Issues on current master

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Nick]

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

Thanks - another thing to test.

[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.

[AnonymousHero]

t4nk stuff

Sorry, I was being kind of an asshole -- I really just hope that it does eventually get merged.

[Sky]

...

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

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: angband.exe
Application Version: 0.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 58fd55a3
Fault Module Name: msvcrt.dll
Fault Module Version: 7.0.7601.17744
Fault Module Timestamp: 4eeaf722
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00009966
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1
Locale ID: 2057
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

[Gwarl]

I don't know if this helps at all (I'm sure it doesn't) but I'm attatching the file which contains the pathfinding functions for the roguelike I started writing in C#, which seemed to work as intended. The last three functions are the relevant ones.

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

I managed to implement monsters not being omniscient by having each monster remember its destination, so upon losing sight of the player it would proceed toward the square where the player was last seen, then resume the default drunken walk if not catching sight of the player again. It's not very sophisticated but monsters ended up going where they were supposed to

I'm quite sure there are a great money reasons why nothing this simple could be done with angband, but I'm still a little too afraid of C to delve in myself to see how pathfinding in angband is done just yet.

[Nick]

Another small bug: "You feel something roll beneath your feet" message is being given for items that have been ignored.

Right - Pete gave me a fix for a potential crash in this function, I must have done it wrong.

Thanks for the reports, keep them coming. I'm hoping to get the monster pathing to a better state this weekend.

[Ingwe Ingweron]

Another small bug: "You feel something roll beneath your feet" message is being given for items that have been ignored.

[t4nk]

@AnomymousHero: It's just a pretty big chunk of code, about 40k lines or so. Nick already has plenty of things to do, considering deaf monsters and other things
Yes, all of it is licensed under the same terms as the rest of Angband's code. Adapting it to T2 would be a big task. textui2 is not written in C++, and has numerous dependencies on other parts of Angband (memory functions, string functions, parser...). You'll probably have a better time with something like libtcod?

@Sky: Interesting that you said "they think 8 squares is better than sideways 1 square plus straight 8 squares". Your character has 12 stealth, and most monsters have hearing 20, so they can only hear you from 8 grids (and NOT "as the crow flies", but by pathing through non-wall grids). Looks like monster list rebalancing will have to be done for 4.1

[Ingwe Ingweron]

An odd occurrence: @ fighting the Tarrasque, firing arrows at his point-blank target. Then, suddenly, the targeting fails and the arrows are dropping at @'s feet. When "looking" at the Tarrasque, the game says, "You see an open door".
@ switches to bludgeoning the Tarrasque to death and discovers the Tarrasque is standing on solid rubble (not the passable kind). So, what must have happened... Tarrasque breathed fire and created lava under its feet, then Tarrasque breated frost and changed the lava to solid rubble under its feet, then the game incorrectly (a) allowed the Tarrasque to stand on solid rubble, and (b) incorrectly identified the solid rubble as an open door when "looked" at by @ (keeping in mind that, I, the human player saw a Tarrasque, not rubble, until the Tarrasque was no more).