More on diseases

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@tesla.EECS.Berkeley.EDU>]

I just got on this incarnation of the crossfire mailing list
(the "official" one on crossfire@ifi.uio.no doesn't get copies
of what goes through here.)

Anyway, in reply to someone else who posted on diseases:

1)  Yes, I knew that if you changed skills while a contageous disease
was raging and killing, the experience would go into whatever skill
category you had active when the monsters died instead of Wis.

  This is also true of the fireball spell.  As far as I could tell,
I was using the experience code correctly:  but both fireball and
diseases had this bizarre effect.  

  I reported this bug on the crossfire mailing list and asked
the developer of the skills system for advice on fixing it, since
I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong and since fireball did
the same thing.  (I believe it is true of anything which delays killing
long enough for you to change skill categories.).  The upshot was
that I never got a reply and it never got fixed.

  This is very annoying, and definitely a bug, and if I knew how to fix
it (or had lots of time to figure it out) I would.



2)  The really dangerous, contageous disease spells should NOT be in
the hands of players at present.  When I made them, I made it so that
no spellbooks of these diseases would appear and no one would
find scrolls or staves/wands.  I did this partly because they were
too powerful, and because of issue 1).  The diseases spells 
no one should have are:  red/black death, smallpox, plague, 
typhoid, anthrax.

These disease spells were turned on 
leprosy (not contageous except by attack hitting, spell affects 1 victim)
cause flu (kills weak things (kobolds), but debilitates/slows 
	   and is highly contageous.)

Some time ago, someone let me know that the deadly ones were
being handed out at altars during prayer.  When I wrote these
spells, praying never taught spells.  When told about this
I changed some things to make these spells inaccessible again,
but my changes seem to have been undone.

Did you all learn these spells via prayers?

In summary, these are both bugs:
1)  Experience snafu (horrible bug)
2)  Players getting their hands on the deadly disease spells.

PeterM