Also, the player with Bodmall power should probably be immune to the smoke demon’s attacks–but I don’t know if she is…?
This is by design: the scroll tells you that it protects against the next attack. It does not protect against any other sources of damage. (We could make it that way, if we wanted to, but this would involve writing a more centralised damage system. Might be worth it in some later version of the game, even if we don’t want the SoP to work that way, but I’m loath to undertake it for this version of the game.)
This was one of these cases where a seemingly innocuous change in one part of the code (I believe a change made by Dannii in ATTACK when he implemented the hitting action) had consequences in a completely different part of the code. How do other large software projects ensure this doesn’t happen? Anyway, it’s fixed!
The cynical answer is “they don’t”, but in an ideal world regression testing (unit testing) would catch such cases.
I’m unable to reproduce this – all my attempts to hide fail, as they should, given this code:
A detection rule (this is the cannot hide when grappled rule):
if someone grapples the player:
increase detection probability by 1000.
It is possible that the grapple was broken for a moment?
I have also been unable to reproduce these, but maybe they’ve been fixed by other changes to the way the attack and hitting powers are handled.
I cannot reproduce this either.
All other bugs reported by emacsuser have been fixed! New beta build attached.
Kerkerkruip - Release 6 - PRE-B.gblorb (1.35 MB)
My conception of the smoke demon is not that it suffocates all its enemies; that is merely the flavour text when it kills the player. So as far as I’m concerned, it should be able to attack everyone.
I’d be wary about making druids immune to the smoke demon, as this would make the optimal strategy for a player with the power of Bodmall visiting the elemental plane of smoke be to wander around for hundreds of turns – there is nothing to fear, and that way he could be sure of finding all the items hidden on the plane. But what about giving the smoke demon a damage penalty versus druids?
I have spent some time killing all potential bugs having to do with grappling (the player can now no longer enter, exit, go, dig-go, or get off stuff when he is immobile), and the smoke demon appearing and disappearing (when a “new” smoke demon is generated, a lot of stuff is reset that wasn’t previously reset). So I hope that this has killed a bunch of bugs we hadn’t seen in practice yet.
I’ve also commented out the scroll of etherealness.
The power of the bomb hasn’t been changed yet. Next time – maybe tomorrow.
Man, I didn’t even know there was an elemental plane of smoke… I just encountered smoke demons for the first time a couple of days ago, when I fought the new Bodmall for the first time, and two smoke demons spawned during the course of the fight. I thought, Wow–smoke is dangerous now!
Anyway, a damage penalty v. druids sounds like a good solution to the dilemma you describe.
There seem to be large parts of the game that I’ve not encountered yet. I guess I need to get my difficulty level up above 1 to see some more of what the Kerker has to offer. (That or start reading scrolls without ID’ing them!)
–Erik
Or in this case, just start digging around if you get the chance. The portal to the elemental plane of smoke is one of a handful of rooms that sometimes get placed near the dungeon, but are not connected to it. (The others are the Cave of Rust, the Hidden Treasury, and the Eternal Prison, if I’m not forgetting anything.)
Oh, it’s one of the hidden rooms! I tried random digging the last time I got a digging implement, but I didn’t find anything 
I find that my getting the opportunity to dig and my being powerful enough to sense the direction I should dig in are not very often coincident…
You generally wouldn’t sense anything anyway, because only the Hidden Treasury can contain an epic item (I think). You will notice when you are next to a room (“The stone seems different north of here”), which should increase your probability of finding something. Otherwise, digging is of course mostly for some fun fooling around – I mean, you could suddenly dig into the Eternal Prison, and that is not fun. OK, it is fun, but it is not necessarily useful. 
Ahh, that’s fine. Perhaps we could change the flavour text depending on whether the defendant breathes air or not.
Belated thanks for all of the fixes! I’ll look at those four again, though if you can’t reproduce them, they’re probably gone or else my mistake. I regret not taking a transcript.
I still think that there should be a “release for testing” option in Inform that–among other things–include code to automatically write transcripts to disk for every game, w/o any interaction from the player. It wouldn’t be too hard to write that behavior up as an extension, but it would be even better if there were out-of-the-box support for it.
O, by the way, should I be uploading test builds for you? That would allow you to use the standard debugging commands (showme, purloin, gonear) as well as some Kerkerkruip specific ones (plonk = kill all enemies in the room; plunk GUY = kill GUY; reduce GUY = set GUY to 1 health; rambo = get 100 health, 100 melee, and set damage die of rapier to 100; meatboy = get 1000 health; win = win). Let me know if you think that would be useful to you.
New update!
- The smoke demon now deals 4 less damage to druids.
- Fixed a bug in ATTACK that sometimes allowed monsters to consider themselves as targets. (ATTACK assumed that factions would never hate themselves, but in Kerkerkruip, some factions do: the horror faction and the insane faction. Since the alternative of making a special insane faction for everyone is not very appealing, I chose to see this as a bug in ATTACK.)
- The power of the bomb has now been upgraded: you always hurl yourself at the lowest health person who might give you a soul. I also created the infrastructure for handling groups of people, like the fanatics of Aite: these would never give you a soul, even if there was only one of them left. The power of the bomb has now finally been implemented in a robust and bug free way! And anyone who doesn’t believe it, well, well, I’ll… Ok, maybe there are still bugs. But I sure hope there aren’t.
- I have overhauled the difficulty system. Now, you will only lose one level of difficulty if you die, rather than being set all the way back to Normal. Also, the lower difficulty levels have been made slightly easier. The idea is that as a player, you’ll find a sort of equilibrium position around the difficulty that is most interesting for you (50% win chance). I have changed the names of the difficulty levels, and added several more named ones – though they go up into all infinity, or at least as far as an integer will take you. Which is way beyond the point where all monsters get a +1000% health bonus…
- The “restart” option is now known as the “new game” option, which makes more sense.
Added a testing release below. Note that I haven’t checked yet whether the documentation needs to be updated to reflect the new difficulties.
I decided to put my money where my mouth is, and I waited around until my enemy killed me when I had the power of the bomb!
There was a bug. I died.
This world is a sad, sad place.
I think that a debugging build of the sort you mentioned might be useful–for one thing, it might encourage people like me who are very much PLAY testers to forget the game and just bang on the program a little …
The file I just put up two posts ago is a debugging build. (I figured there was no real disadvantage.)
Ah, well, you know, there is indeed a crack in everything… but that’s how the light gets in! (I’ve been on a Leonard Cohen listening streak.)
There are many, many worse things you could be listening to on a streak than Leonard Cohen!
I have a couple of comments about the new level system and the start menu:
First, I like that the winning streak concept has been simplified out of existence. I’m still not entirely certain how the level system works, though: Do you lose a level every time you die w/o killing Malygris? Or do you only lose one level if you die, no matter how many times you die before winning again, or do you lose a level every time you die? I think the latter would be more fun. The next observation explains why I think that:
However, it seems that I am now booted down to the easiest difficulty level even if I do have a victory under my belt. I have one victory (don’t snicker), yet my level is now 0 (“Novice”). This isn’t any fun, because the easier enemies–at least–are way too easy in the new Novice mode, so I suspect this is a bug. If it isn’t, though, please let me cast my vote for never dipping below Apprentice if you have logged at least one victory.
Finally, I think that the menu option keypresses need to be re-pegged to their most logical equivalents. Here is the current list of options:
OPTIONS:
Continue the game : (SPACE)
Start a new game : S
Skip to Apprentice level : N
Display help menu : M
Reset victories : R
Quit : Q
I would propose that the most appropriate letter be used for each option in all cases:
Space for Continue, but also C if the player happens to type that instead (the C wouldn’t need to be visibly presented as an option–but the game should respond to it).
Space for New Game when that’s there is no saved game, but also N (rather than S) in all cases.
S for Skip to Apprentice level.
H for Help menu
R and Q as they are currently.
(The graphical version of the menu I’m designing is more compact–“New Game” vs “Start a New Game”, so I’ll be using the more focalized choices there.)
–Erik
Yeah, you lose one level every time you lose; but you should never dip back into Novice level. If that happens, it’s a bug, and I’ll look into it. I’ll also check out the option keys, thanks! Somehow, they didn’t cross my mind at all… a strange oversight.
Maybe rename the help menu to the about menu, and give it A. Because it has more than just help info.