From a bug report, if you rob a shop, let the
angry shopkeeper catch up with you outside his shop, escape to another
level with adjacent shk tagging along, then pacify the shk by paying him
off, he will dismiss kops on the present level and return to his shop
but when you return to his shop level there'll still be kops chasing you
there. This fix adds an extra flag to the eshk structure so that kops
can be dismissed a second time when the shk migrates back to shop level.
The first dismisal (on the "wrong" level) still takes place in case any
kops are around. Neither dismissal actually occurs if there happens to
be another angry shk present on the level where dismissal is being done.
I can't figure out how to make PuTTY use the Alt key to function as
a Meta key and set a character's high bit, so I used this hack to test
the M-5 fix just committed. This lets me specify a character to be used
to force the next character to have its high bit set, so I can fake the
Meta key with a two character sequence. (I used the back-tick/accent,
since nethack doesn't do anything special with it.) Conceivably something
like this should be promoted to the core; this just affects VMS, and only
when vmstty.c is compiled with DEBUG defined.
From a bug report, using Alt+5 when number_pad mode
is set to MSDOS compatibility (where Alt+5 is supposed to function as the
'G' movement prefix) didn't work correctly. The code that did M-5 to G
conversion was being executed after the code which should have gotten G's
direction, resulting in strange behavior, probably using stale values for
u.dx and u.dy. (With current dev code, I evidently had u.dx==0 && u.dy==0
so was getting "You can't get there from here..." which is actually pretty
amusing in the current context. 3.4.3 didn't have that feedback so I'm
not sure what happened in it; possibly just silent refusal to move.)
From a bug report, the weight of a non-cursed bag
of holding would be off by 1 when the weight of contents was a multiple
of 2 (for uncursed) or of 4 (for blessed), since the round off handling
added 1 when it shouldn't in those cases. Mainly noticeable when empty;
the extra 1 unit made it be twice as heavy as it should have been.
Probably never noticed in actual play. He has implemented a patch
which shows weights as part of an object's formatted description, making
this stand out. Supposedly the Vulture's Eye interface also added a
patch like that a farily long time ago; I wonder why nobody using it ever
noticed. (Maybe the weight was suppressed for bags of holding there?)
Optimize yesterday's new code. When calculating magic cancellation,
avoid calling protects() for hero's inventory; the information it's
providing is already available via u.uprops[PROTECTION]. That part of
the inventory scan is only needed for monsters.
Magic cancellation comes from some types of worn armor and has a
value of 0 through 3. A non-zero value guards against some forms of
monster magic attacks (most notably, level drain by vampires and wraiths
and lycanthropy from werecritter bites). This reduces the effectiveness
of mc a moderate amount (the new values happen to be the same as those
adopted by the Spork variant):
chance to block various touch effects
mc old new
1 34.67% 30%
2 67.33% 60%
3 98% 90%
This also makes the Protection intrinsic (strictly speaking, extrinsic)
be the only way to attain an mc factor of 3. Cloak of protection is the
only way to get mc 3 from a single item. Otherwise you need an mc 2 item
and a ring of protection (or one of the recently modified quest artifacts).
Cancellation factor for elven and dwarvish mithril coats and for
robes and oilskin cloaks is reduced from 3 to 2; for elven cloak and
cloak of magic resistance from 3 to 1 (play balance; they're valuable
even without magic cancellation); for dwarven and orcish cloaks and
clocks of invisibility and displacement and for cornuthaum (wizard hat)
from 2 to 1. Plate mail and crystal plate mail stay at 2. A variety of
suits which were at 0 are increased to 1; leather jacket and dragon
scales/scale mail stay at 0 (the latter for play balance rather than for
the amount of your body that's covered).
Having extrinsic protection will increase mc by 1 (unless it's
already 3). That's obtained by wearing a cloak of protection (where the
increase is redundant), a ring (or two) of protection (even if conferring
a negative AC amount), or wearing the Mitre of Holiness or wielding the
Tsurugi of Muramasa. Having multiple sources doesn't make the benefit
cumulative; it's just +1.
Intrinsic protection (bought from priest, gained from prayer, gained
from eating rings of protection while polymorphed into metallivore, or
temporary while spell of protection is active) doesn't increase mc from
armor but does provide minimum mc 1 instead of naked 0 (play balance
again; buying it is too easy to let it increase mc 1 or 2 to 2 or 3).
(Extrinsic protection is a superset; its +1 bonus also increases 0 to 1.)
TODO: add an amulet of protection so player has another option for
extrinsic protection.
This is mostly groundwork prior to making the Protection intrinsic
become more meaningful. The Mitre of Holiness (priest quest artifact)
and the Tsurugi of Muramasa (samurai quest artifact) will now confer
Protection when worn/wielded (though at present that effectively does
nothing). While in there, this also changes the Eye of the Aethiopica
(wizard quest artifact), the Eyes of the Overworld (monk quest artifact),
and the Sceptre of Might (caveman quest artifact) so that they need to
be worn/wielded rather than just carried in order for them to confer
magic resistance. That way they're a little less attractive for wishing
by other roles and a little more likely to be actively used by their own
roles (not an issues for the Eyes, I'm sure). This change actually works
to the player's advantage, since it means that monsters who successfully
steal those items won't instantly obtain magic resistance in the process.
This adds protects() as a predicate routine to check an item for
conferring Protection. In order to do that, it renames the existing
protects() routine to defends_when_carried(), because that predicate is
actually a variant of defends() for items which aren't worn or wielded.
Mage-spell casters higher than level 23 and cleric-spell casters
higher than level 13 became less and less likely to cast interesting
spells as level went higher, more and more likely to cast the default
psi-bolt or open wounds. [Level 21 caster had 4.75% chance to cast
touch of death; level 22, 9%; level 23, 13% chance; then level 24, 12.5%;
level 25, 12%; level 30, 10%; level 50 (demon lords/princes), only 6%.]
This oddity in spell selection meant that the Wizard of Yendor gradually
became less likely to use "double trouble" to clone himself as he got
killed off more times and his next incarnation arrived at higher level.
This fix makes high level casters who pick too-high spell usually retry
until they get a valid one instead of just reverting to the default.
Still slightly biased towards psi-bolt and open wounds, since they're
effective even though a bit boring.
This started out just documenting the commands where use of the
new paranoid_confirmation option was relevant, but it end up sprawling
to other stuff so I left it out of the paranoid_confirmation patch.
Eventually I changed all the commands with long-ish descriptions to use
a single line summary of the what the command does, with any additional
explanation or examples forced into a separate paragraph instead of
just being appended to the summary. It increases the number of lines
and probably pages in the document, but I think it makes skimming over
the list of actual commands much easier.
A couple of unmodified command descriptions are 'f' and 'Q'. The
only way I could avoid the temptation to discard "quiver sack" was to
leave those alone entirely.
A couple of others received some spoiler-ish additions, notably
#offer (which doesn't actually give anything away) and #pray (where
someone might assume that the command is useless if their very first
attempt gets rejected). I also added tips for two-weapon combat (how
to set up to use it, not when or why to use it) that ended up being much
more verbose than planned.
I don't know whether nroff+tmac.n offers a better way to get a
non-indented paragraph than using a labeled paragraph with an empty
label; .lp "" achieved what I wanted so I used it quite a bit. I also
wanted the value lists for number_pad and paranoid_confirmation to not
be indented but failed to figure out how to do that properly. In
Guidebook.mn they're still indented; in Guidebook.tex number_pad fakes
it using fixed-with tt font, paranoid_confirmation approximates it with
a ridiculous indentation hack. The number_pad result is wrong, but I've
given up. "~0" lines up with "-1", but "~1" through "~4" line up with
the minus sign instead of with the 1 as if that unbreakable space prefix
wasn't there.
[Short writeup; see 'cvs log' of flag.h or options.c for the long one.]
This is a reworking of user contributed patch known as Paranoid_Quit.
Add a new compound option, paranoid_confirmation, accepting a space
separated list of values "quit die attack pray Remove"; default is "pray".
paranoid:quit - yes vs y for "really quit?" and "enter explore mode?"
paranoid:die - yes vs y for "die?" in explore mode or wizard mode
paranoid:attack - yes vs y for "really attack <peacful monster>?"
paranoid:pray - y to pray; supersedes prayconfirm boolean; on by default
paranoid:Remove - always issue an inventory prompt for 'R' an 'T', even
when only one applicable item is currently worn.
[Long writeup committed with flag.h and options.c only.]
This is a reworking of a user contributed patch available in Pasi
Kallinen's NetHack Patch Database at http://bilious.homelinux.org under
the name "Paranoid_Quit". It was created by David Damerell and extended
by several others, and I haven't attempted to preserve attribution.
Their patch added three new boolean run-time options (this one
doesn't; details below):
paranoid_quit: if true, change the "really quit?" prompt to require an
answer of yes rather than just y to quit, presumeably for players who
type faster than they read and think (been there, done that...). It
also applies to the "do you want to enter explore mode?" prompt. The
changed prompt shows yes and no rather than yn as possible answers.
After having used it a few times, I find it easily noticeable that
"yes"<return> is expected instead of just single keystroke 'y', and
if you mess up somehow you can just reissue the #quit or X command
with no harm done. (And the default setting is off; the game still
issues the original yn prompt.)
paranoid_hit: if true, make a similar change for the "really attack <the
peaceful monster>?" prompt. Definitely helpful if you bump into a
monster while in the midst of using 'y' to move diagonally upper left.
Note that this just changes the expected/required answer to an existing
prompt; it doesn't change interaction between the hero and monsters.
paranoid_remove: if true, the 'R' and 'T' commands will prompt the player
to select an appropriate item from inventory even when there's only one
applicable item (instead of simply removing or taking off that only
item). Helpful if you think you've got more than one thing on and
intend to take off something other than the last one (which might be a
ring of levitation keeping you from dropping into lava or a blindfold
and you're trying to play the whole game blinded).
Their patch also made two other changes which weren't controllable via
options: when dipping, after picking what to dip, mention it in the
second prompt for what to dip into; and require yes instead of y at the
wizard mode "save bones?" prompt. We've had the enhanced dipping prompt
for a while, and "unknown" installed a fix-up (which wasn't needed with
their version) for it recently. I've left our bones prompt alone, the
original yn query. Anyone who saves bones by accident can remove them,
if not externally they by using wizard mode to revisit the same dungeon
depth, load the bones, and unlink them.
#####
That's a summary of the contributed patch. Now for the implemented
one.... Instead of separate booleans, this adds a single compound option
called "paranoid_confirmation" that takes a string argument of space
separated words: "quit die attack pray Remove". And it puts the actual
yes vs y querying into a new routine instead of duplicating it at each
affected prompting location.
paranoid_confirm:quit - as above, if true then require yes instead of y
to answer the "really quit?" and "do you want to enter explore mode?"
prompts. Can also be supplied as paranoid_confirm:explore or even
"quit explore" but that's just redundant; it's a single flag which
controls prompting for both game-ending or game-altering commands.
paranoid_confirm:die - applicable only for explore and wizard modes but
visible/settable during option viewing/changing in normal play. If
true then require yes instead of y at the "die?" prompt. This wasn't
part of their original patch, but should have been since the effect
of accidental y is just as drastic as unintentionally quitting.
paranoid_confirm:attack - as above, yes vs y for "really attack <the
peaceful monster?". Can also be supplied as paranoid_confirm:hit.
paranoid_confirm:pray - supersedes the existing prayconfirm boolean.
That option is still accepted and honored duing config file processing,
but option viewing/changing with 'O' only handles the new variant.
This does not control "yes" vs 'y', but rather whether there's a prompt
first or prayer simply starts. When used, the prompt itself is the
same yn one already being asked with prayconfirm. Presumably config
file support for prayconfirm will go away in some future version.
Unlike the other paranoid settings, this one defaults to 'on' in order
to match the 3.3.0 through 3.4.3 behavior controlled by prayconfirm,
whose default was on (but maybe should have been off...).
paranoid_confirm:Remove - as above, causes the 'R' and 'T' commands to
use a "what do you want to remove?" or "what do you want to takeoff?"
inventory selection prompt even when only one accessory or piece of
armor is worn. Player can pick the inventory letter and remove/takeoff
the item, use ? or * to see what the candidate item is, or cancel with
ESC. Can be supplied as paranoid_confirm:takeoff or "remove takeoff",
but like with "quit explore", a single flag controls the behavior of
both 'R' and 'T'.
Option file processing accepts two other settings, paranoid_confirm:none
and paranoid_confirm:all, but those are not available (nor needed) when
using the 'O' command. "none" is useful because it's the value shown to
the player by 'O' when none of the paranoia flags are set, and it's a
way to turn off paranoid_confirm:pray without turning on any of the other
choices. "all" probably isn't very useful but was trivial to tack on.
This is an example of the menu that 'O' puts up after picking option
paranoid_confirmation from the main list. I've shifted everything left
to reduce whitespace here; it appears on the right side of the screen for
tty menuing.
Actions requiring extra confirmation:
q - yes vs y to quit or to enter explore mode
d - yes vs y to die (explore mode or debug mode)
a - yes vs y to attack a peaceful monster
p + y to pray (supersedes old "prayconfirm" option)
R - always pick from inventory for Remove and Takeoff
(end)
Currently set paranoia features are marked as preselected and can be
toggled off along with toggling any others on as desired. I've just
realized that this menu relies on showing entries marked via preselection
rather than explicitly annotating each one as [on] or [off]; that seemed
perfectly natural during testing so I think I'll leave it this way, at
least for the time being.
A post-3.4.3 dipping change (to make the dipping prompt mention
the item that you've chosen to dip) formats a phrase for its eventual
getobj() call in advance, but then was modifying it inappropriately if
you were on a fountain or pool location. If you declined to dip into
the fountain or pool, the prompt for carried potion to dip into was
garbled: "What do you want to Dip <the object> into the fountain??".
instead of "What do you want to dip <the object> into?". Fix to use
a separate buffer in the case of a fountain or pool prompt so that the
"dip <the object> into" phrase will be intact when calling getobj().
Noticed when testing the [trunk] ^X fix: polymorphing into human
form (not reverting to original form) reported "you feel like a new man"
when I resumed being a cavewomen. Like with ^X, it used poly'd hero's
current monster gender instead of the about-to-be-restored role gender.
It's amazing that nobody seems to have ever noticed in all this time.
Being a cavewoman polymorphed into a male creature revealed multiple
mistakes in the post-3.4.3 ^X code, including the initial title text.
It was using current gender in several places where it should have been
using the saved value that applies when not polymorphed, leading to
confusion as to whether you'd changed genders if/when current and saved
ones were different. More noticeable with gender-distinct role names.
Apparently I lied yesterday when I said that patch was the last
polyself one. This has been on my agenda for a long time: when dragon
scale mail merges with your skin during polymorph into the corresponding
dragon, have it revert from mail to scales. Its enchantment stays the
same when reverting. So after returning to your original form, using
enchant armor to convert it into scale mail again will eventually risk
its destruction due to over-enchanting. (Cursed scroll of enchant armor,
spell of drain life, or being hit by a disenchanter can be used to reduce
its enchantment back to a safe-to-enchnat value. Or cancellation if
you're desperate. I think those all work on all colors of dragon scales
despite the assorted magical properties that scales confer.)
From a bug report, it you're targetted by
divine wratch while swallowed by a shock-resistant engulfer, the
ineffective lightning is followed by a wide-angle disintegration beam
which "fries <the engulfer> to a crisp"; he felt that being fried was
not appropriate for disintegration. I agree. (He also failed to notice
that the exact same terminology is used for killing the hero when not
swallowed.) I wanted to use "disintegrated into a cloud of dust" here,
but if a suit has just been disintegrated you'll have seen "turns to dust
and falls to the floor" for that, so I settled for "into a pile of dust".
Teleport_control is disabled while the hero is Stunned; do the same
with Polymorph_control. Also now disabled while unconscious, but that
is academic since random polymorphs and were-critter transformations are
postponed until multi is non-negative. I included it for completeness.
(Reverting to original form can occur while unconscious, but control is
not a factor in that situation. Teleporting handles being unconscious
differently but does negate control then.)
The fixes entry could just as easily have gone into the new features
section as into the bug fixes one. The teleport control part actually
belongs in fixes34.4 because it is present in the branch, but I didn't
feel like spreading this across two different files (and the current diff
references ``Unaware'' which doesn't exist in the branch so it isn't
trivial to include this patch there).
Also noticed while testing polyself changes, a few polymorph related
items weren't being listed as reasons for having some polymorph related
intrinsics during wizard mode enlightenment (a post-3.4.3 feature).
There may be other intrinsics conferred by items where you aren't told
about the item being responsible; I didn't look around for them, just
noticed these three: Unchanging (via amulet), Polymorph (via ring), and
Protection from Shape Changers (also via ring).
When testing the change of "you can't polymorph into that" to
"you can't polymorph into <a monster type>" I noticed that specifying
high priestess told me that I couldn't become a priest (role monster),
but specifying high priest told me that I couldn't become a high priest
(monster as-is). Aligned priestess and high priestess aren't separate
monsters; the user-specific string to monster name code found the latter
as a rank title rather than as a monster and couldn't find the former
at all. This adds those two special monst types to the list of variant
spellings and whatnot that are used to augment name to type lookup.
Since they aren't viable candidates for polyself or for genocide I doubt
that any players ever noticed, so I haven't added a fixes entry for this.
While making the change to prevent random mail daemons, I noticed
that controlled self-polymorph into a critter specified by class (a post-
3.4.3 feature) rather than by name wasn't excluding NOPOLY monsters so I
checked to see if they were being handled correctly. Accepting NOPOLY
monsters as candidates was intentional but it had a problem (although
many NOPOLY monsters are NOGEN and vice versa, so the problem wouldn't
show up often). If I specified A and Archon was randonly chosen, I'd
be told "you can't polymorph into that" but if I retried A and it chose
couatl, the polymorph succeeded. This changes the way the first case
gets handled: it skips the message and makes another pick from the
specified class, although that consumes the same retry counter as
reprompting so you might still end up with "you can't" if random picks
come out unfavorably too many times (or if you've typed in some bad
choices first and the counter has already been reduced).
When doing that, I changed the "you can't" message to say what it
is you can't polymorph into, instead of just "that".
And I've changed controlled polymorph to accept ESC when prompted
for monster type. When used, either don't polymorph (for wizard mode
#polyself command) or revert to uncontrolled poly (for all other causes
of polyself) instead of just asking again. Specifying "*" or "random"
will also produce uncontrolled polymorph.
From the newsgroup: when the special level loader is creating
random '&' class monsters, it can produce mail daemons. The thread
reports seeing some on the levels holding the Wizard of Yendor's Tower
and they vanish as soon as it's their turn to move. I didn't reproduce
it, but create_monster() is overriding the NOGEN flag when it calls
mkclass() so getting mail daemons is feasible. This fixes that by
treating them similar to the human/elf/orc/giant placeholder monsters
that are excluded from random generation. More or less.
From a bug report,
when falling into a spiked pit and being killed and then life-saved, you
could immediately die from fatal poison. It isn't necessarily a bug and
there are other ways to be killed, life-saved, and re-killed (such as
zaps that bounce off walls or reflecting targets), but it does seem to be
somewhat unfair. This patch makes life-saving be more effective: in a
damage-plus-poison situation, if the damage triggers life-saving then the
poison won't deal out any further damage (including its nasty chance for
instant death). The poison still matters, but it will always target an
attribute stat--which is already one possible random outcome--instead of
maybe doing damage. [It is actually possible to get damage if stat loss
tries to take hero's strength below 3, but now there's no chance of that
being fatal immediately after savelife() has restored full hit points.]
I noticed "you were wielding two weapons at once" in end of game
disclosure from a newsgroup ascension post for the Spork variant and
thought we ought to show that too. Well we already do. This moves it
from an attribute entry for magical enlightenment to a status entry for
^X display since it's something the hero and the player should already
always know. In the process I added feedback for being weaponless and
then went further and added some feedback about what weapon is wielded.
This is stuff that could/would be shown on the status line if there were
room, and fits with the post-3.4.3 ^X expansion of cryptic status stuff.
The "new ^X output" entry in the new features section of fixes35.0
covers this too.
I've been sitting on this for a long time (29 months?); it got more
elaborate for a while, then got stripped back to something fairly simple.
The original description was once accidentally attached to an unrelated
patch; it was more detailed than this one....
This makes it harder for non-fighter types to throw or shoot
multishot volleys of missiles, and gives a couple of minor new bonues to
try to get a little more variety than the current situation of everyone
(with possible exception of arrow shooting by rangers) just using stacks
of daggers for ranged attacks. Since daggers are so plentiful that's
probably just wishful thinking.
