[Gensouband] How does .live track victories/deaths?

[Cryomaniac]

How does the .live server track victories/deaths in the games in order to report them? I've noticed it didn't register my death in Gensouband - probably because the game over wording is slightly different.

[Gwarl]

Two ways:

1. Anything sufficiently like more recent versions of Vanilla contains a header in the savefile which gives some basic character information, which angband.live reads.

2. The "Exo patch", a small piece of code in load.c and save.c which outputs some basic character information to a text fiel on saving or loading the game. Examples:

https://github.com/Owen-GHB/composband/blob/master/src/save.c

https://github.com/Owen-GHB/composband/blob/master/src/load.c

.live only recognises the win when the cause of death is 'Ripe Old Age'

[Cryomaniac]

To be clear: The relevant code is in the new functions updatecharinfoS/updatecharinfoL, which work with a new file that contains info about current character in a parseable format. This is used to track character deaths and current status (race/class/level/location). They're called getting called in the savefile write/read functions.

Is there any other new relevant code I'm missing?

Is there a difference between the functions called on saving and loading?

[Gwarl]

I think in many cases I only went with udpatecharinfoS with the reasoning that whatever character info might be written upon loading a save will be identical to the information output when that save was saved, so it's unneeded.

The important parts are I guess the format and the directory that the output goes to. It's basically just JSON eg:

{
race: "Half-Orc",
class: "Blackguard",
mapName: "Angband",
dLvl: "0",
cLvl: "1",
isDead: "0",
killedBy: "(saved)"
}

[Cryomaniac]

Added this code to save.c/load.c, did a quick check on my PC - seems to work properly, it created a similar CharOutput.txt for me. Made the commit to my github project.

Not sure if I can cleanly implement support for victory tracking - right now, the variant expects death cause to be just "ripe" if we're looking at a victory dump, tinkering with this could break old behaviour.

[Gwarl]

If you can confirm that the killedBy field will be =="ripe" for a victory I can just add that as a condition for victory, possibly even for gensouband specifically in case of a variant having a unique called 'ripe'

[Cryomaniac]

I don't have a winner character on hand right now to directly confirm that, but according to the source code, the p_ptr->died_from field (which will be copied to killedBy in the dump) can have following special values:

"ripe" - Standard victory
"triumph" - As an Outsider, win the game and leave Gensoukyou
"hourai" - As a Chemist, make the Hourai Elixir and drink it
"true_loser" - As Shion, defeat Serpent of Chaos in your super form

[Gwarl]

I've added logic fro registering gensouband victories.

I think I may have misled you about main-gcu.c I'm currently running into compile errors, can you revert that commit? I can take a look at implementing the customiseable subwindows myself later, it's not critical for this variant anyway since the hardcoded subwindow layout seems to come from Zangband and be very reasonable.

[Cryomaniac]

Changed to older version of main-gcu, made commit.

[Gwarl]

Seems to be working.