11 conduct run spoiled by bizarre bug
Nybes
http://alt.org/nethack/userdata/thewumpus/ttyrec/2010-01-05.06:09:57.ttyrec
I was exploring the dungeon on Dlvl 20.
T:23370 - A team of 4 soldiers spawn. I retreat to a corridor and
begin picking them off with my stack of 16 throwing daggers named
pickme. ('pickme' is my autopickup exception suffix).
T:23383 - I've killed three of the soldiers. My stack of daggers has
all been thrown, and all of them have been picked up by the last
remaining soldier. I advance and check the soldier's status with my
stethoscope.
T:23386 - I now intend to finish off the last soldier by meleeing him
with my bare fists. I attack - and my heart breaks as the message
appears - 'You begin bashing monsters with your 17 daggers named
pickme'.
I immediate check my conducts - weaponless conduct has been broken. I
check my inventory - I am not even carrying any daggers, let alone
wielding them.
After scanning through the message history, trying in vain to work out
what the hell just happening, I continue finishing off the soldier
with bare-handed melee.
T:23388 - Another bizarre message appears - 'The soldier wields 17
daggers named pickme (wielded)!'
I kill the soldier, and reclaim the daggers, but my 11 conduct run is
already sadly ruined.
Has anyone any idea at all what happened here? It seems that the game
confused my inventory with that of the soldier, but how or why that
happened is a complete mystery to me. Perhaps it had something to do
with the fact that soldier was already carrying a single dagger - my
original stack was 16 daggers, which had became 17 when the bug
occured. Is it possible that the game's handling of merging the stacks
as the soldier picked up my daggers caused something screwy to happen?
As you can probably imagine, I'm extremely guttered about this
happening. This is my 6th attempt at 11 conducts, and it was looking
very promising. Barring any operator stupidity, there was nothing
significant in the way of an eventual acension. I'm now debating
whether to continue for a shot at 10 conducts, or restart.
Stefan O'Rear
The only thing I know of that could cause this is the cream pie bug. If
you apply a wielded cream pie, the item gets destroyed, but your weapon
pointer is not reset; under certain circumstances, a new or existing
item can assume the same address, and thus automatically become wielded
even if not in your inventory. You're lucky; the normal outcome of this
chain of events is a crash.
Stefan
Derek Ray
> daggers named pickme (wielded)!'
>
> confused my inventory with that of the soldier, but how or why that
> happened is a complete mystery to me. Perhaps it had something to do
> with the fact that soldier was already carrying a single dagger - my
> original stack was 16 daggers, which had became 17 when the bug
> occured. Is it possible that the game's handling of merging the stacks
> as the soldier picked up my daggers caused something screwy to happen?
It sounds like an obscure bug indeed. The game is normally very careful
about verifying that uwep (wielded weapon) is only set when _you_ wield
something, and also verifying that uwep is unset whenever you run out of
a thing to wield -- but in this case, I'm going to bet that there's a
weird corner-case in autopickup exceptions that blindly sets uwep
without checking to make sure it's the player who's carrying the item.
I will take a look into it in a bit; it should be easy to reproduce (and
incidentally should exist in Spork as well since I am using the same
autopickup_exceptions patch), but given the care that needs to be taken
related to uwep in other places, i'll bet this is one that just slid
through as "ultra-rare circumstance".
--
Derek
Game info and change log: http://sporkhack.com
Beta Server: telnet://sporkhack.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net, #sporkhack
James Of Tucson
>
> I was exploring the dungeon on Dlvl 20.
>
> T:23370 - A team of 4 soldiers spawn. I retreat to a corridor and
> begin picking them off with my stack of 16 throwing daggers named
> pickme. ('pickme' is my autopickup exception suffix).
Is it possible that the Soldier picked up a #named dagger either from
this run or from a bones level?
To me the strangest aspect of the bug would be the merging of the
stack. Could he have had one dagger #named pickme? It would still be
a very bizarre bug, but slightly less bizarre, I suppose.