mwp@munnari.oz (Michael Paddon) (11/04/87)
Conquest dumped core on me again today. I was logged in as god and
attempted to remove a player from the game by destroying his nation.
The culprit was the routine destroy() in "npc.c". It attempts to
fprintf to the stream "fnews". This works fine during the daily
update as the news file is opened as "fnews" in update(). When
god destroys a nation, however, this file has not been opened and
the rest is history...
The easiest hack I could think of was to change the definition of
"fnews" at the top of "update.c" to:
FILE *fnews = NULL ...
and precede every "fprintf(fnews...)" with:
if (fnews != NULL)
Another bug also cropped up!! I changed the name of my nation and then
logged on and off a few times to make my moves. Low and behold, when the
update ran all moves after I changed the name were ignored. I have not
attempted to fix this one as it appears to be of a much more subtle sort
than the one above. Any takers?
What really needs doing, though, is a second pass over the code to
clean it up and make it a bit more reliable.
Michael Paddon
==============
===========================
UUCP: {seismo,mcvax,ukc,ubc-vision}!munnari!mwp
ARPA: mwp%munnari.oz@seismo.css.gov
CSNET: mwp%munnari.oz@australia