mek@pyuxss.UUCP (M Kaufman) (04/10/84)
As a long time roguer, I've lost count of the number of occassions the lovely message "Sorry, File has been touched" comes up when trying to restore a saved game THAT I DIDN'T TOUCH. The problem is that if you saved the file on a system that, at the time you did the save, was heavily loaded, the inode modification time gets out of whack with the tolerance compiled into the program for such. Specifically, rogue will "stat" the file when doing the save, then close and leave. Whe restoring, it restores its entire data space, including the stat structure from the time it saved so the problem is that the st_ctime value of the saved stat structure does not agree with the present one. CHECKING THE SAVE FILE IS A RIDICULOUS FEATURE, AND SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM ALL ROGUE SOURCES! If I must fool with my save file to become a "total winner," I have the satisfaction of knowing that I had to cheat to win. I don't compete with anyone for high scores, and even if I did, so what? It's still (sorry) only a game. I have painfully ported 3.6 and advanced rogue 1.3 to an ATT/Bell Labs computer and my first and only source modification outside those necessary for the port is to comment out whatever code checks the save file to see if you can restore. It's great not seeing that message anymore. Matt Kaufman 3.6 TW Advanced Rogue Almost Total Winner, until it ran out of memory (another bug - sigh)