Building with an old version of gcc with various warnings enabled
generated a lot of noise. Most of it was due to not guarding string
literals with `const', but there were a couple of actual problems too.
Based on a report from <Someone>, avoid calling rn2(ml) when ml == 0.
Since level 0 monster always fail in their spells, just skip the whole
loop looking for a good spell.
Get rid of the obsolete comments about summon spells also aggravating.
The effect on balance of not aggravating is negligible, because nasty() already
wakes up most of the monsters it creates.
This throttles insect creation through monster spell casting. Especially
insects. It was creating m_lev worth of insects--for a 25th level priest,
that means every batch of insects was size 25!
I also lowered the range for nasties creation for similar reasons.
This changes monster spellcasting to remove the fallthroughs. It simply loops
now until it finds a valid spell to cast, so if the spell is useless another
random spell is picked rather than falling through to whatever happens to be
the next one in the list.
This will inevitably change some spellcasting probabilities.
Make wands of speed or slow monster known if their effect
on monsters is observed; likewise for speed boots. Also, avoid
giving odd "the bat is moving faster" when seeing a bat created
in gehennom and inaccurate "the monster is moving slower" when
a monster puts on speed boots.
- watch messages if you can't see the watch now start "You hear"
- unseen spellcaster messages are shown as "Something", to remove
some silly message pairs.
- unseen spellcaster that casts at itself causes no message
- recalc vision before spoteffects messsages, to avoid invalid "It"
This fixes the problem with my monster spell changes which let monsters
summon monsters around you when they don't even know you're around.
The summoned monsters should appear where the monster thinks you are, if
you're invisible or displaced.
I have not prevented them from summoning monsters when you are in a temple,
nor have I prevented them from aggravating monsters several times when you're
out of sight.
Messages should be a little smarter, taking into account number of monsters
and invisibility/displacement.
--Ken A
Testing the Astral Plane showed that the summon insects spell was a little
ridiculous with the new monster spellcasting routines. You can easily
have enough priests within range of you that insects are summoned almost every
round. I've made this saner by halving the frequency of the spell. The player
will still probably encounter summoned insects a lot more than before.
Summary of spell changes:
-- wimpiness of 'default' spell fixed by doing half damage for magic resistance
instead of 1 damage, and using half monster level instead of 1/3. It may
still need tweaking, but is much better than before.
-- 'default' spell for cleric monsters is now the wounds spell, by analogy with
wizard monsters.
-- added clerical lightning strike, flame strike, gush of water
-- all spells should now say the monster is casting a spell, and all spells
should have messages. (Side effect: monsters speeding up by other means
also give a message saying so).
-- casting undirected spells is not affected by whether the monster knows
where you are. Monsters that are attacking your displaced image, that are
several squares away, or that are peaceful can use undirected spells.
-- messages should correctly say whether the spell is undirected (a monster
was always casting at thin air or pointing at you and cursing, without checking
to see if the spell wouldn't require pointing)
-- Monsters which are attacking your displaced image, etc. use up mspec_used.
If they are casting an undirected spell, the spell still works.
-- Monsters which are not attacking can cast spells that don't attack.
-- If a monster didn't have ranged spellcasting ability (which most don't),
it would print a curse message from buzzmu() every round it was at range,
creating a useless stream of constant curse messages
I still haven't made spellcasters "smarter" in the sense of noticing whether
you have reflection, fire resistance, etc. That opens a big can of worms
because it would mean giving monsters a memory.
Known bug: the higher level a monster is, the more spells it has; since it
chooses a noncombat spell by randomly picking a spell and casting if it
happens to be noncombat, the higher level the monster is the greater the
chance of getting nothing.
