Hidden statistic?

[Kadan]

It's been a long time since I last played DM, and thanks to dmweb.free.fr and these forums I started playing it again .

However, during playing I noticed something really strange. My party consisted of Daroou, Hiss, Tiggy and Woof (I call her Woof ). At the rat level when I started to train I noticed that Hiss and Tiggy were practically immortal compared to Daroou and Woof. Rats did only 5-15 damage on Hiss and 10-20 on Tiggy, while on Daroou the damage was 40-80. I finished the game anyway, and then started testing. I experimented it with fireballs, by shooting them next to a wall. Daroou and Woof died from 3 level MON fireballs, but for Tiggy and Hiss to die I needed to shoot 11 of them...

Then I edited the save a little, I set Daroous every stat to 100, so that they all were higher than Hiss' and Tiggy's, and tried again. No real difference, Daroou died from 5 MON balls, even though based on stats he should have been much tougher than the others.

After that I did a solo Tiggy run, both to try soloing for fun and to see if Tiggy becomes again as tough as in the previous game. She didn't, game was very fun though.

So, I'm now asking if anyone has any idea why 2 of my characters became half immortal? Because visible stats don't seem to matter in this (like I said, I tried it) I didn't include the stats of my chars. Is there some kind of invisible stat in addition to luck?

Oh, and I played the PC version, v3.4.

And also, nice to meet you all!

[zoom]

I remember back in the amiga age, where ìn a pal´s game, daroou acted very similar to your description; he was near to immortal.Or merely hard to kill- harder than all the others. dunno why`shrug
Do you still have the savegame? So everyone could see what u mean.

[Kadan]

Yes, this is the endgame save:

http://www.students.tut.fi/~parnaneh/stuff/DMSAVE.DAT

[zoom]

The way i remember this is that you somehow meddled with cursed armor resulting in a super hero due to ?negative luck statistic/bug?.

[Kadan]

I don't know about cursed armors, but I checked that it's not luck. I set both Tiggys and Daroous luck to the same value by memory editing, and it didn't change anything. Also, none of the characters had negative luck.

Is it rare to encounter this bug/feature? Not many are responding, so I guess it is... Would just be interesting to know what's the cause, so that you could avoid it. It's not very fun to play with characters that can't really die...

[Paul Stevens]

I used CSBuild to convert this dungeon ( DMSAVE.DAT )
to CSBwin format. Then I tried playing with CSBwin and it
worked OK.

So......if you want to try this then you can see whether or
not the same thing happens using CSBwin. If the same thing
happens then make a recording(s) that demonstrates the
problem and I can figure out what is causing it. Use the
latest CSBuild ( 1.87 ) and CSBwin ( 9.8test5 from
FloorGraphics.zip ).

[Kadan]

The same thing happens when using CSBwin. I made a small recording, it just consists of firing 6 level mon fireballs against a wall. You can see that Daroou and Woof die almost instantly, while others take only small damage.

There's some difference between the PC DM and Atari version though. Fireballs clearly do more damage in CSBwin.

I also included a savegame csbgame2.dat, where I edited Daroous stats to match those of Hissssa. Just to prove that their higher anti-magic and anti-fire were not the reason why this happens.

Here's the link to the pack:
http://www.students.tut.fi/~parnaneh/st ... _demo1.zip

*edit*
I used CSBuild 1.88, which seems to be the most recent one, and CSBwin 9.8test5 from FloorGraphics.zip. That version of CSBwin doesn't seem to accept any keypresses though...

[Paul Stevens]

Thanks much. I will look into your Fireball anomaly.

Keypresses are defined in config.txt. Is it in the same
folder as CSBwin?

[Paul Stevens]

OK. Here is what I wrote when I fixed this a few
versions ago.

i16 word64; // In the original it appeared that this was
// intended to hold an adjustment to damage
// resistance. When an attack was made by a
// character a positive or negative value was
// added to this word. When the attack expired
// (when the character's attack was no longer
// disabled) the adjustment was subtracted.
// Unfortuately, some attacks required no time
// for recovery. In such cases the adjustment
// was made when the attack occurred but, since
// it never timed out, the adjustment was never
// canceled. When a player did hundreds of these
// attacks the adjustments added up until they
// overflowed. Then the value suddenly changed
// from +32767 to -32768. It was not too terrible
// because the final computation was limited to
// to the range (0, 100). But it was noticeable
// and probably hid smaller effects of armor, etc.
// Since this word is used for only this one thing
// and since only one adjustment can be in effect
// at a time I have changed it to set the value
// and clear the value instead of adding and
// subtracting. Wish me luck.

Using a recent CSBwin version, you can repair the problem
by having each champion do some sort of attack that
causes an 'Action Disable'. Chop, for example.

What has happened is that two of your characters have
overflowed and gone negative and two of characters
are still very positive.

At least this demonstrates that the problem exists in
the PC version as well as the Atari version.

[Kadan]

Ok, thanks a lot for finding out the reason. But I guess there's no easy way to change it back to normal in other DM versions than CSBwin... Too bad. And about the config.txt, sorry, I forgot that .