During some recent newsgroup discussion, <Someone> posted an entry from
his personal bug list: energy draining damage from ordinary attacks is
implemented even though there are no monsters with that capability and it
was not implemented for engulf attacks even though energy vortices have
the capability. This implements energy drain engulf attacks against the
hero and also both modes of energy drain attacks for monsters and poly'd
hero against spellcasting monsters. Since monsters don't have energy,
they lose access to their special abilities (their spells, that is) for a
few turns, same as a post-3.4.3 change done for anti-magic traps.
From the newsgroup: when a monster throws a potion at the hero and
it hits a long worm's tail, you'd get "The bottle|flask|&c crashes on the
long worm's _head_ and breaks into shards." The relevant code changes
"head" to "body" when appropriate, but monster throwing wasn't setting up
`notonhead' so that alteration only kicked in for player throwing.
build system.
Anyone who wants to do a build from sys/unix and doesn't want to figure this
out just needs to do:
sh setup.sh hints/unix
instead of:
sh setup.sh
and then continue on as usual.
New files:
sys/unix/NewInstall.unx - the new directions
sys/unix/hints/* - the hints files. There will be more later.
sys/unix/mkmkfile.sh - helper for setup.sh
Summary of changes:
see NewInstall.unx for info on the new build system
introduction of various preprocessor symbols to turn options off that
are defaulted on historically
comment out nethackrc (and similar) entries that still use the old symbol
syntax.
commenting out of Makefile.* lines that now come from hints/unix
GAMEDIR is replaced with HACKDIR so the Makefiles and the C source agree.
Note that I have NOT changed the docs and/or Makefiles for be, msdos, os2,
vms, or winnt. If port maintainers don't then I will, but I can't test
those ports.
nethack.sh now handles the font path automatically
In the newsgroup about three weeks ago someone described trying to
use the Bell of Opening to find the magic portal on the Plane of Water
and not succeeding. It's supposed to work like a wand of secret door
detection to mark nearby traps as known. And does, but it turns out
that the wand wasn't working as expected there either. They both require
line of sight, and since the water outside of the bubbles blocks that
they only found the portal if it was within the same bubble as the hero.
(Clouds on the Plane of Air posed a similar problem, although monster
activity usually reveals the portal on that level so this wasn't much of
an issue there.) Since the detection magic doesn't require the hero to
see the traps--wand and Bell both work while blind--this patch overrides
the line of sight requirement on the Planes of Water and Air. As long as
hero is within the detection magic's range, the portals on those levels
will get marked as having been seen and when the hero gets into the right
bubble or out of the clouds the portal traps will be shown on the map.
The line-of-sight override code is simple-minded and lets players
find traps through boulders when/if those are present (but the found
traps won't be seen yet since vision still controls the map display).
Also, it assumes that only water/air/cloud terrain is present so could
potentially yield strange results if any other terrain gets introduced on
either of those two levels.
From the newsgroup: hangup save while picking up gold from the
floor in a shop would duplicate that gold in the save file. First the
gold amount was being added to hero's gold, then two messages were given
[pline() or prinv() about pickup followed by one from costly_gold() about
shop credit], and lastly the floor gold would be removed. The second
message could trigger --More-- and provide a controllable interruption
point between giving the gold to the hero and removing it from the floor.
Change this to do the removal step before feedback.
From a bug report, attempting to open or close
a door while blind didn't always update the map display after telling the
player that a remembered-closed door was already open or a remembered-open
door was already closed. And in the cases where it did update the map to
reflect a change in door state, it didn't use up a turn. Now always update
the display and use up a turn when 'o' or 'c' reveals any new information.
From a bug report, wizard mode's sanity_check
option has a check for container contents but wasn't using it recursively
for nested containers, so the contents of the latter weren't checked.
This fixes that, and also adds a check for objects carried by migrating
monsters. And it now formats objects and monsters fully even if the hero
happens to be blind or hallucinating at the time.
Tested by using a debugger to poke in various bits of invalid data.
Newsgroup discussion about the devnull tournament which started
today has pointed out that ``d4294967296$'' would cause getobj() to create
a gold piece object with quantity 0 which then got dropped to the floor.
(It's specific to gold; other types of objects don't behave that way.)
Also, wrapping which went past negative and zero all the way to positive
again (like 429496729*10+7, yielding 1) wasn't detected.
Newsgroup discussion points out that a chameleon which starts out
in nymph form also starts out with nymph's inventory (50% chance each for
mirror and potion of object detection). That's not right; shapechanging
shouldn't manufacture items. Also, the post-3.4.3 code to initialize
vampires was overly complicated in order to preserve chameleon behavior,
but the old chameleon initialization which used rndmonst() instead of
selecting a preferred shape was just that way by accident (says the
person who implemented preferred shapes however long ago and completely
overlooked that at the time...).
This is tricky to test; ^G these days forces a created shapechanger
to start out in its natural form. That's a bit odd to begin with (a side-
effect of transforming requests for uniques and other special monsters
into doggelgangers), but downright strange when monpolycontrol is enabled;
a prompt to pick monster shape is issued, then the player's choice gets
overridden. I'm not sure which aspect, if any, of all this should be
changed to fix a wizard mode quirk.
Fix the problem From a bug report. His system has a logical name "DATA" pointing at some disk, and
when the dlb utility tried to open "data" for inclusion in the library
being built at install time, it attempted to access the wrong thing and
failed. He then attempted to fix it in a manner which let dlb finish, by
modifying dlb_main.c to append "." to file names that lack a dot, but
then nethack couldn't access "dungeon" in the library because string
comparison didn't match the altered dlb directory entry of "dungeon.".
NetHack was working around this unintended interaction with the
environment issue in fopen_datafile(), and dlb was doing so for fopen()
but not open(). This moves nethack's fixup out of src/files.c and into
sys/vms/vmsfiles.c, adds another routine there so that both open() and
fopen() are covered, and updates the vms Makefiles so that the various
utility programs all link with vmsfiles. (The build script vmsbuild.com
puts object files into a library and gets that last bit for free.)
"You can see invisible" is misleading when you can't see anything,
so use alternate phrasing for See_invisible when blind. Also, add extra
wizard mode feedback when blindness is overridden by the monk's Eyes
artifact, when invisibility is blocked by worn mummy wrapping, and when
clairvoyance is blocked by worn cornuthaum. And fix end-of-game disclosure
for blindness; it was only being shown if/when caused by worn blindfold.
Reported a month ago by <email deleted>, putting on
a cloak of invisibility while blind and then using ';' or '/' to examine
yourself revealed that you had become invisible. This fix just changes
the lookat() output when you can't see that you can't see yourself. :-)
Probing and stethoscope still reveal invisibility, as will any message
which uses x_monnam() to identify the hero. (First part is intentional;
last part seems not worth bothering about--I'm not even sure that the
player can arrange to trigger it.)
Prevent monsters who kill other monsters to obtain the Amulet from
targetting a priest inside his temple. Blocks players from just staying
on the Sanctum stairs while a teleporting arch-lich or Asmodeus fetchs the
Amulet from Moloch's high priest for them. A previous post-3.4.3 change
prevented monsters from targetting the Wizard; this extends that (and
assumes that we can ignore the possibility of other temple priests ever
handling the Amulet). The earlier patch went into the branch code, but
inhistemple() isn't available there so this one is trunk only.
From a bug report, if you're swallowed
while in a vault and the guard arrives, he'll ask your name even though
you're hidden within the engulfer. This makes him give a message and
then leave, as is already done if you're mimicking an object or unable to
speak.
This also suppresses his repeated "Move along!" message if you're
swallowed or held since it's silly to keep telling you to move when you
obviously can't.
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 a bug report, a monster which
died by moving into a trap which was next to the hero standing on Elbereth
resulted in "The <mon> is killed! The <mon> turns to flee!". An earlier
change made monflee() return if it's given a dead monster, so the fleeing
message is no longer given. This fixes the place where monflee() was
inappropriately being called for a dead monster in the reported situation.
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.
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.
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 the newsgroup: you could get "suddenly you cannot see the <mon>"
even though it remained visible. Cited case was for an orc who drank a
potion of invisibility while being observed by a hero wielding Sting, which
causes orcs to be displayed even when they're invisible. But it could also
happen when non-blind telepathy or extended monster detection is in effect.
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.
Another entry in $cvsroot/shared/bugs/buglist, this one reported by
<email deleted>: if the Wizard had the Amulet and used
his "double trouble" spell, his clone would attack him in order to try to
get the Amulet. This prevents any monster who's after the Amulet from
attacking the Wizard to get it.
From an entry in $cvsroot/shared/bugs/buglist From a bug report:
when item weights were all scaled up by a factor of 10 for 3.1.0, the
code controlling random item drops by monsters still limited small ones
to dropping things of 3 weight units of less. Scale that up to 30.
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.
