bugs in rogue 5.3 with 4.2 BSD unix

[Dik T. Winter]

Very regularly a game of mine bombs. This occurs in general when I am
carryint a lot. In that case when a request is made for an item and
I answer '*' the game is saved (but not really restorable because the
restored game has the same symptoms). I suspect the inventory data
base is corrupted. I have corroborating evidence for this from transcripted
games. In one case an inventory listing has gotten bogus (mentioning 3
brown potions on separate lines; one indicated by i); the other two
indicated by ().). In another case a Nymph stole 2 potions of restore
strength, but my inventory listed afterwards still 2 of those left
(while I had 3 originally).
I have heard that the problem is still more pronounced with 5.4 rogue
under 4.3 BSD unix (a vax next door, but I have not used it).

My questions:
1. Who maintains this and is he/she aware of these problems?
2. Is it likely to be fixed?
(I am really angry at it as it happens generally in promising games at
level 13 or so.)
--
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
UUCP: {seismo,decvax,philabs,okstate,garfield}!mcvax!dik

[DWB]

In article <2...@zuring.UUCP>, d...@zuring.uucp (Dik T. Winter) writes:
> Very regularly a game of mine bombs. This occurs in general when I am
> carryint a lot. In that case when a request is made for an item and
> I answer '*' the game is saved (but not really restorable because the
> restored game has the same symptoms). I suspect the inventory data
> base is corrupted. I have corroborating evidence for this from transcripted
> games. In one case an inventory listing has gotten bogus (mentioning 3
> brown potions on separate lines; one indicated by i); the other two
> indicated by ().). In another case a Nymph stole 2 potions of restore
> strength, but my inventory listed afterwards still 2 of those left
> (while I had 3 originally).
> I have heard that the problem is still more pronounced with 5.4 rogue
> under 4.3 BSD unix (a vax next door, but I have not used it).
>

When we received "Advanced Rogue Version 2.0", (rogue from Bell Labs)
it too had a problems like that. (i.e. fighting a monster in a maze
(not dungeon) was the surest way to bomb the game.) The remedy to that
was very simple, it has to do with a global varible called `version[]'
in vers.c. It is used by the "save" functions as the "lowest" memory
address for the write to the file. This will only work if it linked first
in the final compilation (i.e. cc -O vers.o ..... -o srogue). When I
first got it wasn't like this, but since I had worked on adding a save
routine to midway (by uc berkeley) I changed it, recompiled it and
haven't had a problem since.

Since the source to 5.{3,4} is not distributed I would suggest you
switch to a rogue clone like hack or any other. Nothing is more frustrating
than `attempting to' play a game with buggy code.

--
Doug Boyce Daemen College, Buffalo NY
UUCP : decvax!sunybcs!daemen!boyce or ihnp4!kitty!daemen!boyce
ARPA : boyce%buf...@csnet-relay.arpa
"Of course the Nielsen ratings are accurate... We proved it in a taste test!"