[CF-Devel] Cause light wounds broken

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

At 10:57 PM 8/13/02, you wrote:

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     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.
     
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      Highly unlikely that is the actual problem.
     
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      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.
     
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      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.
     
     
I doubt the monster is starting with a high HP, because this happens in rooms
where it never happens when I use SP attacks or melee attacks.  From what you
say, I wonder if cause light wounds sometimes adds HP to monsters...

Perhaps if I had enough SP I could kill the creature with a magical attack,
but when this happens, the only way I've been able to kill them is with 
continuous melee attacks.