Bugs and issues in 4.1.0

[kandrc]

I've got a young @ mage with his back to the wall in a corridor and a panther pounding on him from the north. My frost bolts miss it, whether I target it explicitly or simply fire north; it's as if it isn't there. Any tips where I should set a breakpoint to debug this?

[dreembeard]

Damn, I hate it when I find some nice, fresh monster droppings and they've already got bugs.

How a bug report made my day... love your wit!

[dreembeard]

I'm sure a new topic will come up some time in the next 50 nanoseconds.

Ah, crap! I was too slow again!

[PowerWyrm]

speaking of Teleport Self;

TS works by sending you X distance away from your current location, where X is based on your CL.

Now, as i understand it, this means that the higher X, the better. However, when you are CL50, the spell tends to cycle you through a set number of teleport results.

I assume this is because the X value exceeds [a parameter i'm not sure of] and therefore only so many spots in the map qualify. However, when you are lower level, you actually teleport a smaller X away, thus making the spell BETTER when your CL is lower.

Currently, TS for mage is clvl5 and priest is clvl*8. At level 50, your priest will try to teleport 400 squares away in a dungeon of size 198x66, placing your character always out of bounds. The game then chooses the spot farthest away from the character. And when you teleport again, bouncing you back and forth between two spots. As proposed, the solution would be to use a randomized distance.

[PowerWyrm]

Speaking of bailing out, I just bailed out of quaffing an unidentified potion at the "Direction?" prompt and didn't learn its identification. I think either I should learn that it's !Dragon's Breath (what other potion requires a direction?) or I shouldn't be allowed to bail out.

In PWMAngband, I simply removed the choice of direction for unIDed potions of dragon breath and applied the effect on the spot (blast effect around the player).

[kandrc]

2 minor bugs with monster droppings

Damn, I hate it when I find some nice, fresh monster droppings and they've already got bugs.

[dreembeard]

Smeagol's crappy life and legacy (2-3 minor bugs)

(2 minor bugs with monster droppings + 1 misleading comment in monster.txt)

The first bug is not specific for V 4.1.0; it was introduced in some earlier version. But it's still there:

bug 1: Certain uniques drop an item or money. If they are supposed to drop "excellent treasure", this typically leads to a drop of "31 gold pieces worth of copper".
(Pfff. What a wondrous reward for hunting down Smeagol.)

Not vital, but nice if it got mended. Either by ensuring that "excellent treasure" really means "lots of dough"), or else by adding an ONLY_ITEM flag.
I did not look up excellent money drops in the code yet, but I suspect that turning 1dX into X/2+1d(X/2) may be sufficient. Maybe with a level boost added in.
I did scan gamedata/monster.txt, and found that most uniques that drop something already have the ONLY_ITEM flag. Only Smeagol, the 3 balrogs, the Lernean hydra, Pazuzu, Radagast, Arien and Osse do not have it. If there's any logic in that, I don't see it. Except for the Lernean hydra perhaps.
Of course, Smeagol does steal money now, but it would be more true to character if he stole jewelry and fish.

As a (kind of) workaround, I made my own mod for Smeagol (see below), where I beefed him up a bit (higher ac; steals items as well as money), and gave him more appropriate droppings, using the new "drop:" lines. So now he usually drops one or two rings, next to (a bit more) money and any stuff he recently stole from you or picked up.
For players who do not postpone the duel until they are at dlevel 20 or so, this drop can actually turn out pretty nice.

misleading comment in monster.txt:
# 'drop' lines create possible drops for specific monsters. [COLOR="Yellow"]If any L lines are
# present, the monster will drop *only* items from its L lines[/COLOR]. Each item has
# its percent chance rolled for individually.

bug 2: DROP_4 | ONLY_GOLD, which always leads to a single pile of treasure, is counted as 4 treasures in the monster memory.

So of Smeagol in the modded form below, it is said that he may carry "up to 6 objects or treasures". Which is not formally untrue, because with the spec shown, he MAY drop up to 10 rings. But on average, he drops 1.2 rings. And his faulty monster memory record was based on a drop that comprised 2 rings plus one pile of treasure composed of 4 identical-type little heaps.

[Smeagol's monster.txt entry]

name:Sméagol
base:humanoid
color:B
speed:130
hit-points:400
hearing:20
armor-class:32
sleepiness:5
depth:3
rarity:2
experience:50
blow:TOUCH:EAT_GOLD
blow:PUNCH:HURT:1d3
blow:TOUCH:EAT_ITEM
blow:KICK:HURT:2d3
flags:UNIQUE | MALE | EVIL | INVISIBLE
#flags:DROP_1 | DROP_GOOD | DROP_GREAT
flags:DROP_4 | ONLY_GOLD
drop:ring:Searching:20:1:1
drop:ring:Protection:10:1:1
drop:ring:Resist Fire and Cold:10:1:1
drop:ring:the Mouse:10:1:1
drop:ring:the Dog:10:1:1
drop:ring:Slow Digestion:10:1:1
drop:ring:Feather Falling:10:1:1
drop:ring:See Invisible:20:1:1
drop:ring:Reckless Attacks:10:1:1
drop:ring:Open Wounds:10:1:1
flags:RAND_25 | RAND_50 | TAKE_ITEM
flags:HURT_LIGHT
desc:Usually known as Gollum.  He's been sneaking, and he wants his 'precious.'

I'd recommend my mod for the main branch, but I am a little worried that the RNG will generate a "golden ring" flavor. And of course, Smeagol dropping a golden ring could easily lead to an elderly player suffering a heart attack.

-------------------------------------------
Two monsters to turn cavers into cadavers,
But only when together,
With the small one in front.

A hard one for poor Sméagol, who has never played angband.

[Derakon]

I thank you for this attempt to save us (and me in particular) from taking the path to boredom. Let me try to return the favor.
To keep you from the tedium of constantly switching gear around to improve your chances on winning the game, you will from now on only change gear in town. I for my part will renounce all search-boosting gear. Does that strike you as a good deal?

Alas, it turns out that "just don't do the thing you find tedious" is not an effective way to design games. If there is a tedious but effective technique, then your players will use it, while loudly claiming how boring your game is. And they'll be right. The secret of good game design, at a mechanical level, is ensuring that there is no effective yet not-fun path to success. We had this same argument regarding no-selling, where people were saying "if you don't enjoy selling items, just don't sell items!" But as long as the game rewarded selling items, I and many others felt that we had to sell items, so we were doing something we didn't really enjoy because it meant our chances of success were higher.

But all that doesn't really matter now, because as it turns out my understanding of the current system (or my understanding of Nick's modification) was flawed:

Well done! You have accurately described the system as currently implemented

So I don't think we have anything left to argue about. I'm sure a new topic will come up some time in the next 50 nanoseconds.

[dreembeard]

I meant the old s/S commands, which searched once or toggled search mode. They were removed when the new traps system was created, but swapping around your equipment seems to nearly-exactly duplicate their functionality, if I understand the exploit correctly.

No, I 'm afraid that you don't. The old 's'earch command was probabilistic; putting on other gear is determistic. Not an exact duplicate, and not "nearly-exact" either.

There's a difference between quirks and game mechanics, in that the latter is intentional. Your list is a mix of quirks and mechanics; for example, selling for 0 gold is absolutely a mechanic, not a quirk.

I agree that "selling for 0 gold" was not a good example. Not really a quirk, in that it was intentionally introduced. As a compromise in the "War on Selling", iirc. But "mechanic" is not the very best term either: I suggest "kludge". Like quirks, kludges are not very realistic, but nevertheless kept because of their functionality in gameplay.

But more importantly, there's a difference between fun quirks and tedious quirks.

Well.... There are quirks that you find tedious. Or rather, that seem tedious to you (I assume that you did not use my quirk yet, or did I infect you already?), because you associate them with tedium you experienced in the past. In my book, (fresh) quirks are always fun. Quirks are loopholes in "the system" that players can make use of. Which is fun to do. Even more so if you found them yourself. I 'm sure that whoever invented scroll-reading-on-a-stairway never had more fun than when he foiled "the system" for the very first time.

But in the end, any quirk can become a routine, and then a drudge, if you use it too often or too long. Like any part of gameplay. So the trick is to stop going through the motions when you feel the onset of boredom. Which, admittedly, can be hard. Because routines are addictive. Sometimes, it is easier to make some modifications that force you to behave differently.

Which is what you seem to be bent on. Not just for yourself, but for the entire community. You are trying to save us all from tedium.

Putting searching gear off and on is a tedious way to detect traps. I don't think anyone really wants to go around constantly switching their gear around to improve their odds of detecting traps. What they really want is to not be surprised by a trap. To the extent that the game is rewarding constantly swapping gear around, the game should be changed so that said gear-swapping is not necessary, in an attempt to make the game more fun (by eliminating a source of tedium). The easiest way to do that is to make gear-swapping unrewarding, which can be done by giving the player exactly one chance to see each trap.

I thank you for this attempt to save us (and me in particular) from taking the path to boredom. Let me try to return the favor.
To keep you from the tedium of constantly switching gear around to improve your chances on winning the game, you will from now on only change gear in town. I for my part will renounce all search-boosting gear. Does that strike you as a good deal?

Let us pray that it will help us both to make our games more fun!

----------------------
Melee is for warriors.
We paladins prefer mêlée.

[Nick]

How about this, then: when a trap is generated, it gets a randomly-generated difficulty score for noticing it. If your search skill exceeds the difficulty, you can see it, with no roll required (conversely, if your skill is too low, then you cannot see it). If you failed to notice a trap, but then equip an item that improves your search skill, now you can see it because your skill is higher. But removing/re-equipping the item has no effect, because you only get one roll for every trap: the roll that determined the trap's difficulty score at the outset. If you want to run around with low search skill, and then equip items that improve your search skill when you suspect traps have sprung up around you, you can, and doing so will help you notice traps "post-hoc". But I don't see any obvious way to game the proposed system to let you tediously search for traps.

Well done! You have accurately described the system as currently implemented

[Ingwe Ingweron]

I realise this is controversial but I would like to unify the various kinds of lines and corners in angband so that if you can see it, it can see you and you can target it, and if you can't see it, you can't target it. But I'll probably just leave that on the feature list of my imaginary variant.

I look at the asymmetric LoS as compensation for monsters being able to cast spells from within walls, but not be hit by spells in return, and that the asymmetric LoS goes both ways, if @ is on the wrong side of the hockey stick (e.g., my last Elf Warrior attempt that got one-shotted by a Pit Fiend. (Actually, that was a combination of both being on the wrong side of the hockey stick and the improved path-finding that let the once TO'd Pit Fiend to find @ again very quickly). (Also, the asymmetry is absolutely vital for purposes of Rocketband, that you just loaded to the server.)

[Derakon]

I see your point, but this makes sense in the game world - and could be mimicked by saving and reloading. We don't want to encourage people to do that every turn

How about this, then: when a trap is generated, it gets a randomly-generated difficulty score for noticing it. If your search skill exceeds the difficulty, you can see it, with no roll required (conversely, if your skill is too low, then you cannot see it). If you failed to notice a trap, but then equip an item that improves your search skill, now you can see it because your skill is higher. But removing/re-equipping the item has no effect, because you only get one roll for every trap: the roll that determined the trap's difficulty score at the outset. If you want to run around with low search skill, and then equip items that improve your search skill when you suspect traps have sprung up around you, you can, and doing so will help you notice traps "post-hoc". But I don't see any obvious way to game the proposed system to let you tediously search for traps.

[Nick]

I don't think this is desirable. As you can see it's leading people back into the tedium of searching for traps, just by abusing quirks of the game mechanics rather than by using standard, well-documented tools like a search command. IMO you should get one chance to see each trap, period. If you want a higher chance, you have to be wearing your search gear while you're exploring (or while fighting trap-summoners).

I see your point, but this makes sense in the game world - and could be mimicked by saving and reloading. We don't want to encourage people to do that every turn

[Gwarl]

I realise this is controversial but I would like to unify the various kinds of lines and corners in angband so that if you can see it, it can see you and you can target it, and if you can't see it, you can't target it. But I'll probably just leave that on the feature list of my imaginary variant.

[Derakon]

I don't get this, Derakon. What "well-documented search command" are you talking about?

I meant the old s/S commands, which searched once or toggled search mode. They were removed when the new traps system was created, but swapping around your equipment seems to nearly-exactly duplicate their functionality, if I understand the exploit correctly.

And whence this indignation about other players "abusing" quirks?

Nearly all players make use of game quirks now and then. Such as "selling" potentially harmful consumables for 0 gold, wasting a quylthulg from "around the corner" (using the quirk that Q can only teleport or summon with you in LoS), and reading unknown scrolls on a stairway (using the quirk that monsters cannot follow you onto the stairs).

Would like to forbid all of these?

There's a difference between quirks and game mechanics, in that the latter is intentional. Your list is a mix of quirks and mechanics; for example, selling for 0 gold is absolutely a mechanic, not a quirk. But more importantly, there's a difference between fun quirks and tedious quirks. Fun quirks are fine! Let's codify them into mechanics wherever possible. But we should be seeking to eradicate unfun or tedious quirks, or at least turn them into something that is fun/flavorful.

Putting searching gear off and on is a tedious way to detect traps. I don't think anyone really wants to go around constantly switching their gear around to improve their odds of detecting traps. What they really want is to not be surprised by a trap. To the extent that the game is rewarding constantly swapping gear around, the game should be changed so that said gear-swapping is not necessary, in an attempt to make the game more fun (by eliminating a source of tedium). The easiest way to do that is to make gear-swapping unrewarding, which can be done by giving the player exactly one chance to see each trap.