How to Avoid Crashes
After recently losing a very promising character to a crash, YET AGAIN (though I should be thankful that this one didn't happen on my final descent toward an ultra ending, as has happened before), I wanted to A) Bitch about it, but more importantly, B), Get some advice about what exactly causes these crashes and how to prevent them.
I know the following will crash the game: Eating a werewolf lord/king corpse, picking any talents from the 'Skilled' line, finding a wand of wishing (which will either crash the game or cause you to descend into a dark room, take a step, and bump into a greater titan).
What else? For my part, it seems to crash most often on certain actions, typically walking onto a certain item/pile of items after a heavy battle, or on Chatting to certain NPCs (such as asking Thrundarr about 'quest' for the final time, to slay the greater daemon.). It doesn't always happen in these cases, of course, but it's happened a few times.
I tend to have less crashes (and also, when I do crash, I can typically continue playing) when I play jaakos's fantastic online server. I'm not entirely sure why this is. Unfortunately, I can't play it where I am currently, as for some reason the Numberpad controls are all messed up (e.g, I hit '8' and 'y' comes up instead). I've tried setting the key-thingie in Putty to Normal and Roguelike, but it didn't really do any good.
I've also got to confess that I'm not entirely sure what ADOMSage does (and to be fair, it's not easy to find out with simple Googling). If that's got any kind of no-crash functionality, please tell me about it.
As much as I love ADOM, the one thing that stops it being the best Roguelike in my eyes is its terrible stability. I've had the odd crash on other Roguelikes, Incursion being a prime offender, but the thing that makes it worst about ADOM is the fact that characters are so irretrievable. Say what you like about Angband, it's so easy to save there that you're unlikely to lose more than ten minutes of progress.
I really do think TB should have designed a better save system, in the context of the poor stability. Keeping in mind that it's easy enough to cheat anyway (copy & paste your save game before doing X), there's no excuse for not implementing some feature that would allow people to recover some kind of backup if the game were to crash. We're mature people, we don't cheat because we don't WANT to, not because we can't. (Yes, I know you can make your own backups by quitting, copy/pasting, then starting up again, but it interrupts the flow of play so much that I'm sure I'm not the only one who leaves long gaps between doing this. Now if it were a simple press of 'Shift + S', or hell, an auto-save on leaving/entering a level, well, that would be perfect).
The more I think about it, the more I wonder about how possible it would be to write some kind of front-end that does exactly that (if this is actually what ADOMSage does, then please tell me gently, as I'm going to feel like a complete retard. Or is this what Jaakos's server does? Hmm).
EDIT: My God, there are probably more brackets in this post than there are in the whole ADOM code!
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Originally Posted by Soirana
