MAngband

Lopper (with Fingle) had a problem recently, which brings up an interesting case. I'm almost tempted to put this post in bugs, but it's more of what may be instead an unthoughof (yikes) case, related to death.

In a nutshell, he staired into a roomfull of gravity hounds, who started blasting away. He understandably dove for the stair key to retreat.

However, as he was hitting the stair key, he died. So, what happened was, in rapid succession, death - ghost - stair key.

The result of this is that the stair command hit juuuust after turning into a ghost, so he unloaded the level he was on, with all of his loot. Particularly lame as he had just bought a nice loadout of equipment from me 15 minutes earlier.

I don't know if commands are cleared upon death (I assume they are), but I realize that this wouldn't really cover the understandable scenario of hitting stair juuuust after you become a ghost and unintentionally leaving the level and your loot.

So, I dunno, could we have a special set of stair keys that are to be used when you are a ghost? Perhaps cntrl "," and "." (that is, the same keys whose shift-version is "<" and ">"  )?



-Fink

I can provide a little insight on this.

Point 1. When you stair into a group of something, chances are very low that you will still be on the staircase. Possible fix for this coming eventually.

Point 2. Commands are sort-of cleared on death, in that the stream is flushed, but if you pushed any keys even milliseconds after the server sent you the death notice, then that's new input. In other words, by the time your client receives the notice that you have died, you've been dead for a while and your newest keystrokes are on their way to the server. This happens to a lot of people and there is nothing that can be done to fully solve it, since it is due to network latency.

We could conceivably make ghosts use different keys for stairing. It's not a bad idea.

Another idea would be to grant a few (perhaps two or three) seconds of complete invulnerability (and also complete immobility) to ghosts upon placement, and make monsters ignore the ghost for that duration. The timer would have to be started immediately after the ghost was placed, instead of right upon death, so that the game lag due to death would not be an issue.

That is very helpful!

Thank you Finkster for posting for me! I am back on my way to success after that and a few other set backs. Back to lvl 31. I do have a concern. I won't be on crimsons server or any server for two months. I was wondering if i couldn't put in a reservation on Fingle so i don't get deleted. I have no artifacts so that shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks Mangband staff!

I cant imagine that you'll have any problems if you don't have artifacts. On the other hand, I think a full-on reset is coming soon.