dudek (07/12/82)
There seems to be an intermittent bug in the attack routine. One
of our players was launching an attack (against me!) and partway
through the output, the "@"s and "!"s stopped coming. The program
just kept chugging away, chewing up cpu time. He hit quit, delete,
and all that, to no avail. In fact hanging up didn't even kill
the process (although he may run nohupped). It logged him
out of the game, but since we run with the user-id set, he
couldn't kill the process.
Has anyone else had similar problems? I have not heard
of this bug before, nor of a fix to it.
Another user claims that in big battles, he has seen cases
where number remaining + number killed > number in attack. This
seems like another rare occurence, but he is sure he saw it. Is it
possible that there is a synchronization problem in attack.o; maybe
with other players accessing the same sector?
A final question: has anybody got a good scheme for the
DIETY to model (sculpt) the world without knowing exactly how it'll
look (so he can play fairly). My technique is to designate groups
of sectors without checking what they are. For example des -32:32,1:2 .
places a big river across the world. This works, but it's more than
a little bit crude.
Gregory Dudek