory error.)

* replace "-O2" with "-O2 -g" in the CFLAGS options in makefile.win (or other appropriate makefile.) You can use plain "-g", but it'll run horribly slowly, rather than just a bit slowly.

[Gwarl]

Just want to say I played a bit of 4.0.5 today experimenting with ttyrecs and it seemed terrible after all the new conveniences of master. That's the opposite of an issue but I thought I'd post it here anyway.

[Sky]

well i looked at that debugger but i have no idea how to run it.

@Nick letting you know that angband-4.0.3-720-gb057135 ALSO has the DL99 bug.

has anyone else experienced this bug? i'm starting to think it might be something on my end.