Re: Corrupt characters, messages, etc..

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU>]

In message <9409020810.AA08264@paprika.cs.adelaide.edu.au>, Craig Spencer write
s:
>Hi all,
>	just a couple of questions.
>
>1. We have been writing some highly interactive quests, with npcs having to do
>   a lot of talking, and have found that they have quite a limited amount of 
>   space assigned for messages. Is there an easy way to give them more space,
>   or are we just going to use more npcs.

 You might want to make use of magic ears.  Magic ears are just like monsters
in how they respond, however, they are invisible.  For long dialogues in
goth's tavern, where I describe some of the quests you can go to, I
had split them up between the monster and magic ears stacked underneath
him.  I am very happy that you have added some quests to the game.

>3. We have fixed emergency save for a UNIX 4.3.1 based system, do the 
>   implementers want to have a listing of what we've done, as it was not very
>   difficult, or has it been fixed in version 0.91.4?

  Uh, what do you mean by 'fixed' the emergency save?  The reason the
emergency save was removed in the first place was this:  server would
experience an error.  Data structures, including player structures, would
get corrupted as a result of the error.  Server would then, somewhat later,
realize it was screwed up and *save* the corrupted players, ruining the
player files!  Then I'd have to *by hand* fix the corrupted players.
  Does your fix of the emergency save address this problem?  Can you 
guarantee that as the maintainer of a public server, I won't have to
fix corrupted player files, because the emergency save saved corrupted data?

  Periodic saves are much safer, as the server is unlikely to be corrupted
when the periodic saves take place.  Someone here at Berkeley claims that
she sent in a hack to save players at Scorn instead of wherever untenable
location they are.  Was this applied, Mark?

>4. We found that polymorphing wands and staves causes core dumps. Does anyone
>   know how to fix this, other than the obvious removal of the chance for the
>   polymorphing for these items?

  I don't know what the problem is.  Run 91.4 under gdb and see where it
is core dumping.  Some things about rods and staves were changed, and the
code might be buggy.  Look in particular for things like divide by zero
errors:  I found one bug already having to do with that, maybe I forgot
to send in the patch.

  Would you mind telling us which version of the code you're talking
about?


Regards,


PeterM