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Re: CF: experience bug in .92.5 (and .4)



On Mon, 29 Jul 1996, Corey Sweeney <corey@interaccess.com> wrote:
> our charactors appear to no longer collect any experience points for the 
> catagories of wizard spells, or prayers.  I can take a guy back and 
> demonstrate for the exact same motions that a guy will get significant 
> points under .92.2.
> 
> I believe that it does not say "you killed chinese dragon with fireball" 
> on the screen when we see this bug.  that is probably somehow related.

Hmmm...  I've noticed something similar, although it doesn't affect all
spells.  Note that my server is currently a mix between 0.92.4 and 0.92.5
because I'm in the process of moving code to the new version in order to
be able to submit patches to Mark, so maybe some of the comments that
follow do not apply to the "standard" 0.92.5.

There seems to be a problem with the fireball spell and it looks like
the reference to the player is lost once the fireball explodes.  I
haven't had the time to look into that and I could be completely wrong
(or it could be a side effect of my mixed code), but I think that the
op->owner field is not always set correctly for the fireball.  This
could be a problem with all spells which throw objects, so it could
also affect poison cloud and comet spells.  I will look into that
after I finish updating my patches.

Also, you don't get any experience points for spells that are cast by
objects such as scrolls, rods or wands.  Maybe that should be changed
so that you get some experience, but not as much as you would have got
with your own spells ("known spells").  Hmmm...  Maybe something like
this: new_exp = old_exp * (object_level + 1) / (player_level + 1) / 5

> while i'm at it... there appears to be a oratory bug in .92.4 that 
> causes the system to crash when you have a large group of followers, and you 
> try to go to a differnt city. This has gotten worse in .92.5 in the fact 
> that it will crash with only one follower.

I haven't seen that one yet.  I managed to convince a bunch of castle
guards and other monsters to follow me, and the game didn't crash.  Do
you also have the same problem with "summon pet monster"?

> [...]  does anyone have any ideas what we could do 
> to fix it?  or is there any specific information we could send to the 
> list to help with a solution?  [...]

A few things that would help when you want to report a bug (besides what
is already explained in the README file):
- What error message (if any) is printed on the server's console when
  the game crashes?
- Tell what you have changed in config/crossite.def and include/config.h
  (except for the pathnames which are site-specific).  Or send the
  output of "crossfire -o" (but keep only the interesting lines).
- Check if you can reproduce the bug.  Try to explain how to do it, so
  that others can try it on their system.  You should also try to
  reproduce the bug with different characters.  Some spells can be
  affected by the objects that are readied or your current skills, so be
  sure to describe that if necessary.
- Re-compile crossfire with debug mode enabled and see if you get any
  interesting error reports on the server's console.
- If you have defined MANY_CORES and you have gdb or another debugger,
  run "gdb crossfire core" when the server crashes and type "bt" to
  see the call stack.  The output of that command can be very useful
  for locating bugs.

Well, it can take some time to write a good bug report, but writing a
good bug report is the best thing you can do if you want others to be
able to fix it easily.

-Raphael