From a bug report, a long worm with 0 HP
was observed via stethoscope after cutting one or more worms in half many
times, followed by an unspecified crash. Cutting a worm doesn't reduce
its level below 3, but if a worm is drained to level 0 by some other means
and then gets cut in half (and still has at least 2 HP left), cutworm()
would give the new level 0 worm 0d8 (hence 0) for current and max HP.
That could confuse end-of-move monster cleanup, which thinks 0 HP is a
dead monster who has been removed from the map but not yet purged from the
fmon list. Purging it would then leave a stale monster pointer on the map.
cutworm() should have special cased level 0 to use 1d4 for HP, but
instead I've changed it to not produce a cloned worm if the source one is
lower than level 3.
Fix the crash From a bug report, where
having the hit that cuts a long worm into two also take the original down
to 1 HP would result in clone_mon() returning null and nethack crashing due
to a segmentation fault or access violation. The same thing could happen
if there's been enough long worms created to get them flagged as extinct.
This bug was only present in 3.4.3. Prior to that, cut_worm() did
its own monster creation inline instead of calling clone_mon(), ignoring
extinction and too-low hit points.
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.
I've gotten tired of seeing newsgroup claims along the lines of
"since devteam is aware of this and has chosen not to eliminate it, they
must endorse it", so weaken the tactic of "pudding farming". It is still
possible to gain unlimited experience (past level 15 or so there's not
much point), but will be less effective for gaining items and for providing
sacrifice fodder. Keep track of which monsters have been created via
cloning (mostly puddings; gremlins and blue jellies are affected too but
nobody's likely to care much about them) so that they can receive special
handling. Make cloned monsters progressively less likely to leave corpses
as the number killed for a particular type goes up, and also much less
likely to drop random items at death. This is sure to need some tuning
once hard core farmers point out how they can still abuse it. For the
absurdly extreme case, see
http://scavenger.homeip.net/farmbot/HomePage
FYI, farmbot/PuddingFarmingHOWTO includes an impressive screen shot of a
dungeon level where rampant farming is taking place.
Cutting a shopkeeper poly'd as a long worm would generate strange messages
and could result in a crash. cutworm didn't deal with all the intricacies
of duplicating a monster. Fixed by changing cutworm() to use clone_mon()
to do most of its dirty work. It seems to me that without this change,
cutting a tame long worm could also have similar bad effects.
Other side effects of this change:
- clone_mon now takes x,y coordinates, 0,0 results in previous behavior
- clone_mon no longer always makes cloned monsters tame/peaceful if player
caused the clone, using the same formula previously in cutworm. Someone
else may wish to tweak this for gremlins.
- clone_mon will christen the new mon with the old shopkeeper's name, even
though clones are never shopkeepers (game can't handle 2 for a shop)
- cutworm can now be called during conflict or pet combat, although I
added no such calls (yet)
<Someone> wrote:
- You currently appear to be able to specify '~' and have it try
to detect monsters (though it won't detect any long worms)
Show the entire worm when specifying either '~' or 'w' now.
Pat Rankin wrote:
> collect them all into some new struct and
> save that separately rather than jamming more non-option stuff
> into struct flags.
This patch:
- collects all context/tracking related fields from flags
into a new structure called "context."
It also adds the following to the new structure:
- stethoscope turn support
- victual support
- tin support
>More worrying is the fact that applying a figurine over water lets
>the monster wait until its next move before it drowns (giving
>you time to teleport it to safety, or whatever) [...]
>Should there be a minliquid() check as part of make_familiar()?
Applying at the water location next to you was easy. But
applying it at your own location (triggering BY_YOU) could
end up placing the figurine at the far side of the level if
there was lots of water.
Correcting that required the ability to pass a flag from
make_familiar to makemon() telling it to not rule out
water locations as good positions. The flag had to
be passed on down to goodpos() and enexto().
The bulk of this patch is just adding an additional
argument to goodpos() in all of the callers.
