Potion of object detection and then looking at a generic object glyph
on the map would try to "discover" the generic object, and the loop
in discover_object would go too far, overwriting the exclusion_zones
pointer.
Take the easy route and just prevent discovery of generic objects;
there are probably other places where the generic objects should
be handled too, but the fuzzer hasn't hit them.
With sys/unix/hints/linux.370, if GDBPATH doesn't exist, comment out
the GDBPATH line in sysconf during 'make install' or 'make update'.
[ macOS apparently uses sys/unix/hints/macosx.sh to do its sysconf manipulation,
so there is no corresponding change for sys/unix/hints/macOS.370 ]
Closes#1477
Based on the principle that there should always be at least two
solutions to any given problem, this allows monster-slowing magic
to be an effective solution to fast low-monMR monsters (in
particular home-plane air elementals, who after recent commits
could reasonably be dealt with using good AC, but I want a second
good option to be available, in addition to the existing mediocre
options). This helps to make playing with bad AC (for whatever
reason) more viable.
This is one of the fairest instadeaths in the game (it gives
multiple warnings and there are reliable ways to escape it), but
is also where most of the threat of purple worms comes from. It
was also pretty much nonfunctional: the previously used formula set
the timer to somewhere around 50 turns (for a typical character in
Gehennom, which is where purple worms are normally encountered).
This new formula (which affects only purple worms, as the only
monster that engulfs and digests) is based on the same inputs, but
produces much smaller numbers, meaning that the instadeath is
relevant sometimes. A typical character at purple worm depth will
be able to kill faster than the timer if they focus on the purple
worm and put some damage on it before they get engulfed, but it is
much closer if the purple worm gets the first hit in (possibly
requiring the use of escape items, but the common wand of digging
works).
Hopefully this brings purple worms closer to their intended threat
level: previously they were somewhat more nonthreatening than they
should have been.
The previous commit caused air elementals to become almost totally
nonthreatening in the endgame (even the buffed ones on the Plane of
Air). This commit fixes that (whilst still leaving them somewhat
weaker than they were before against characters with good AC), by
doubling the damage of home-plane air elementals.
The damage of the other home-plane elementals was doubled too,
because they were mostly nonthreatening previously. On Fire, this
has no real effect as almost any character would be fire-resistant
by this point. On Earth, it makes the elementals more of a threat,
when they previously weren't.
However, it made Water too difficult (albeit more fun, because it
became important to avoid letting water elementals swam you). As
such, water elementals are made slightly slower to compensate.
(My own playtesting indicates that 6 is slightly too fast, but 4 is
too slow, so I'm hoping that 5 is the correct value.)
Players of both 3.4.3 and 3.7 have observed for a long time that
air elementals are disproportionately dangerous compared to other
endgame threats. (In particular, playtester feedback from 3.7 was
that the Plane of Air was much more dangerous than it should be,
with playtesters treating it similarly to Astral with respect to
the use of high-quality escape items.)
It turns out that this was because damage from air elementals while
engulfed was entirely ignoring AC, meaning that regardless of your
stats, you would be taking around 16.5 damage per turn while
engulfed (half physical damage helped, but nothing else did).
This commit purely fixes the bug, but does not balance around it,
which means that it causes the endgame air elementals to become
almost entirely nonthreatening. In a future commit, I plan to
balance around this change.
Pull request from entrez: reading an engraving added a terminal period
after the quoted text even when that text already ended in one.
That should be conditional like it already is (post-3.6) for T-shirts.
Fixes#1476
Skip the terminal period only if there is true punctuation at the end of
the engraving, not degraded text. This feels a bit janky because the
way engravings are malloced and structured uses this manual offset to
access the space allocated for text. I used a macro to unify all those
accesses so that it will be harder to screw it up if something changes
in that respect, since repeating (ep + 1) as a magic number across
engrave.c seems quite brittle.
Change the formatting of reading an engraving to include a terminal
period only if the engraving does not already include punctuation, to
avoid messages like:
| You feel the words: "Please don't feed the animals.".
This brings the formatting of the read_engr_at() message in line with
doread().
One minor concern with this is that degraded engravings can use
punctuation to represent "chicken scratch" degraded text rather than as
actual punctuation, and ideally it might be better to include the final
period if you're reading an engraving like "Hc| ? |?".
This is true of burnt T-shirts already, but it's much more common with
engravings. It should be possible to identify "real punctuation" by
checking whether (ep->engr_txt[pristine_text] == et[elen - 1]) -- but
this doesn't actually work without more tinkering, since trimming
initial whitespace in u_wipe_engr() updates the actual_text pointer so
the indices stop matching.
They still have their other current effects (aggravating monsters
and granting temporary invisibility). This is mostly meant as a way
of counteracting the "turn permanently invisible" effect of magic
traps, for players who would rather their characters remained
visible.
Thanks to paxed for helping with this commit.
This commit is intended to achieve two things: a) making Vlad's
throne a little less dangerous, b) making polymorph traps less
dangerous for players who don't have magic resistance. (At present,
uncontrolled polymorph is too dangerous in the late game for most
players to consider risking it, so they take care to avoid things
that have even a small chance of it, cutting out a lot of potential
strategies. Toning down polymorphs should make them happen more
often by increasing the chance that players will be willing to go
without precautions.)
Body armor is still destroyed (with the existing exception of
dragon armor), in order to mostly preserve the balance effect of
polymorph traps in the early game.
This removes the container-cursing effect (which is too specific
and too easy to work around) and replaces it with an effect that
greases everything (largely but not entirely positive).
This is primarily intended to help new players understand the
mechanics (the "wield the launcher, throw the arrow" sequence may
be unfamiliar to newer players), so the message is worded to
indicate the correct way to use the ammo.
Dragon corpses are capable of rotting, so it's plausible that the
skin of a dead dragon might also be possible to rot.
This is unlikely to come up in actual play at present (unless
wishing for rotten DSM, it can only end up rotting as a consequence
of brown pudding attacks): the primary motivation is to open up new
possibilities for armor-damaging attacks, which in current NetHack
aren't very relevant in the late game because everyone is wearing
dragon scale mail.
After discussing with paxed, I decided that instead of reducing the
safe enchantment limit for magical armor, it is instead better to
make the scrolls less effective on it. So this commit restores the
previous rules for the safely-enchant-from level and changes the
effectiveness of the scrolls to compensate.
Non-elven magical armor now only gets +1 from blessed scrolls of
enchant armor when enchanted from +3, coming to a total of +4. But
scrolls of enchant armor are now more effective on nonmagical and
elven and previously unenchanted armor, giving more of an incentive
to use them in the early game.
Cursed and uncursed scrolls of enchant armor are now also more
powerful than they were (but less powerful than blessed scrolls),
hopefully making it a more interesting decision as to whether to use
scrolls of enchant armor even if you don't have the means to bless
them.
