Pat wrote:
> <Someone> has a patch (we've added a couple of
> his earlier ones) which changes the statue display from a single
> one size fits all "`" to a gray monster symbol instead.
> But I think the idea is a good one, and along with the
> bouldersym option could make the fairly hard to
> distinguish back-tick character go away.
Sources tagged before applying NETHACK_PRE_STATUE,
and afterwards with NETHACK_POST_STATUE for easy
rollback.
About six weeks back, <email deleted> suggested that
bear traps should deal out damage and be escapable via opening magic.
This doesn't do anything about the first part, but it does allow opening
magic (wand of opening, spell of knock, blessed Bell of Opening) to get
the hero out of bear traps and webs if zapped either at self or downwards.
Zaps across the floor which hit monsters will free them from such traps,
with a chance that releasing a hostile monster will pacify it (using
existing #untrap code). Conversely, if you are at a web or bear trap
location but not currently trapped, closing magic (wand of locking, spell
of wizard lock) will cause the trap to activate; you may or may not become
trapped. Likewise for zaps at monsters who are at such locations, which
is treated as an attack.
Opening magic which hits the hero or a monster located at a trap door
or falling rock trap spot will cause the trap to activate; as above, it's
an attack for the monster case. At the moment, zapping opening magic
downwards at the hero's location (but not zapping at self or at monsters)
will also cause holes, pits, and spiked pits to activate. (Zapping down
triggers falling rock traps and zapping up doesn't; that'll need to be
changed.) Zapping opening down while mounted will untrap, if stuck in a
web or bear trap, and will trap, for the falling cases, in precedence over
releasing the saddle and forcibly dismounting. The latter still occurs
when there is no applicable trap present though.
Zapping locking magic downwards at a hole location will convert the
hole into a trap door. Zapping breaking magic (wand of striking, spell of
force bolt) down at a trap door location will convert the trap door into a
hole. (Neither conversion currently alters the made-by-you flag for the
trap. However, the rationalization that distinctive style is what makes
made-by-you recognizable suggests that conversion should clear the flag.)
Lastly, the old behavior (which pre-dated bare holes) of destroying trap
doors when zapping down at them with locking magic has been removed--it
didn't seem to fit very well with the new cases. I'm starting to have
second thoughts about that but am going to commit this before discovery of
some more niggling details drags it out for another six weeks.
More explicit control over the behavior of spoteffects() is probably
the way to go in the long run, but this much simpler fix handles the case
at hand. I'm not sure what `thrownobj' was intended to be used for in the
first place, but it came in handy here. (It was being left as a dangling
pointer when thitmonst() reports that the missile has been used up; that's
fixed now.)
Fix the reported problem of lookhere/autopickup not seeing the missile
which just killed the engulfing monster whose death caused the hero to be
put back onto the map and so look/pickup upon arrival. Normally the missile
gets placed after damage has been dealt and the throw has finished. This
overrides that so that the missile is put into the engulfer's inventory as
it is being killed (which will then put that inventory onto the floor prior
to expelling the hero on top of same). If the monster happens to get
life-saved it just ends up collecting the thrown-from-inside object a little
sooner than usual.
This wouldn't correctly handle the same case for a kicked object, if
that were possible. But it isn't possible to kick objects while engulfed,
so that's moot. Other calls to thitmonst() and hmon() don't appear to have
any objects in transit so shouldn't need any comparable fix (I hope...).
> Give demon lords and other monsters who teleport to your location a
> oneshot arrival message. [...]
> The fixes entry is deliberately a bit vague (and I put it in the new
> feature section rather than the fix section).
And apparently I neglected to commit it with the rest of that patch last
week.
Turn being unconscious (via several reasons, including fainted from
hunger) into a pseudo-property named `Unaware' and use it in several
places where only being asleep was checked. #H202 was about a stunned
character who got the recovery message when it timed out while fainted.
This suppresses messages for several difficulties when they begin or end
while hero is Unaware. Messages about fatal illness, sliming, or
petrification aren't suppressed; they're too important to hide from the
player. "You feel ..." messages come out as "You dream that you feel ..."
when Unaware; fairly lame but hopefully adequate.
From a bug report, having hallucination time out while
mimicking an orange (instead of gold, after eating a mimic corpse), you'd
still get the hallucinatory end-of-mimicking message about not wanting to
be peeled. If hallucination state is toggled, update the pending message
and change the hero's appearance. In practice, only the orange-to-gold
case can occur. Anything which might trigger gold-to-orange will have
terminated the hero's mimickery befort that happens.
<Someone> reported being swallowed by his pet purple worm during
Conflict, then being stuck inside once Conflict ended. I'm not entirely
sure what dog_move() intended by the "swallowed case handled above" comment.
It returns without letting the pet move when the distance between pet and
hero is 0; that wasn't much in the way of "handling" being swallowed.
Grabbing pets did let go, but peaceful monsters didn't until you actually
attempted to move away from them. Now all four combinations (grabbed or
swallowed by tame or peaceful monster) are handled the same: the monster
will let the hero go next time it gets a chance to try to move, using up
its move in the process.
Forwarded from the newsgroup by <Someone>: temple priest might
abandon his post via teleport if conditions are obscure enough. Change
rloc_pos_ok() to only accept spots inside the same shop or temple when a
shopkeeper or temple priest is teleported to a random destination. rloc()
tries rloc_pos_ok() 500 times before reverting to goodpos(), so this will
usually succeed for a large room; it may fail for a small one (reverting
to the current behavior, more or less). Shopkeepers or priests who get
polymorphed into a critter which teleports to the stairs when in need of
healing will still leave their shop or temple if wounded (no change).
Priests resist if the player tries to teleport them, but shopkeepers
don't. So for direct attack by the player, this only affects shopkeeper
destination. But it affects both types as far as being hit by quantum
mechanics (probably caused by player's use of conflict) or if polymorphed
into monsters which steal and then flee (again, probably caused by the
player since those strong monsters won't voluntarily polymorph).
From a bug report...): pushing a boulder onto a level teleporter trap
could repeat the
You push the boulder and suddenly it disappears!
message. That would happen whenever the teleport destination was the same
as the current level (20% chance). The boulder wasn't being moved onto the
trap location so was still present when the pushing code tried to handle
the next one in the pile. I've changed so that pushing stops whenever a
pushed boulder is affected by a trap, and also so that the boulder gets
moved as usual when a level teleporter fails to send it somewhere.
I've always thought it's pretty strange that pushing ever operates
on more than one boulder in the same turn in any situation, but I haven't
changed that for the non-trap cases. (Usually the first boulder pushed
ends up blocking the second one, so you get a "you try to move it, but
in vain" message which seems odd since you just moved one. But if there's
a pool of water or lava in the path, you can actually push multiple
boulders successfully.)
<Someone> reported that he applied an unID'd bag and it became
discovered as a bag of tricks even though a spellbook appeared on the floor
next to him rather than having a monster show up (the monster was a mimic).
Suppress the bag discovery unless you can see or sense a monster appear.
(This doesn't really achieve much for most players, who'll recognize the
bag because they know that only one type of container doesn't prompt to
take things out and/or put things in, but I think it does make sense.)
While mucking with bag of tricks I decided that to be consistent with
the behavior of other containers, the #tip command should release all the
monsters in the bag instead of just one.
And after doing that, I realized that horn of plenty ought to behave
much the same, so #tip will operate on it now. However, it won't be listed
as a likely candidate in the "which item?" prompt unless/until it has been
discovered. (Attempting to empty any other type of horn yields "nothing
happens", same as for a horn of plenty with no charges left.) Emptying a
horn of plenty in a shop can be extremely verbose, but I don't think that
qualifies as a bug and don't currently have any plans to alter it.
From a bug report: [ slashem-Bugs-1206099 ] Torches are not extinguished with rust traps).
A rust trap that hits the torso candles causes all lit objects being carried
to be extinguished, but one which hit the weapon arm didn't have same affect
on a wielded light. This fix causes wielded candles or lamps (not Sunsword)
to go out if affected by any rust, such as hitting a rust monster with one,
rather than use his patch that just handled the trap case. It also excludes
wielded lights from the existing torso splash since having them be hit by
both instances is too obviously buggy.
I think brass lanterns ought to be exempt from being extinguished by
water (at least splashing which is less drastic than total submersion) since
there are references to them operating by batteries rather than fire, but I
didn't want to track all the places which would be affected.
<email deleted> wrote:
> - when in a hardware store, I put a glass wand out of a sack (the glass wand
> will cost you 266 zorkmids) and threw it in the shop => shattered into a
> thousand pieces BUT if I try to pay, I do not owe the shopkeeper anything !!!
> If I break a potion with a /oS, I have to pay !
The user (<email deleted>) who recently suggested a
dump command for containers also wanted atmospheric sounds on levels which
have altars. Right now we'd have to find unattended altars the hard way
(by scanning the entire level) but we could add a counter (or set of
counters, one per alignment) like for fountains and sinks if we really
wanted to do that. [Now that I think about it, the #overview patch may
have already done something of the sort.] But what noises would an altar
be expected to produce? This only adds sounds for temples, where the
attending priest can be the source of the noise.
I'm not real thrilled with the initial set of sounds, particularly
the hallucinating one, but the implementation works. The "carcass" one is
a little clumsy; it's intended to add a hint for new players who haven't
figured out what the #offer command does.
Saving the game while punished, not carrying the attached ball,
and while swallowed by a purple worm resulted in losing the
ball and chain.
Since the required information was not being written to the
save file at all, I couldn't come up with a clean way to do this
for the branch, and preserve save file format. I could think
of lots of kludgy ways to do it (insert ball and chain into
the hero's inventory prior to saving, and remove it on restore, etc.)
Attempt to fix a buglist item: if hero poly'd into iron golem form
enters a pool of water and drowning triggers reversion to human/whatever
form due to water damage, he will fall into that pool again, crawl or
teleport out, then redundantly crawl or teleport out for the initial entry.
[ spoteffects -> drown -> losehp -> rehumanize -> polyman -> spoteffects
-> drown ]
I don't have a lot of confidence in this fix. It does handle the
reported problem, and hasn't broken a couple of earlier tricky cases
(ice melting to water, land mine turning into a pit). But drown() and
lava_effects() seem to leave a trail of special case handling wherever
they appear so they--or spoteffects, or both--ought to be redone somehow.
From a bug report, the game gave feedback
about a monster becoming stuck in a web but there seemed to be no monster
around because it immediately began hiding under an object at the web's
location. Prevent monsters--or poly'd hero--from hiding when trapped in
anything other than a pit or spiked pit. Also, prevent them from hiding if
they're holding you or you're poly'd and holding them. I'm not sure whether
either of those cases ever actually happened but big mimics are capable of
both hiding and grabbing on.
The bug report about losing/regaining the Protection intrinsic reminded
me of a couple of things. First, as an intrinsic, Protection seems to be
completely useless and we ought to redo it. Second, periodically people in
the newsgroup have complained about how it's nearly impossible to figure
out the important--possibly crucial--armor attribute of magic cancellation.
Wearing a cloak greatly increases characters' survival rates, but beyond
that, magic cancellation is just spoiler fodder.
This doesn't do much about Protection other than to change "you are
protected" into "you have a <small,moderate,&c> defense bonus" similar to
how the attributes conferred by rings of increase damage and increase
accuracy are handled. For magic cancellation, it adds new feedback:
You are protected. -- mc factor 3
You are guarded. -- mc factor 2
You are warded. -- mc factor 1
(with no extra feedback for mc factor 0, the normal naked state. The mc 3
case might cause some confusion over the changed meaning of a previously
existing item, but I think it'll be ok and not need re-wording.)
From a bug report, monsters with the wait
strategy (described as "meditating" by stethoscope probing) could be
affected by music but left meditating. Various wake up attempts shared
the same situation. Finish waiting if the monster would have been woken
(or pacified). I didn't search for places that diddle the msleeping bit
directly instead of calling one of the assorted wake() routines.
A fair bit of this is making usage of DEADMONSTER() be consistent.
Sooner or later there'll be another monster movement overhaul and those
if (DEADMONSTER(mon)) continue;
statements will all go away. (Probably just wishful thinking.)
Fix a bug described in the slash'em bugs page at Sourceforge. When
attributes are undergoing adjustment (from drinking a potion of gain
ability, for instance), don't display "you feel wise" or "you feel weak"
messages if worn equipment is keeping the relevant attribute at some point
below max or above min and the current value doesn't actually change.
The old logic just checked whether you were at max or min and assumed that
when not, the value would be changing. Now it checks whether the value
actually did change. But it doesn't intercept attempts to go over max or
under min at the same point any more; I hope it hasn't introduced any new
bugs in the process.
Add a patch attached to one of the bug reports sent by <email deleted>
which prevents shopkeepers who have been polymorphed into animals from
speaking. Some messages are altered so that the player gets informed about
shop interactions without it seeming to be spoken by the shk, other messages
are suppressed outright. I cleaned it up a bit (mostly formatting, but the
``getcad'' section seemed to have a logic error--using goto to jump into
the middle of an if-then-else is evil...) and implemented a TODO comment he
added (to use mbodypart() when second shopkeeper at end of game shakes his
head; also, skip that phrase if shk is in headless form--futility while
attempting to test this led to discovery of the misplaced parenthesis bug).
Add the capability of sorting the entire spellbook by various criteria,
augmenting the existing ability to swap pairs of spells. In the menu that's
put up for the '+' command, add a non-spell entry after the last known spell
+ - [sort spells]
Selecting that brings up a new menu
View known spells list sorted
a + by casting letter
b - alphabetically
c - by level, low to high
d - by level, high to low
e - by skill group, alphabetized within each group
f - by skill group, low to high level within group
g - by skill group, high to low level within group
h - maintain current ordering
z - reassign casting letters to retain current order
'a' corresponds to the normal ordering; 'b' through 'g' cause the order
to change, but during the current invocation of the '+' command only.
(Entry 'h' is a no-op, something aside from ESC to get out without doing
anything. 'a' is only a no-op if you haven't picked any of 'b' through
'g' yet.) After making a choice, you're taken back to the '+' command to
view the spells in the requested order. And once back there, you can pick
'+' again to come back to this menu, where picking 'z' will cause casting
letters to be shuffled such that present display order becomes the actual
spellbook order. Newly learned spells get appended to the end as usual;
the most recent sorting order isn't sticky even if finished off with 'z'.
No doubt seeing it in action will be clearer than this description.
This also updates the Guidebook to mention the spell retention field added
to the '+' menu some weeks back.
This patch by <email deleted> was released
when 3.4.1 was current and has been incorporated into slash'em. It is
extremely useful while using ranged weapons. When both autopickup and
pickup_thrown are enabled, walking across previously thrown objects will
pick them up even if they don't match the current pickup_types list.
[See cvs log for patchlevel.h for longer description.]
We've been getting numerous complaints from people
about "dungeon failure", often related to attempts
to start NetHack from within various zip utilities
that present a folder-like view.
The dungeon failure was actually misleading. The
real problem was a dlb file open failure, but the
return value of dlb_init() was not being checked
in pcmain.
This moves the dlb_init earlier in the startup,
checks for failure, and provides some feedback
around the common zip utility problem for win32.
Move part of the recent "munstone fixes" patch to the branch code
since one of those fixes prevents accessing freed memory. The part that
lets monsters eat tins of lizard meat or tins of acidic monsters in order
to get the same benefit as the corresponding corpse has been left out.
move oattached and oname and other things that vary
the size of the obj structure into a separate
non-adjacent oextra structure, similar to what has
already been done for mextra. The obj structure
itself becomes a fixed size.
New macros:
#define ONAME(o) ((o)->oextra->oname)
#define OMID(o) ((o)->oextra->omid)
#define OMONST(o) ((o)->oextra->omonst)
#define OLONG(o) ((o)->oextra->olong)
#define OMAILCMD(o) ((o)->oextra->omailcmd)
#define has_oname(o) ((o)->oextra && ONAME(o))
#define has_omid(o) ((o)->oextra && OMID(o))
#define has_omonst(o) ((o)->oextra && OMONST(o))
#define has_olong(o) ((o)->oextra && OLONG(o))
#define has_omailcmd(o) ((o)->oextra && OMAILCMD(o))
changed macros:
has_name(mon) becomes has_mname(mon) to correspond.
The CVS repository was tagged with
NETHACK_PRE_OEXTRA
before commiting these, and
tagged with
NETHACK_POST_OEXTRA
immediately after. The diff
between those two tags is this oextra patch.
The associated mail daemon changes to use an oextra
structure instead of a hidden command located in the
name after the terminating NUL, have not been tried
or tested.
From a bug report, a monster who eats a lizard
corpse in order to cure confusion was treated the same as one who did so
to cure petrification, losing intrinsic speed in the process. In the same
report by <l>, monsters wouldn't eat lizard corpses to cure being stunned,
and those who ate them for another reason weren't cured of stunning, even
though the hero gets that benefit. While fixing those, I added some code
to let monsters who are carrying tins of lizard or acidic monster use them
if they're also carrying a tin opener, dagger, or knife. I don't think
any monsters except for nymphs are willing to pick up tins, so it won't
have much effect. It now works for nymphs though.
Examining the code while testing showed that mon_consume_unstone()
has been accessing the potion (acid) or corpse (lizard or acidic monster)
after the item had been used up, so that has been fixed too. I never saw
any detectable problems due to this, but folks using a debugging malloc
implementation which overwrites freed memory may have not been suffering
collateral acid damage or receiving intended confusion cure, or perhaps
did get either or both of those effects when they shouldn't have. Since
it only applied to monsters it wouldn't have been easy to observe.
<Someone> suggested that digging down on a land mine with a pick-axe ought
to set if off. I agree; this implements that and also for bear traps. In
the bear trap case, if you dig down once trapped, you will destroy that
trap explicitly rather than replace it with a pit, so it's now possible to
escape from one without leaving another trap in your wake. Once the bear
trap is gone, further digging there will make a pit as usual. While stuck
in one, digging down poses a modest risk of harming yourself.
|You now wield a pick-axe.
|You start digging downward. A bear trap closes on your foot!
|You start digging downward. You destroy the bear trap with your pick-axe.
|You continue digging downward. You dig a pit in the floor.
|You start digging downward. You dig a hole through the floor.
|You fall through...
[It seems a bit strange that finishing a pit discards all digging context,
so that resuming within the pit in order to make a hole "starts" digging
rather than "continues" it.]
Digging down with a wand or spell will disarm these two types of traps
and then leave the corresponding object (which may or may not fall through
the resulting hole, like any other object there). Digging to the side via
magic while trapped in a pit will also disarm such traps when it encounters
them. (When not in a pit, a digging beam which simply passes over an armed
bear trap or land mine won't have any effect on the trap.) Digging to the
side via tool behaves somewhat oddly ("no room for the rubble"?) and will
probably need some tweaking before eventual release; at present it doesn't
reach adjacent traps so didn't need any land mine or bear trap handling.
I put the fixes entry in the new features section.
<Someone> reported that thitu() was adding d20 damage for silver object
hitting silver-hating hero even though all the callers were using dmgval()
which also does that, resulting in doubled silver bonus/penalty. This
fixes that (including for boomerangs thrown by player, which weren't using
dmgval(), to handle a hyptothetical silver boomerang). While testing it,
I noticed that there was no "the silver sears your flesh" message when a
monster hit you with a wielded silver weapon, so this fixes that too.
(How did we miss that? And how did <Someone>? :-)
From a bug report, moving into a trap
during a failed untrap attempt didn't autopickup any objects there or
report about objects which aren't picked up. Although that appears to have
been intentional, change move_into_trap() to behave more like a regular
move. (I wrote this bit of code and don't remember whether the no pickup
aspect was deliberate; I suspect it might have been to avoid the redundant
"there is a trap here" message which you get when pickup checking is done
but not everything on the spot gets picked up. This patch suppresses that
message.)
I've been using this for a while; it is occasionally handy. #terrain
is a new wizard mode command which brings up a text display where the map
topology is revealed, similar to the obscure #wmode command but showing
different information. Also, #wmode has been tweaked a little so as to
actually overlay the tty-mode map exactly, rather than being off by one
line and one column. (That shouldn't really matter for other windowing
schemes where the map and a text rendition of it aren't very likely to
have a given location be displayed at the exact same screen position.)
The line of formatted flags info below the terrain display probably
belongs in a separate debugging command altogether where it wouldn't have
to be displayed in such a terse fashion.
From a bug report, making engulf time longer for high AC
didn't make sense for non-digestion attacks: taking longer to die from
being digested (high AC lets you last longer there) is much different from
being stuck inside a vortex or elemental and suffering extra buffettings
or whatever. Calculate swallow time differently for non-digestion than
for digestion. (The adjustment based around level 25 doesn't make much
sense either, but I left that in.)
If you survive total digestion via life saving, you get a message
about the monster not liking your taste. I don't think that's appropriate,
but haven't tried to figure out how to fix it.
<email deleted> wrote:
> Eating gold in a vault (or polymorphing a pile of gold into 1 gold piece)
> doesn't anger the guard.
This addresses the eating part of that report, but the hero
has to get caught doing it.
<email deleted> wrote:
> * MAIL Abuse: one can polymorph into a gelatinous cube, send themselves lots of
> scrolls of mail, and eat them, gaining free nutrition.
Responding with '?' to the "what level?" prompt when using ^V in
wizard mode brings up a menu of special level destinations that lets you
move across dungeon branches. But getting in and out of Fort Ludios
didn't work, and jumping to the endgame forced you to arrive on the Plane
of Earth. Now Fort Ludios will not be selectable in the menu until after
the portal ordinarily used to reach it has been created (so you'll need a
level between Bigroom and Medusa with a vault on it to be created before
you can bypass the magic portal and jump directly to the Fort), and you
can go directly to any of the elemental planes, including Astral, without
stopping at Earth first (the Wizard will be there to greet you, whichever
level you pick). Also, this limits the menu to endgame entries once you
are in the endgame. (Previously, picking a non-endgame level would yield
"you can't get there from here"; you can still get that, if you really
want to see it for some reason, by giving a destination level number
outside the range of -1 to -5 instead of using the menu.)
I hadn't realized that this feature has been around since 3.4.2 until
I couldn't find any new feature entry for in the current fixes file....
This one turned out to be more effort than I had
originally anticipated.
We had a bug report requesting that zapping a wand of digging
laterally while in a pit should dig beside you. That seemed
like a reasonable enough request, but this ended up with
the following results:
- needed to check where this should not be permitted, or at
least where there should be special-case code because there is
something such as furniture on the surface above the dig
point.
- now tracks conjoined pits through new fields in the trap
structure, hence the pathlevel increment. The array of
8 boolean values represents each of the 8 directions
around a pit.
- Previously, pits could be adjacent to each other as two
individual pits, in which case moving between them
results in a fall as you went into the next pit. That
behavior is preserved.
- Pits created either by zapping a wand of digging
laterally while in a pit, or by "clearing debris"
between two adjacent pits via a pick-axe, sets the
conjoined fields for those two pits. You cannot
create a brand new adjacent pit via pick-axe, only
with the wand.
- The hero can pass between conjoined pits without
falling.
- dighole() was hijacked for adjacent pit digging,
so the ability to pass coordinates to it and
its downstream functions was added (dig_up_grave()
for example). dighole() does pretty much everything
appropriately for this adjacent digging, more so
than calling digactualhole() directly.
- moving into a conjoined pit that has spikes still
does damage, but less so that "falling" into the
spiked pit, and you "step on" the spikes rather
than falling into them.
- Not done: should pits with the conjoined fields
set be referred to as 'trenches' rather than pits
in messages and identifications?
<email deleted> wrote:
> BUGS TO REPORT:
>
> * Zapping a wand of locking at an open door with an object on it probably
> shouldn't give a "Something's in the way." message - especially if the wand is
> unidentified.
avoid "Something's in the way" message with unidentified wand of locking
<email deleted> wrote:
> * Doors absorb the blast of a broken wand of striking. What's more, the message
> reads "The door absorbs your bolt!" rather than "blast".
passes wand type to explode() as a negative value for the case
where the wand type isn't mapped to an AD_* explosion type.
Then explode() converts it to a positive and passes it to zap_over_floor().
Implement the following suggestion by <email deleted>
- Reading a scroll of light while confused should
create a hostile yellow light (black light if cursed).
It only creates the light monster effect 1 out of 5 times.
Something I noticed during a level change in slash'em:
You hear the sounds of civilization. You fly down the stairs.
The first message ought to follow the second. Our only arrival messages
that are handled via the special level loader occur in the endgame where
travel is by magic portal, and the transit message given for portals is
for entering one rather than exiting at the far side, so this sequencing
problem can't currently be noticed in nethack. But sooner or later there
will be levels reachable by stairs and having entry messages, or there'll
be some feedback added when magic portal transport finishes, and then we'd
get bitten by this.
Tested by adding an arrival message to each of the bigroom variants.
Make a not-very-robust fix for the report from <email deleted> about
being told a scoll disappears as you read it, then for the case of cursed
remove curse being told that the scroll disintegrates. He missed similar
case for scroll of fire erupting into flames after it had disappeared.
This suppresses the "disappears" part of the scroll reading message for
those two cases, but won't be very reliable if other scroll messages
referring to the scroll itself get introduced in the future. [Several
paths through scroll of fire won't report that it burns, and now it doesn't
give the disappears message any more. I don't think that's worth worrying
about; the scroll leaving inventory after burning up is implicit.]
Also cut down on redundant feedback for several scrolls (genocide,
charging, identify, stinking cloud) that start off by informing the player
what they are. That's only needed when the the player doesn't already
know the type of scroll. I've always felt it silly to be told that I've
"found a scroll of genocide" when I'm intentionally reading a known scroll
of genocide. All these types of scroll give a subsequent prompt which
makes them recongizable if you somehow manage to choose the wrong object
when picking the one to read.
Lastly, make spell of identify behave like ordinary uncursed scroll of
identify by default instead of ususally ID'ing multiple items. Now you'll
need to be skilled or better in divination spells skill in order to get the
blessed scroll effect out of it. And give some feedback if the spell is
cast when not carrying any inventory; it was just silently moving on to the
user's next command in that case.
I doubt if many players in nethack ever have pet ghouls (in slash'em
they're the necromancer's starting pet), but if so, provide them with a
portable food source by letting ghouls eat dead eggs in addition to tainted
corpses. Also, let them eat fresher varieties of either when they're about
to starve to death. Treat lizard & lichen corpses as always fresh since
they never become tainted (probably ruining slash'em necromancers' present
pet food of choice, though they'll still be able to eat lizard corspes if
starving).
I set the omnivore flag in their monster definition. Previously they
had been left as non-eaters despite the fact that they need to eat. When
the flag wasn't set, a hero who poly'd into one and then put on an amulet of
unchanging could go a very long time (thousands of turns) before the hunger
imposed by wearing an amulet finally made him/her become hungry. (Same as
with any other truely non-eating monster, so not really a big deal.)
Also, avoid the expression &mons[obj->corpsenm] for objects where the
corpsenm field isn't applicable, in case the default value ever changes from
0 (PM_GIANT_ANT) to NON_PM (-1).
Instead of just marking forgotten spells with an asterisk, add a new
column to the '+' spell menu which gives an estimate of how well the spell
is remembered. Precision of the estimate depends upon the hero's skill in
the category of spell; expert gets the most detail with a low-to-high range
spanning just 2%, such as 19%-20% or 75%-76%; skilled sees 5% ranges; basic
10%, and unskilled the least detail with 25% ranges (ie, one of 1-25, 26-50,
51-75, or 76-100 for percentage of time left available for the spell).
[The tab-separator variant for the menu is untested.]
This fixes an off by one bug for spell retention. It got set to 20000
as intended when a spellbook was read, but then it would be decremented to
19999 before the player had a chance to do anything else, cheating him out
of 1 turn of memory. Spells known at game start last exactly 20000 turns.
Also, adjust the point at which you're allowed to reread a spellbook
and refresh your memory of the spell. When the current spell system was
instituted, that was 10% of the retention period (1000 turns or less left
out of 10000); when retention got doubled to 20000 turns, the relearn point
was left as is. Increasing it to 10% (ie, doubling to 2000) makes it fit
better with the displayed retention percentages. Otherwise expert casters
would be left to guess when they've hit that point (1000 is 5%, falling
within their 5%-6% range, which really indicates (4%+1) to 6%). At 10%,
it's the threshold for the 9-10 range for experts, 5-10 range for skilled,
and 1-10 range for basic so the player can see when it has been reached;
only unskilled, with a bottom range of 1-25, is left to guess. Players
will likely prefer to wait until later, when the spell is nearly expired,
to refresh, but if they're about to abandon their books on the way to the
endgame then being able to re-read sooner is beneficial.
