How to Avoid Crashes

[warheart]

The only crash I've had lately was the bunny level one, where it crashes every turn but game does an emergency save and you don't lose the character. It wasn't in my computer though, was at school. In fact, I can't remember when my last crash was at home, and that's using winbeta4 under windows.

However, I use to make backup saves because my old computer used to crash a lot (the computer, not adom) so I lost 90% characters that way and needed the backups. Now it's just a habit, have never needed to backup the file.

[F50]

For me, death certainly sneaks up on me. I haven't been killed by any named monster in...a long time. Its the doppleganger kings and mimics mostly. Bunny level really should be generated undiggable sometimes.

[Elone]

Each time I make the same mistake, and I dig or teleport in the bunny level. Next time I reach it, I'll go the long way around, for fun.

[Nate]

My view of the stages of ADOM might be a little bit off, but to me the mid-game begins when a character can either take on the Tower or give Khelly the only thing he's really looking for. I try not to skip giving Khelly that thing unless I have a great supply of on-demand TP options and I am uninterested in the rest of the stuff for various potential good reasons. Obviously there's no skipping the tower.

I define it this way because everything before that is stuff I've done a million bajillion times; stuff I have done less often just seems more interesting and less like "the preliminaries".

That said, as many of my characters who've made it into my definition of the mid-game have been lost to game crashes as to legitimate deaths. Then again, I'm not very good at even getting a character to that point, but it's still frustrating.

Idea: the game could silently generate a single save file each time the player character first enters a level other than those within the ID, and then silently delete this file each time:
-the PC enters a non-ID level that hasn't been entered yet (new save will be generated afterwards)
-the player saves
-the player quits
-the PC dies
-an ADOM process starts running under the same user login that started the current ADOM session

This wouldn't do much to make scumming easier, but it would automate a relatively helpful crash backup process; when ADOM starts aware that its previous run crashed, it could offer a "recover" option that would load the backup and then delete it. Trickier crashes that go undetected when ADOM next starts would mean the user would have to be wise enough not to start any new characters or load any previously created characters before salvaging the backup save file and putting it into the normal save file location rather than the backup location.

Gotta love pipe dreams! ADOM isn't about to get any feature updates or bug fixes. I would do it myself if I had the source and the time, but as someone with neither I really may as well shut up and go back to doing work instead of bitching about issues with my favorite game which is freely available to play and has made many hours of my life wonderful.
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Vaporizer Review

[Per_Killer]

I have crashed quite a few times when doing live sacs on an altar and too many items stack up. The game crash when I step onto the pile. I've started moving useless drops away into corners in tidy piles, just to make sure I don't get a stack of like... 100 items
But yeah.. It seems like alot of these crashes are pretty specific, and it seems like ADOM generate a pretty specific crash-message so I wish ADOM 1.1.1 could be polished alittlebit more.
OR like you say, make 'S'ave game, not also automatically quit game. That would be enough. That would be very easy to make. I don't like the idea of autosaving.. (I HATE load/save times in games)
Luckily most my chars die before level 20 so crashes don't happen too often! ;D

[Dawky]

Wow, interesting people have so many problems with crashes.

Can't remember the last time I had an actual crash. Lost a promising character to a power cut a while ago but that's the only unfortunate experience that comes to mind.

Must really suck for anybody who has big problems with crashes.

[F50]

Do the people with lots of crashes have small amounts of RAM?

[Covenant]

Do the people with lots of crashes have small amounts of RAM?

I've got 1 GB, which should be more than adequate for something like ADOM. And I'm fairly sure I'm not running anything with large memory leaks.

[Soirana]

i use 2 gigs, but actually it was more reliable on my very old PC [with win3.17 i believe] which had 4megs at best.

IMO, it is more about system... I used to tun dos version quite reliable before i applied some service packs... now i can live with winbeta4 but i usually leave ingots were they lay...

[gut]

I've not had an ADOM crash on my 2 GB Vista system,
but on my old Win98 system it crashed all the time. I
also leave ingots alone, but wasn't there a 'TB endorsed'
ingot patch already developed.