[comp.sources.bugs] PCmoria bug/feature?

sargent@uicsgva.UUCP (01/29/88)

	In a recent version of PCMORIA I'm encountering
either a bug or a feature:  when trying to enter a store
(on the town level) it tells me "The door is locked". 
Even after several more runs, the doors are still locked.
This is a problem because my char may starve to death.

	In the helpfile, it is mentioned that shopkeepers
may refuse admittance (for a while) if you insult them too
often.  I don't think I have been doing this excessively.

	Also, I tend to kill a lot of townspeople while
up top, which although not mentioned in helpfile, may
encourage shopkeepers to lock doors.  

	Thirdly, I run several characters with the same
copy of the executable by swapping around moria.sav files
for each character.  The program may believe I'm illegally
keeping backups and decide to punish the character.

	Has anyone ever encountered this problem?  Any
comments/suggestions would be vastly appreciated.  I'm not
sure if my address below is correct, so a reply here would
be OK too.

Jeff Sargent
USENET : ihnp4!uiucuxc!uicsgva!sargent
  or 	 sargent@dwarfs.csg.uiuc.edu
  or PLATO :  sargent/cic (on CERL)

wilson@ji.Berkeley.EDU (James E. Wilson) (02/04/88)

In article <5500006@uicsgva> sargent@uicsgva.UUCP writes:
>
>	In a recent version of PCMORIA I'm encountering
how recent is recent?

>either a bug or a feature:  when trying to enter a store
>(on the town level) it tells me "The door is locked". 
>Even after several more runs, the doors are still locked.
>This is a problem because my char may starve to death.

This is a bug in PCmoria4.83.  (And a very minor bug in Umoria/VMS moria).

I am not involved in the development of the PCmoria source, but I can
make a good guess as to the problem...

The problem is that there is a counter for the current turn which is
declared as an int.  If this is still declared as an int on the PC, then
this counter will suddenly become negative after 32K moves. 
(The same thing happens on the mainframe
versions after 2G moves.)  When the counter goes negative, all stores
will have locked doors.

I checked the latest source for PCmoria that I have (approx Dec. 17),
and noticed that if the above bug is the problem, then
it has already been fixed.  You can probably solve your 
problem by getting a 'more' recent version of the program.
Or, if you have old source, try changing the declaration of the variable 'turn'
from int to long.

Jim Wilson
wilson@ji.Berkeley.EDU