On Mar 16, 9:43 am, ais523 <
ais...@bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> > You die... But wait... Your medallion begins to glow!
> > You feel much better! The medallion crumbles to dust!
> > You survived that attempt on your life.
> > Something is engraved here on the floor.
> > You read: "Elbereth Elbereth Elbereth Elbereth Elbereth".
> > You see no objects here.
> > The grid bug misses.
Huh. Weird.
> Note that I was standing on the Elbereth all along. I
> haven't finished writing it yet, but I can act again
> because I was lifesaved, and I can read it even
> though it hasn't finished writing.
Now that is most definitely a bug. I can see two
ways this might be "fixed" (without completely
changing how engraving works): either you
continue engraving (and being attacked) after
the lifesave, or the engraving you were working
on should be truncated in progress at the
point where you would have left off.
> (The grid bug attacking me before the lifesave
> is not a bug; the grid bug attacking me afterwards
> is pretty bizarre.)
Depends how you look at it.
The gridbug continuing to attack is consistent
with how engraving works in NetHack, given
that the engraving was not finished. (The
definition of "finished" is up for grabs here,
but bear with me.) It is arguable that the
mechanics of how engraving works should be
revamped entirely and from the ground up, but
that's another discussion for another thread.
The way it works now, it makes sense that
the grid bug would continue to attack if the
engraving isn't finished.
What does not make sense is that you were
able to perform other actions while you were
still engraving. That's a bug. The game needs
to decide, when the lifesave event happens,
whether you are indeed going to continue
engraving or not. Either you continue, (which
would be easiest to implement, I think) and
you cannot act until you're done, or else you
don't continue, and the engraving is truncated
in progress -- in which case you *would* be
able to act, and the engraving would be done
(well, as much of it as you got done would
be done), and the grid bug would stop its
attack if at least one Elbereth was complete.
> Eventually, many turns later, without doing
> anything to affect the engraving, I got "The
> grid bug turns to flee!"; it had been attacking
> me all the time up to that. That's when I would
> have finished writing the engraving if I hadn't
> been lifesaved.
>
> Off to report this to the devteam now…
Yeah. You probably could've walked away
and even left the level, and yet at the appointed
time you would have finished the engraving --
which would clearly not be an intended feature.
(Now I want to test to see whether the engraving
that you complete shows up where you started
it or at your location when you finish, and
whether this bug makes it possible to engrave
long strings of Elbereth in otherwise impossible
locations, such as on the plane of water, or
even the high altar on the astral plane. That
could make for YASAT.)