Dungeon Master Forum

Having upgraded my Kid dungeon to the v0.17 format, I kept getting crashes with a coin slot/alcove puzzle:

I place a coin in the slot which then disappears and reveals an alcove containing items. I can pick up the items and use them normally. If I place them back on the alcove, the game instantly freezes - a complete lock up. I have to reboot the machine to get out of this and no error log file is generated. This always worked fine in previous versions

The only difference between my puzzles and the first 'small details' puzzle in the DM dungeon is that the objects on my alcove are LOWER numbered items than the alcove itself. In the DM dungeon, the falchion has a HIGHER object number than the alcove.

So I renumbered everything to match the DM dungeon, and the problem went away - no crashes.

I suggest that if it's *essential* that objects have a higher number than the alcove, then the compiler should pick this up and warn the user accordingly. If it's not important, then there's a bug here that needs fixing to allow objects to have any numbers.

Hope that makes sense!

This is a bug in the main game code; the order of items shouldn't make any difference to whether it crashes or not!

I've fixed this and it will go in V0.18.

BTW - the numbers are totally irrelevant. If fact so much so they don't have to be numbers at all, they are just arbitary alphanumeric strings which uniquely identify that item so they can be referenced by the TRIGGER=(xxx) elements. I've just always used numbers because it's easier to see that they are unique!

What counts is the *order*that the items appear in the file.

Ah, perhaps I should clarify: I both renumbered the items in the alcoves, and moved them down the file so that they appeared after the alcoves. It definitely doesn't work if they are higher up in the file than the alcoves.

<blockquote><b><i>Quote:</i></b><hr> BTW - the numbers are totally irrelevant. If fact so much so they don't have to be numbers at all, they are just arbitary alphanumeric strings which uniquely identify that item so they can be referenced by the TRIGGER=(xxx) elements. I've just always used numbers because it's easier to see that they are unique!<hr></blockquote>

Do I read this correctly that I could label an item ama003 or apple01 or door0101 or something if I wanted? If so, what is the max string length?

Yes, that's correct, you could name them as you suggest.

In principle there's no upper limit to the length of each identifier string. However, each line must be less than 1000 characters long which, in practice, restricts the length of the identifier to about 950 characters; I trust you'll never get anywhere near that

Fixed for V0.18