New diabolic power: Crash game

[Turukano]

I copied some lines from recent chat in ##crawl

*******

<mibe> i just crashed my webtiles game
[...]
<mibe> 'Unfortunately your game ended unexpectedly.'
<mibe> oh wow
<mibe> it reverted me back to the start of the level
<Mandevil> Could be worse.
<cang> hm
<mibe> i shot a needle of sleeping at a pan lord
<mibe> and then my game crashed
<Turgon> Because pan lord wants to stay alive
<cang> it's a pan lord spell
[...]
<Mandevil> mibe: Diabolic power of "Crash Your Game".
<mibe> he cast go back in time

[swoonis]

Mine (latest version of trunk) crashes occasionally if I shift+click twice in a row. This has never happened before.

[bcadren]

I've heard of people using this to cheat in offline. Less trouble than actual savescumming with similar effect. Hell you probably could use it abusively ONLINE, you'd just need a way to intentionally crash. Also, on crash any creatures that were in LoS when you entered the floor are asleep.

[daggaz]

Im curious how or even if that happens, to be honest. Anytime my game (or computer) crashes, the game always starts right over exactly where I left off. I always assumed that the state files were updated on every turn (makes sense, you calculate the state might as well write it to memory there considering there are no save points).

[duvessa]

Saving every time the player makes an action would be really bad for performance, which is why it isn't done. The game does, however, save when you change levels, in case of crashes like this one. This can absolutely be abused - I used a demonspawn bug to get the previous record for most Wiglaf kills in one game.

[mibe420]

it happened to me again, on gloorx's level. i managed to figure out what was causing it, report it, and neil fixed it.

https://crawl.develz.org/mantis/view.php?id=10166

[neil]

BTW, the thing about changing levels that duvessa mentions also applies to just looking at other levels: there can be only one level loaded at any time, so loading another level to view it forces a save of the current level. So if things are getting crashy, or you find an exploit, X[ is your "save and don't quit" button. I believe ctrl-f works too, at least in some situations.

Or worship Jiyva---offlevel eating loads the target level so it can find and modify a stack, meaning it also saves your current level (at random times).

[adozu]

which means jivya eats a lot more... processing power?