[CF-Devel] Cause light wounds broken

[Mark Wedel]

Kevin R. Bulgrien wrote:
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      At 01:19 PM 8/10/02, I wrote:
     
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     Server 1.3.0 off of CVS...
     
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     The cause light wounds spell can make monsters invulverable.  This has
     
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     happened to me repeatedly.  No (reasonable amount of) damage can kill
     
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     the creature after this happens...
     
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      They aren't really invulnerable.  I laid on the Run key and "went to
     
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      sleep" while running into the monster.  When I woke up, he was dead...
     
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      Without looking at the code, one might guess the problem to be one of
     
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      death detection and rollover.  Like a "life" number goes negative but
     
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      death isn't detected.  The creature now will not die until the variable
     
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      rolls back around to zero again.
     
     
  Highly unlikely that is the actual problem.

  The check in the code is for hp < 0.  hp is a 16 bit value.  So unless it took 
so much damage in one to to got from say 5 hp to 32000 hp, rollover isn't an 
issue.  If death isn't detected when you put a monster at -5 for some strange 
reason, the same <0 check goes through when it gets to -10, etc.

  Much more likely is that the monster is just starting with a really high HP 
total for some reason.  The cure light wounds doesn't kill it because it has 
gobs of HP.  Similarly, it takes a long time to kill it by melee attack.  So the 
real question then becomes why does the monster have gobs of HP - it is possible 
the cause light wounds is adding to its hp and not removing from it, or is it 
possible that one in some number of monsters are being generated with a very 
high hp total.