bibelot
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 322
Registered: 07-11-2003
IP: Logged
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Brained goblin bug (0)
In the editor, create a room with a brain and a goblin, and put a force arrow pointing left to the south of the goblin. Try playtesting the room by putting Beethro four squares north of the goblin with sword pointing north, and try standing still for several turns. Surely Beethro is a goner! Or is he? Usually the goblin will attack Beethro, leading to his swift death. Other times he will move onto the force arrow to the south, and then north, and then south, et cetera. If you have trouble getting this to work, try going back to the main editor screen and back to the room, or try closing DROD completely and coming back; most of the time the goblin will move normally, but once in a rare while it will behave as described above.
I think the reason for this might be in the way goblins are programmed to move. The only difference for brained goblins is that they calculate distance differently. With a brain in the room, distance is calculated as twice the number of moves required to reach Beethro, with an added .5 for diagonal moves. However, if the goblin cannot reach Beethro, the distance is just the normal Euclidean distance. When the game calculates the path map, it generally ignores arrows, treating them as walls. I'm not sure, but then it might happen that it thinks that, in the example above, if it moves to the arrow then it will be a distance 5 from Beethro, but that if it moves towards him, it will be a distance 2*3=6 from him, which causes it to move towards the arrow. This inconsistency of distance usually isn't a problem, since you generally won't be able to get from a square that has a path to Beethro to one that does not. Most of the time, the game treats the arrow as inaccessible and probably sets it to have a large distance from Beethro to avoid monsters moving onto it, but perhaps sometimes it doesn't?
The example above is mostly just dramatic; the same bug happens when the arrow is between the goblin and Beethro. Sometimes the goblin will move through the arrow and sometimes it will go around it.
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