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From: ron@wjvax.UUCP (Ron Christian)
Newsgroups: net.games.rogue
Subject: save game bug (clues)  (long)
Message-ID: <207@wjvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 17-Sep-84 23:00:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: wjvax.207
Posted: Mon Sep 17 23:00:12 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Sep-84 07:41:10 EDT
Organization: Watkins Johnson, San Jose, Calif.
Lines: 39

Here's another clue on the mechanism that produces
what we call the save game bug.  A friend says he
suspects it's a malloc problem, and I think I now
agree.  In my last game, I got the save game bug
when I started to enter a room.  If I went down
the hall in the opposite direction, everything was
fine, but if I tried to enter the room in the upper
right hand corner, the game saved itself.  This happened
as soon as I tried to move over the +, and when I
reentered the game, my @ appeared in the hall as
if I hadn't made that move.  This room had to be
REALLY small, as the hallway came up real close to
the right hand edge, and the + was practically in
the corner of the screen.  Is it possible that rogue
blunders occasionally when it tries to create a
room, generating an error? I guess the game traps all
error signals and tries to save itself, so a 'segmentation
fault' or some such thing would cause the game to
save itself.  This was on level 27 in 5.3 rogue.

Or, since this bug only happens on the best games at the
highest levels, could rogue simply not be allocating
enough memory for data storage?  Along about level 27
we run out of allocated memory, the shell complains,
and boom! the game saves itself.  Comments?

Another interesting thing, since the game would not
be posted after I got out of there, I restarted it 
with a |tee to a file name so I'd have a record of
the score.  This is after escaping the level of the
non-room.  With a |tee, I couldn't use the Y
move in rogue, as it caused the game to be put in the
background.  Facinating.
-- 

	"Trivia is important."		Ron Christian
	    (syntax bug)		Watkins-Johnson Co.
					San Jose, Calif.
					(...ios!wjvax!ron)