From a bug report, unseen pet sensed by
telepathy was referred to as "it" in the message given when it ate food.
This code is subtly convoluted and has now been changed at least four or
five times over the years. This patch changes the terse comment to try to
spell out the intent. Whether or not the new code actually matches that
intent remains to be seen....
From the newsgroup:
The tin opens like magic!
<some interruption occurs>
You stop opening the tin.
Either it opens immediately or it doesn't, so the "opens like magic"
message is inaccurate. Rather than simply changing the phrasing, this
gives blessed tins a 50% chance to really open immediately so that their
contents are available for eating on the same turn, and 50% to behave as
before but with a message which is suitable for the single turn delay.
Hero poly'd into a metalivore always gets the same-turn case when eating
any tin. Use of a tin opener has a chance to do so (always when blessed,
50/50 for same-turn vs 1 turn delay when uncursed, 33/33/33 same-turn or
1 or 2 turn delay when cursed).
Overall, blessed tins are better than they used to be, since half
of the time you'll save a turn, but they're still not reliable to eat in
the midst of combat since sometimes you'll need another turn and will be
likely to get interrupted in that situation. Uncursed tin openers still
give the same behavior as opening blessed tins, so are also better than
they used to be. Blessed tin openers are now superior, and cursed ones
are slightly inferior in addition to being welded to hero's weapon hand.
From a bug report, when ice on the Valkyrie
quest home level was melted and a boulder filled the resulting pool, that
pool was described as a moat. This was actually a terrain issue rather
than a formatting glitch, so instead of tweaking waterbody_name() with an
extra special case, extend the level compiler to allow specifying ice as
frozen pool instead of always being frozen moat. There's no provision
for having both types of ice on the same level, just a level-wide flag to
control which of the two applies for ice on that level.
This change has a side-effect for the V quest levels: once ice has
been melted, a second blast of fire will now boil away the pool and leave
a pit. The unfrozen water locations on the home level already behaved
that way (ie, they are pools rather than moats) so this should be ok. I
also added <Someone>'s suggestion to make one of the two drawbridges
on the goal level start in random state instead of always being open.
Using F prefix when trying to move into a wall or closed door yielded
"you attack thin air". Like the recently fixed F-vs-boulder case, give
more appropriate feedback. Also like F-vs-boulder, initiate digging if
wielding a pick-axe. (Also handles axes versus trees and closed doors).
One thing which isn't handled but possibly should be: F vs closed
door when not wielding a pick or other axe might attempt to force the door.
(Right now it gives "you harmlessly attack the door".)
From the newsgroup: objects created when killing a monster over
water weren't being affected by falling into the water. The objects were
being created directly on the floor instead of being dropped as if they'd
been in the monster's inventory. This fixes the random "treasure drop"
item, but special items--like dragon scales and the miscellaneous golem
remains--produced by make_corpse() are still put directly onto the floor.
The check to prevent small monsters from dropping big objects was
overly complex, possibly due to the 3.1.x weight threshold bug which was
just recently fixed. Food rations and leashes pass the weight test so
don't need to be special cased; spears, polearms, and morning stars fail
the weight test. (Javelins are an exception; they pass the weight test
so are allowed to be dropped by small monsters now since spears aren't
special cased any more.)
Followup to yesterday's "you attack thin air" fix for when there's a
boulder at the target location: if wielding a pick-axe or mattock and you
use F to explicitly try to attack a boulder, dig the boulder to break it.
Also, treat statues like boulders: F at them gets "you harmlessly attack
a statue" for non-pick weapon, or digs/breaks statue when wielding a pick.
Classified as a new feature in the fixes file.
This is another item from "#Q397: List of Bugs from #nethack" sent
in Janurary by <email deleted> and containing a list
of things collected from the IRC channel associated with nethack.alt.org's
public server. Using F prefix and moving toward a boulder would give
"You attack thin air." Now that'll be "You harmlessly attack a boulder."
This is one of the items from "#Q397: List of Bugs from #nethack" sent
in Janurary by <email deleted> and containing a list
of things collected from the IRC channel associated with nethack.alt.org's
public server. Moving diagonally between segments of a worm tail is
conceptually passing right through the worm's body. This patch prevents
moving in such a fashion for both the hero and monsters (it's still
possible to fight in that position though). It only applies when the two
tail segments are consecutive.
|...... In the diagram here, where tail segments are represented by
|.w1?.. digits indicating relative sequence number, the @ can still
|..@2.. move between segments 2 and 5 to reach !, but can no longer
|.65!3. move between 1 and 2 to reach ?. [However, if there is a
|...4.. monster at the ? spot, it can still hit @ and vice versa.]
Missiles and wand zaps still pass through such diagonals without
noticing or affecting the worm. I'm not sure whether this ought to be
extended to change that--it might get pretty messy since it would need
to be considered during monsters' targetting as well as during the path
traversal itself.
From a bug report, reading a scroll
of mail violates illiterate conduct and he requests that it not do so.
I didn't go that far, since unlike needing to read the Book of the Dead
to be able to finish the game, reading scrolls of mail is completely
voluntary and someone attempting voluntary challanges can choose not to
do it. Instead, this issues a prompt to require confirmation if reading
such a scroll will be the first violation of that conduct. Ordinary
players can answer no and then use '!' to read mail from a shell. I'm not
sure what'll happen to players on public servers who aren't given access
to a shell. Usually they wouldn't be able to get mail either, so more
elaborate servers like the one at nethack.alt.org which allow players to
use mail to communicate with each other will have to come up with their
own solution (perhaps by providing a mail-reader-only shell).
From a bug report, you could swap places with a pet grid bug when
you're making a diagonal move. Now you can't. [Completely ignored: it
is possible to swap places with pets which are incapable of movement....]
This imposes the same restriction on the astral Riders when they're
exchanging places with monsters in their way.
More tuning to throttle pudding farming (plus endgame Rider farming).
Earlier changes made cloned black puddings less likely to leave corpses,
to cut down on sacrifice fodder a bit, and cloned anything less likely to
drop random items when killed; this one makes killing cloned or revived
monsters be worth less experience as the number killed goes up, to cut
down on final score inflation. [With several boulders and magic missile
or a polearm, it's possible to kill any of the Riders repeatedly with
virtually no risk of even getting hit, much less of getting killed. Now
if you kill Pestilence 240 times it will be worth 62720 points instead of
297840 (not including doubling bonus for ascension), with an additional
19 points per kill instead of 1241 after that, requiring a couple orders
more magnitude of abuse--excuse me, superhuman "patience"--to get the
score to reach the overflow threshold.]
While testing this, I got "The Famine's corpse glows iridescently."
This fixes that too. Also, previously unused kill count for experience()
had an off by one error; was including ``+ 1'' even though mvitals[].died
has already been incremented by the time that that code uses it.
It's possible for the player to put escape sequences into strings via
dogname/catname/fruit options (or probably interactively by using "\233"
instead of "\033["--the two character 7-bit version wouldn't work because
its leading ESC gets treated as player's request to abort current input,
but the 8-bit version probably works, I just can't test it because I don't
know how to type such things with this terminal emulator). Such sequences
can do funny things like clear the screen and say "game over" (or worse
with creative abuse of some terminals' "answer back" capability--when
reproducing the reported situation, I kept things simple and had my dog's
name underlined and fruit name blinking; they displayed correctly but
nethack was confused about how long they were since it doesn't expect to
be given characters which don't advance the cursor). This fix still lets
users experiment with such stuff during their own games, but it replaces
suspect characters while loading bones data, so if one player creates a
bones file with suspect strings in it, another can--I hope--be able to
use that file safely.
Monster and object names, engravings, and named fruits are handled.
For the last, if uncensored string matches one already present then it
leaves that alone, so bones data created with same OPTIONS=fruit:whatever
as being used in the current game will continue to keep the same value.
Someone in the newsgroup accidentally dipped the wrong item into a
fountain and wants the second prompt to be "Dip <obj> into the fountain?"
instead of just "Dip _it_ into the fountain?", hoping that he would have
noticed that he had selected the wrong object. I think he's fooling
himself there, but this gives a brief object name for fountain, pool, and
potion prompts.
From the newsgroup: drowning on the Plane of Water gave cause of
death as "drowned in a moat". There was already some post-3.4.3 code to
handle naming of moat on Juiblex level as "swamp", but it wasn't used for
drowning's cause of death and we were still getting "drowned in a moat"
there too. Now the Plane of Water yields "drowned in deep water" and
Juiblex's level yields "drowned in a swamp".
Wizard mode's $WIZKIT can specify an unlimited number of items to
add to starting inventory and they'd be put there without regard to the
number of slots in use, potentially resulting in an arbitrary number of
'#' slot items. Cap at 52 slots, same as when picking up, and put any
excess items at the hero's feet. It's slightly tricky because the level
hasn't been created yet at the time the wizkit gets processed.
For GOLDOBJ configuration, relax the 52 object limit for inventory
when gold uses the special $ slot instead of a letter. Takes care of an
old buglist entry from the beta testers. [It will need to be revisited
if we ever implement multiple coin types that can't all fit in one slot.]
Also for GOLDOBJ, prevents nymphs and monkeys from stealing coins,
since allowing that made their steal-item attack be a complete superset
of leprechaun's steal-gold attack.
Reported to us by <email deleted>:
'You are beginning to feel hungry. You trip over it.'
and also recently in the newsgroup by "<Someone>":
There is ice here. *You see here an electric eel corpse.*
Bib hits the electric eel. Bib misses the electric eel.
Bib misses the electric eel. The electric eel misses Bib.
The electric eel misses Bib. *You trip over it.*
slip_or_trip() was oversimplifying things by assuming that if there
is one object at the hero's location, a message about what that object is
has just been given. Any timeout message which precedes Fumbling (lots
of candiates besides hunger) could intervene, as could monster activity
between the hero's move and timeout handling. Aside from the reported
cases, that code hadn't been updated to account for the new pile_limit
option which could be set to 1 and force a popup display instead of the
usual "you see <an item> here". This fix adds a flag that can be used
to track the most recent message. It is cleared by pline for every
message, so pline's caller sets it _after_ the message of interest has
been displayed.
From newsgroup discussion, reproduced with current dev code (the
missing capitalization is a post-3.4.3 buglet):
The orc tries to wield a halberd.
the orc's bow is welded to her hand!
The orc thrusts a halberd. You are almost hit by a halberd.
Caused by overloading polearm attacks with throwing. The monster throwing
code didn't enforce that a polearm must be successfully wielded.
From another many year old news posting: if you picked up a stack
of potions of oil in a shop and then applied them, one potion was split
off and started burning but you were forced to pay for all of them.
Split the to-be-lit one off first so that the remainder of the stack
stays as ordinary unpaid shop goods.
This also fixes an old bug with bill_dummy_object sometimes charging
a different price than the player got quoted when an object was picked up.
From a four year old news posting: hero was levitating via #invoke
on the Heart of Ahriman, then dropping that artifact yielded:
You drop a gray stone named The Heart of Ahriman.
You float gently to the floor.
A gray stone named The Heart of Ahriman hits the floor.
That might be strictly correct, assuming that both hero and stone fall at
the same speed; if the stone was dropped from perhaps waist height then
the hero's feet would touch first. But it looks strange, like a cartoon
where something hangs in midair until someone notices that it should fall.
Removing the artifact from inventory causes the #invoke property to
toggle off. Unfortunately it has to be done here before the object can
be placed at its destination. Modifying message order seemed unviable;
this fix fiddles with the Levitation property in order to defer hero's
descent until after object handling is finished. Now same setup gives:
You drop a gray stone named The Heart of Ahriman.
A gray stone named The Heart of Ahriman hits the floor.
You float gently to the floor.
You see here a gray stone named The Heart of Ahriman.
From a bug report, reviving a snake corpse
produced a snake monster which was hidden under nothing--it hid under its
own corpse and wasn't revealed when that corpse got used up. Rather than
fiddling with sequencing to remove the corpse before making the monster,
force any monster who revives in hidden state to unhide.
Forwarded from newsgroup by <Someone> in February, 2005: non-cursed
unicorn horn fixes lost Str/Con/&c stats even when ring of sustain ability
is supposedly locking those at current value. This makes unicorn horn
honor the Fixed_abil intrinsic. The potion and spell of restore ability
still override that, so they now have potential for use even after player
has acquired a unihorn. Prayer also continues to override Fixed_abil.
Major prayer result to heal crippled strength now attempts to uncurse a
ring of sustain ability (or gloves or weapon covering it up--similar
situation as with cursed levitation). Minor prayer result to fix lost
stats resets those without attempting to do anything about Fixed_abil.
Something else <Someone> forwarded from the newsgroup long time ago:
attempting to read a dull spellbook ought to have a chance of making the
hero fall asleep.
Suggested by <Someone> in March, 2005 based on newsgroup discussion
at the time: hallucination protects against touch of death attack by
disrupting how the hero's brain reacts, so why not against gaze attacks
too? This gives hallucinating hero 75% chance of being unaffected by
gazes. If unaffected or if the gazer has been cancelled, the gaze will
fail with some feedback. Previously, all cancelled gazes failed but only
Medusa's gave feedback.
This will give players another way to defeat Medusa, but since it
isn't foolproof and there are several sure fire ways already, I don't
think it'll hurt play balance there. It may be useful to avoid getting
repeatedly stunned by Archons though.
From a bug report, 2005:
engulfers affected by conflict might swallow and kill monsters in pools
(not mentioned: or lava or traps) and move to that spot, then not drown
til next move. Make drowning and trap checks when engulf attack succeeds
instead of waiting for next turn.
[This was #2 of the 3 minor bugs; the others have already been fixed.
They were: (1) placing and exploding a land mine on a lowered drawbridge
would leave a pit instead of destroying the bridge; and (3) cause of death
string "killed by Mr. Izchak, the shopkeeper" should omit "Mr.".]
From a bug report, 2005: applying a
polearm towards a monster ignores the `confirm' option. It's a wielded
weapon attack but is handled internally as a throw since it's also a
ranged attack. The report included a small patch for use_pole() but I'm
calling the regular attack confirmation routine instead.
Also, move the penalty for samurai attacking peaceful monsters into
the same routine that handles knight attacking defenseless monsters so
that they're more consistent.
Revise untrap() to handle being unable to reach the floor. That
whole routine is a mess and should probably be rewritten.
Included at no extra charge: #untrap didn't check whether player
picked a spot off the edge of the map so could go out of array bounds.
From a 7.5 year old news posting (with a reply by Kevin Hugo speaking
on behalf of slash'em...): when a monster "nimbly jumps to evade" hero's
kick, it can pass through walls and grid bugs can jump off their grid.
Likewise when a joust or staggering blow knocks a monster back, it could
move grid bugs diagonally. This fixes both cases.
Offhand I can't think of any other non-standard movement situations
which might need similar handling, but it wouldn't surprise me if there
are some. Leashed movement is close but I don't think maybe_mnexto helps.
Implement <Someone>'s menu-mode for #name, primarily because it
is the natural place to add [re]naming entries in the discoveries list,
something that was requested in the newsgroup ten or so years ago. The
latter allows changing the type name of something which has previously
been named and is no longer being carried.
This also makes the C command become a synonym for #name or vice
versa; one or the other could now be reassigned to something else.
This is probably on <Someone>'s bug list, but I don't remember where
that lives. I found a copy of an old news message by him which pointed
out that gem probabilities are set for a given dungeon level at the time
it is being created, but they don't get reset when an existing level is
revisited. So giants' inventory creation and any monsters' death drops
generate gems using values from the level most recently made rather than
from their/hero's current location. That can lead to high level gems in
the main dungeon after entering the mines.
From a bug report: amulet of strangulation
continues to kill hero if he polymorphs into a creature which doesn't
need to breathe or doesn't have a head or even a circulatory system.
Currently, the messages are different when the hero doesn't need to
breathe, but that doesn't seem good enough. This makes strangulation
stop when you polymorph into something which shouldn't be vulnerable and
restart if you poly into something vulnerable while still wearing the
bad amulet.
can_be_strangled() is doing more checks that necessary, in case the
strangulation property ever gets conferred by something other than an
amulet. Its criteria for protection from strangling might need tweaking.
Add #vanquished command to show the vanquished monsters list during
play. At present it's only available in wizard mode. Slash'em has it as
a regular mode command, and I found it handy sometimes: when I managed to
kill an unfamiliar monster, I could immediately get an idea of how the game
ranked its difficulty compared to other monsters. But having this command
available might encourage extinctionism. On the other hand, it might stop
some existing extinctionists from cycles of save+copy+restore+quit to view
disclosure data for their current game.
This also makes merging the wizard mode extended commands into other
extended commands be more robust. It will panic instead of going out of
array bounds if someone adds entries to debug_extcmdlist[] without also
expanding extcmdlist[] to make room.
From some notes I made prior to release of 3.4.3, about applying a
carried mirror in the direction of a monster:
invisible player applying mirror toward monster which can't see invisible
should have no effect (monster can't see hero's equipment);
similarly when inside engulfer regardless of whether it can see invisible;
applying mirror at worm tail shouldn't work but does;
applying mirror toward unseen monster that can see invisible (so should be
able to see its own image) doesn't work because bhit() won't target it;
mirror shouldn't work when target is only visible via infravision.
The fourth one is iffy since it assumes that invisible monsters produce
invisible reflections rather than no reflections. The reverse of that is
probably more reasonable but isn't as interesting. The fifth one may be
contradictory; it fails to extend that logic to "infravisible monsters
produce infravisible reflections."
From the newsgroup: Sunsword is ineffective against shades. It
gets a special bonus of double damage vs undead, but since it's not made
of silver it was only doing 1 point of damage against shades. Make the
bonus-vs-undead attribute override the silver-required criterion. (No
comparable handling for flimsy weapons against thick-skinned critters
this time.)
When testing the monster-breath-at-self patch I noticed that trying
to cure green slime by having hero breathe at self didn't work. The code
was calling buzz() with arguments that produced an attack directed against
the hero's location, but there was a chance for it to miss outright and
when it didn't, reflection would block it. This makes breathing at
yourself with `#monster' comparable to zapping a wand or casting a spell
at yourself: it always hits.
I stumbled across a copy of an old newsgroup bug report which
complained that wishing for "Gauntlets of Power" didn't work. I thought
that this was something which had already been fixed, but when I tried it
out, I discovered that you still couldn't wish for that. It was failing
because case-sensitive makesinglar() didn't recognize that "Gauntlets"
needs special handling. After the unwanted transformation, the case-
insensitive object matching would fail to find "gauntlet of power".
Removing case-sensitivity for special cases like "boots" and "gloves"
would have fixed that, but this patch goes further and removes case-
sensitivity entirely for both makesingular and makeplural. Words which
get their endings modified work when the input is upper or mixed case.
Any modified letters retain the case of the original, so the reason for
case-sensitivity--user specified fruits that aren't lower case--is covered.
Some makeplural fixes: the plural for dingo is dingoes (dictionary
says "-es", not "-s") and for roshi is roshi (just guessing here; most of
the Japanese names use same spelling for singular and plural, but we were
producing roshis). Several words which makesingular leaves in plural form
(boots, gloves, &c) are now recognized by makeplural (avoiding gloveses).
It also fixes a bunch of incorrect singularizations of plural monster
names: foxes, *wolves, lynxes, fungi/humunculi/succubi, mumakil, wumpuses,
baluchitheria, Aleaxes, *elves, erinyes, djinn, priestesses, & valkyries.
Some non-monsters that makeplural handles correctly were also not being
singularized right: feet, hooves, lice/mice, algae, children, nemeses.
For an explosion caused by the player while the hero is engulfed,
skip adjacent monsters. Also, don't give "you hear a blast" when an
unseen explosion is caused by a scroll of fire (explosion is always unseen
when hero is engulfed, regardless of explosion's cause). [Offhand I'm
not sure whether something other than the player can trigger an explosion
while the hero is engulfed.] Lastly, round up instead of down when a
monster takes half damage, so that non-zero can't be reduced to zero.
Like their use of lizard corpses to defeat being turned into stone,
let monsters use wands of fire, fire horns, and scrolls of fire to try to
defeat being turned into slime. If the scroll is read while confused, it
won't succeed. Otherwise, monsters who don't resist fire will take some
damage in the process and might end up killing themselves (although with
the testing I've gone I've yet to see that happen--I guess that means
that handling for dying-in-the-process hasn't been adequately tested...).
So far, they don't know how to jump onto adjacent fire traps, nor
will fire breathing monsters breath at themselves. I don't know whether
I'll get around to tackling either of those.
Something that pops up in the newsgroup periodically, with <Someone>
inevitably pointing out the bit of code that the user needs to tweak,
about control of feedback when hero is walking across floor objects.
Implement new option ``pile_limit'' which allows user to set the point
at which the game switches from listing the objects to giving "there are
several/many objects here". Default is 5, same as previous hard-coded
value (1 object gets listed via pline, 2..4 are listed in a corner popup,
5 or more objects yields a pline message instead). Setting pile_limit
to 0 means no limit, so objects will always be listed regardless of pile
size. Setting it to 1 effectively forces no listing since any non-empty
pile size is always at least that big, so can produce "there is an object
here" even though that's no briefer than a pline() to show one object.
From a bug report: moving while blind
and gloveless onto spot containing a cockatrice corpse is fatal if there
are fewer than 5 items there, but harmless when you get the "there are
several/many objects here" result for 5 or more. I thought that this was
something which had already been changed, but it wasn't. Run a touch
check on the whole pile of objects even when no object-by-object feedback
is being given.
Trunk only because it's using the trunk version of corpse_xname().
From a bug report, mimics
which were exposed at the time the hero leaves a level remain unhidden
upon return no matter how long the hero is away. It was actually expected
behavior since the old level is stuck in stasis and hiders only hide when
it's their turn to move, but it was noticeably odd. This makes unhidden
hiders attempt to hide when hero returns to a previous level or enters a
bones level. I reorganized the monster handling in getlev() because the
relevant part was taking place before floor objects got restored, so
hidesunder() monsters had nothing to hide under at the time.
From a bug report: rogue's backstab bonus
(extra damage when foe is fleeing) doesn't apply when dual-wielding but
does apply to thrown weapons--unless both conditions apply. Having it
apply to throwing is too powerful. Elbereth makes it trivial to get
monsters to flee and a rogue with expert dagger skill can throw up to 4
of those at a time, so a level 30 rogue could get rnd(30) bonus 4 times
in a single attack. This makes the backstab bonus only applicable to
melee and polearm attacks.
Reported in Dec'04 by <email deleted>, the
monster spell "summon nasties" could mistakenly give a message of "a
monster appears" instead of "monsters appear" when more that one monster
gets summoned. Some of the candidate monsters for nasty() can produce a
group from makemon(), as can ones for msummon() which nasty() sometimes
calls in Gehennom. Compare the number of monsters before and after the
creation attempt(s) instead of assuming makemon() creates one at a time.
I don't know whether other routines face the same mis-count issue,
but I suspect there may be several.
Reported in Dec'04 by <email deleted>,
salamanders are capable of using items and of eating green slime corpses
without being transformed into slime, but would not pick up nor eat such
corpses to recover from being turned into stone. Now they will. Also,
monsters who are able to open tins (mainly via carrying a dagger or knife)
will pick up tins of lizard and of acidic monsters in order to use those
to be cured from stoning. The latter is already covered by this new
feature entry in fixes35.0 which previously applied only to nymphs:
"some monsters can eat tins in addition to corpses to cure some ailments".
My last fix from the Dec'04 report sent by <email deleted>. Many of its remaining observations/complaints are
about things which aren't bugs. This implements the suggestion that
doppelgangers should take on humanoid form, although it doesn't take away
the 1/7 chance for pick_nasty() and it can still fall back to arbitrary
shapes when it doesn't pick a humanoid within 5 tries. This also allows
doppelgangers to take on the shape of the various quest guardian monsters
[mostly the quest leaders' attendants, although there is at least one
extra foe (ninja)]. It excludes the quest guardian for the player's own
role, and I don't think there are any cases where it can yield unexpected
quest guardian behavior.
This also allows specifying monster class (via description or letter)
when #monpolycontrol asks for type of monster to give to a polymorphing/
shapechanging monster.
One of the complaints included in the Dec'04 report from <email deleted> was that spell of charm monster doesn't give
any feedback. This makes that spell, and scroll of taming, always give a
message. And the scroll will become discovered if a visible or sensed
monster gets converted from hostile or peaceful to tame, or from hostile
to peaceful.
Scroll of taming/spell of charm monster didn't hit steed when hero
is mounted; now it does. I don't know whether that matters though. You
can saddle a non-tame monster, but you can't ride one even in wizard mode.
However, I'm not sure whether a tame steed you're already riding can
become untame, let alone if it can do so without throwing you. If latter
is possible then re-taming while still mounted has now become feasible.
