Altering sp difficulty

[Jarulf]

...check the bug list. Exerpt:

I have no idea who updates or keep track of the bug list. Here are some comments on errors or things that might need changing. I believe I have submited some of this before, hence questioning if it is updated at all any more :)


>CHARGED BOLT
>If you stand in a tile of a bookcase or shrine and cast Charged Bolt, the spell effect will
>never take place. No bolts will form, but you will lose mana.

I think the effect takes place but the bolt is terminated immediately. End result is the same though.

>TOWN PORTAL
>On levels in which "Gargoyles" (i.e. Winged Demons, Gargoyles, Blood Claws, and Death
>Wings) are present, if a player leaves via Town Portal and re-enters the level, upon arrival
>all Gargoyles are "activated" and will immediately fly at the player when they enter the
>player's light radius.

They are actually not activated. It is just the flag indicating stone status that is not preserved. They are still inacitve. As you enter their light radius, they get “activated” just as any other monster but their behaviour will differ compared to if they had been in stone status when you entered the light radius.


>STONE CURSE
>If you Stone Curse a teleporting enemy mage (Counselor, Magistrate, Cabalist, Advocate,
>or Lazarus) as he is in the middle of teleporting, he will be stoned frozen but you cannot see
>him. Since he is invisible, you cannot hurt him, so you must wait for the Stone Curse to
>wear off.

This should in my opinion be coloured as a quirk and not a bug. Possibly the bug would be that you can cast stone curse while they are in the teleporting state.


>FLAME WAVE
>Flame Wave misses every other square when cast in the diagonal, direct left, right, top and
>bottom screen orientation.

This is clearly a quirk and not a bug though. It is the exact same reason you don’t get damage while walking through the gaps in a firewall and that is labeled as a quirk. It is the same here, those squares are missed since the “gap” passes them.



>GOLEM
>If you are in a corner surrounded by enemies, and cast a golem with your cursor on
>yourself, the golem will appear over you. Your golem takes no damage with this bug.

Similar strange effects should probably be mentioned under TELEPORT, since in some cases you may actually teleport on top of a square with a monster (and probably a golem too). Due to the different way the game handle target check for monsters and players attacking, a monster can hit a target in its own location while a player can not (this is actually a bug of its own and also has some other implications if I recall correctly when it comes to attacking moving targets, oh well).


>A golem is nearly invincible if it is cast while you have negative mana. The game treats the
>negative value as unsigned and thus an enormous HP value is applied.

The bug is of course that you can cast spells at ALL while negative mana, not that golems have silly hit points in such cases. If you get of a spell that is mana dependant while having negative mana, do you similary get silly damage values? Has anyone checked if the game similary mix up signed and unsigned values?


>A Golem has an infinite light radius to witches. Any witch in a line of sight to it will fire Blood
>Stars at it.

I have this strange feeling I have commented errors in the bug list before :)

Anyway, this applies to any monster using the AI succubus use. Checking my guide, that includes Goat Archers, which thus also are affected similary. As will any boss (and possible pack), that uses the goat archer AI). My guide also list the skeleton archers to have this ability, so anything using that AI should also cause it. Although my guide do mention this in part under target selection, it is not mentioed under the AI script. I can’t say if those monsters actually DO get activated when they aquire a golem as a target, or if they simply have the AI script still fire arrows if they have a target, despite not being active. I should investigate this and clarify the guide accordingly. In any case, this “quirk description” is incommplete and somewhat innacturate.



>SPELL EFFECT LIMIT
>Diablo has a limit as to the number of ongoing spell effects (including arrows) that can
>appear on a level at any one time, which is 125. Some spells can use up several effects.

This is hardly a bug but a quirk of the game design I would say. The bug list should similary mention the limit on number of items on the ground on each level. Ohh, and is the limit really 125 for effects? I thought it was 127.


>SPELL QUEUING
>You can avoid entering a stairwell by repeatedly casting spells while standing on the stair
>entrance tile.

Any action that is not walking should be enough to cause this. That is, making normal atatcks should also qualify. If I recall correctly the check for being on a stair square is part of the walk code. No?

>DUPING
>Laggy conditions allow duplication of items in Diablo. Blizzard has never fixed this bug for
>some reason. Their claim that it cannot be fixed without an overhaul of the game engine is
>incorrect, as it has been fixed in modifications.

What specific duping does this refer to? If it is the “click on item on ground”, it has nothing to do with lag but due to the silly way they coded picking up items and it passing through the cursor slot on the way and the game not correctly checking if you allready have an item there. SO it is incorrect to contribute this to lag effects.



>DISAPPEARING ITEMS
>Occasionally an item will simply disappear when a character tries to pick it up. It is believed
>to be caused by lag, although there are reports of occurrences in Single Player mode -
>which may be a wholly different bug. Generally however this is a result of a game desync,
>when clients do not agree as to the items that were "generated" by dying monsters.

Could this possible have anything to do with the limit of number of items on the ground and different clients placing different items on the ground and reaching the limit when it is told by items from other clients, thus causing a conflict? Just a thought.


>HIGH DURABILITY WRAPAROUND
>When an item has over 255 durability, its durability wraps around back to 1 to 10 durability.
>This can cause strange effects when using Hidden Shrines or finding items with durability-
>boosting suffixes that would normally cause its durability to be higher than 255.

This only happens when a character is saved since it is the saving that cut down the data size from a dword into a byte. By the way, as an interesting tidbit, this also happens to player stats and was the reason they had to change the Barbarians Str max from a value above 255 to the current value.



>If you use Hidden Shrines to take an item to exactly 255 durability, the item will transform to
>an indestructible item. This is because an item that is indestructible is actually one with 255
>durability (the highest hex value for durability).

“the highest hex value for durability” is a very odd, incorrect and missleading statement that really does not say anything and should be removed. The reason is that Blizzzard uses the value 255 to signify indestructible in their code that check if an item is indestructible, not because it happens to be some max value (and why on earth say hex, the base used for a numerical system doesn’t alter maximum values). Such a text only has a place in some hack site that feel it is cool to use words such as “hex” without having a clue.



>IMPOSSIBLE ITEMS
>Due to the item generation rules of Diablo, these items cannot be found: Bramble,
>Crackrust, The Deflector, Gonnagal's Dirk, and The Mangler.

Lightforge is missing from this list.


>DUPED ITEMS AT THE SHOPS
>Griswold, Pepin, and Adria will occasionally sell dupes of items at their shops. Dupes of
>potions are somewhat common since the the range of ID numbers assigned to potions is
>rather small.

This is a quirk in my opinion. The same applies to dupes in the dungeons, also a quirk.


>SWING SPEED
>The normal swing speed of the warrior is too fast (by one frame), causing the suffix "of
>readiness" (designed to drop one frame of animation) to be useless.


Heh, I don’t know were this comes from. This should not be true (since sorcerors and rogues suffer from the same problem too). If I am not mistaken it is the first frame that is missing but this doesn’t work out occuring, at least not for repeated actions. I really have to fire up the game again some time and check out the exact nature of the first frame missing issue).


>CURSED AC ROUNDING
>When a cursed prefix or suffix modifies the AC value of an item, it is supposed to lower the
>AC. However, if the amount of AC to be lowered rounds down to zero, the AC is actually
>raised by 1. For example, an AC 3 helm with -26% AC will yield an AC of 4, since 26% of 3
>is rounded to 0.

This explanation needs to be expanded. Why should anything raise by one due to being rounded to 0??



>GRISWOLD/WIRT PRICING INCONSISTENCY
>If you buy an item from Wirt and then go to sell it to Griswold, he will offer you one fourth of
>the price you paid Wirt for it. If you then start a new game, however, Griswold will only offer
>you one fourth of what HE would sell it for (less money).

I would call this a quirk :)


>CORRUPTION SUFFIX
>Equipping an item "of Corruption" when you have negative mana will actually GIVE you
>mana, setting your mana to zero.

Of course, since it is an affix that sets the mana to 0, not “remove any positive mana you have”. :)

>SHARING SQUARES
>If two characters wind up occupying the same square, which can happen rarely when
>casting Teleport or when Resurrecting while standing over a body, the player who does not
>move will become invisible to both players, until he/she moves.

Not only that, I believe the player who is first in line in the internal list of players, will be the one being hit and used as target when attacked.

>Monsters which are invisible to players until they attack, such as Hiddens, are sometimes
>placed in a position where they will be activated by a player entering the level via a
>stairwell.

No, hiddens are always active actually and if there is no door or so preventing them from reaching the player, they WILL reach the player sooner or later without the player moving. This has nothing to do with them being placed differently.


>Monsters inside enclosed areas in range of stairwells aren't considered as dangerous and
>can be placed there. For example, you may enter a level of the caves and find Storm
>Demons waiting 7 squares away, placed there because they are inside a fenced area. They
>will fire at you immediately.

“as dangerous”??? This doesn’t work out as an explanation. The game will not place random monsters within a certain range of the stairs. However, it can place special “rooms”, which includes such fenced areas, close to the stairs though. Since those “rooms” get populated by special code without restrictions to being close to a stair, they can end up so close that they get activated at once when a player enter a level, something that otherwise do not normally happens.



>127 OBJECT LIMIT
>You cannot drop more than 127 items on the floor in any one level, including town. Note
>that this can cause you to lose monster drops if you have 127 items on the floor of a level,
>since a dying monster will have no "room" to drop it and it will simply never exist.
>Remember that every pile of gold is an "item."

MY error above, this was appearntly mentioned :)

>FIFTH SPELL BOOK PAGE
>Clicking on the small area between the number 4 and the right edge of the spellbook
>causes a blank page to appear.

This must certianly be a quirk and not a bug, no?


>PRICE LIMIT
>The upper limit to the price of items Griswold or Adria can sell you is 140,000 gold, even
>though a character could still buy an item that takes up six slots and carry 170,000 gold.
>Wirt's limit is 135,000 gold.

I wouldn’t have included this as a even a quirk.
>BOSS ERRORS
>Bosses in Nightmare and Hell difficulties are sometimes far weaker than they should be,
>with poor AC and to-hit%. This is caused by an error in the order of how the game looks up
>this information, updating for difficulty level.

Actually it is a bug due to the fact that those values are byte values and we get an overflow when they get increased for difficulty. Same roll over effect that happens when items are saved and their durability roll over (except here the game store the value as byte in memory).

>Diablo in Nightmare and Hell difficulties is far weaker than he should be, with poor AC and
>to-hit%. This is caused by a wraparound overflow in his AC and to-hit% values.

Same bug as above for other monsters, or did I miss anything?


>SINGLE PLAYER LEVEL BONUSES
>Players get an extra 1/64th HP and MP on leveling up in single player instead of a full
>64/64.

Not “instead of” but “in addition to”, right? By the way, this is actually a good way to figure out if someone has been moving a single player char to multi player, no? Also, is this for single player only? I had a faint memory of it always applying, no? Then it would be a sign of someone messing with ones HP and then putting it back.


>EARS
>Ears from the same character are duplicates, even if the ears come from two different
>character levels.

Shouldn’t this be a quirk? Or why should ears from the same level be dupes?



>YEAR 2039 RANDOMIZER ISSUE
>The game engine will stop creating random levels after midnight of January 1, 2039. This is
>because the date and time of a computer is used to "seed" the dungeons, and this seed is
>based off the time passed since January 1, 1970. Thus, any game started before January 1,
>1970, will also not be random.

Actually there is a specific check for the 2039 date. So it has nothing to do with the fact that the game seed with the time since 1970, one could do that even for dates after 2039 for example.