ron@wjvax.UUCP (Ron Christian) (09/08/84)
(Ever noticed how the rogue authors don't discuss the bugs?) Funny thing: After a long dry spell, the save game bug is back! Us rogues compare notes at least every day, and we noticed that all of a sudden we were all (ALL!) getting hit with the save game bug, often on our best games. This is different from the Nymph bug, which we side step by avoiding Nymphs with the same degree of terror as we avoid Ice Monsters. Since the 'fix' to the save game bug was posted, (unset the dsusp signal before playing) most of us do this, but it appearantly has no effect! The only other thing that happened lately, is that for verious reasons the load average at our site has dropped to an all time low, usually less than .5 during the lunch hour and on weekends. (It's rogue time!) For the record, We're playing 5.3 rogue on 4.2 bsd. Now, why would a low load average cause the save game bug to come back? (For the uninitiated, the save game bug is where the game saves itself suddenly, and then will only let you make one move thereafter before it saves itself again.) Well, one guy came up with a fix. He puts his game in the background after lunch and never logs off.... And now for something completely different: As you 5.3 players know, the dungeon suddenly becomes deadly beyond level 28. Monster are hasted, Dragons fire through walls, and in general, the rogue gods have prevented the 100 level dives we're accustom to from version 3.6. But lo! Have you ever tried jumping from level 28 to level 27, then back to level 28 with the amulet? Suddenly, you're on a fresh level, with gold, party rooms, all the goodies. I was using this technique to jack up a poor score recently. Worked great. Had a score that would handily put me on top of the list and was preparing for the long journey out when (you guessed it) I got hit with the save game bug. I was trying to reach the stairs a few moves at a time, when after about the fourth restart, the message came up: 'Sorry, the game has been touched. Your score will not be recorded.' Never been so close to homicide before. Isn't it about time this bug was fixed? -- "Trivia are important." Ron Christian Watkins-Johnson Co. San Jose, Calif. (...ios!wjvax!ron)
chuck@dartvax.UUCP (Chuck Simmons) (09/10/84)
<Does anyone really read this group?>
I think that some of us Rogue fans don't understand the "save game
bug" as well as we should. It is probably the case that _every_ bug in
Rogue can be called a "save game bug". In fact, it isn't a bug, it's a
feature. (You'll notice that I don't consider it a bug to be able to
read scrolls while you're blind.)
If you look at the sources to the machine dependent Rogue routines
(or if you look at the binary under ADB), you will notice that Rogue
sets up an "on unit" (yes, I program in pl1) to catch most of the signals
that a C program can get. The action that rogue takes upon getting one
of these signals is to save the game. However, Rogue not only saves
the data portions of the game, it also saves the binary. Thus when the
game is restarted, as soon as the faulty code is executed, *whammo*,
Rogue gets another signal and saves the game again.
I would recommend the following:
1) Change the machine dependent sources so that when Rogue
gets a signal implying there is a bug in the program, it dumps a copy
of itself to some canonical location. (I believe this is a trivial
patch since a routine to dump already exists within rogue.)
2) Find some Rogue fan who is also a reasonable programmer,
have him (or preferably her) look at the dump, figure out the bug,
patch it out of existence, and announce the bug and patch to the net.
3) And finally, let's stop talking about "save game bugs"
since there ain't no such thing.
Chuck