[net.sources.games] bug in phantasia 3.3.1+

kyrimis@tilt.FUN (Kriton Kyrimis) (11/10/85)

We have encountered the following bug in  phantasia  3.3.1+  (the
one  with the modifications by Chris Robertson): If a player dies
while he/she is the king, he/she is not  completely  killed.  The
number of players in the game is not reduced (I believe this hap-
pens even if the dead character wasn't the king) and, more impor-
tantly,  if  someone  else tries to become the king, they are in-
formed that they cannot do so, because the king is still playing!
New players are informed in the title page that the current ruler
is <null>, whose level is that of whoever died last.

Does anyone have a fix  for  this  annoying  bug?  (Or  is  it  a
feature?)
-- 

	Kriton	(princeton!tilt!kyrimis)
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"...E equals M C cubed..."
"Squared!"
"What was that?"
"Squared! E equals M C squared!"
"Not in the extra-temporal physics of the time vortex!!!"
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oaa@houxl.UUCP (O.ALEXANDER) (11/12/85)

A tempory fix for this bug, where characters are not removed automatically and
if the dead character was a king, no one else can be afterwards, is to manually
remove any characters that should be.  Issue the command:
	phantasia -x -S
answer "<null>" to the name prompt, then type "D" to delete the character.
This will only work if you are the super-user as defined by the program when
it was made.
					Owen Alexander houxl!oaa

kyrimis@tilt.FUN (Kriton Kyrimis) (11/13/85)

In article <856@houxl.UUCP> oaa@houxl.UUCP (O.ALEXANDER) writes:
>A tempory fix for this bug, where characters are not removed automatically and
>if the dead character was a king, no one else can be afterwards, is to manually
>remove any characters that should be.  Issue the command:
>	phantasia -x -S
>answer "<null>" to the name prompt, then type "D" to delete the character.
>This will only work if you are the super-user as defined by the program when
>it was made.

Unfortunately this doesn't work if someone else dies  before  you
get  a  chance to delete <null>. If that happens, <null> gets the
characteristics of the last player that dies, but phantasia still
thinks  that the king is someone named <null>, whose characteris-
tics are those of the now defunct king.

My rather drastic solution was to re-create the characs file, and
populate it by hand, using the -x -S options.
-- 

	Kriton	(princeton!tilt!kyrimis)
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"What are you gonna do now?"
"Keep it confused, feed it with useless information - I wonder if I have a
 television set handy?"
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