-TO sends 'em all to one corner

[bughunter]

Interesting phenomenon.

In the screenshot, notice the P (storm giant), G (phantom), g (colbran), and W (white wraith) are all in the same, extreme NE corner of the level.



I encountered them at my entrance to the level, in the bottom of the map, just left of center. Also there were a few other wee beasties, and Rogrog the troll, all in that little cluster of cloisters, kinda like a library but not with all the interesting reading.



Tactically, it sucked. They were crowding Rogrog, and I didn't want to have to deal with them all before taking on the big, stinky Troll (who dropped nothing useful, the lummox). So I -TO'ed them to mop up later and then tickled Rogrog to death with my rapier. (It's hard to distinguish troll laughter from troll howls of agony, anyway.)

Later, I discovered that his dismissed companions all wound up in the same corner of the map.

This is not the first time I've encountered such behavior from -TO, but it is the first time I've seen them all crowded into the same contiguous spaces...

I suspect, using occam's razor, that the Teleport mechanic is generating a distance, and trying to find an open space on the map that matches that distance. Failing to find such a space, it finds the next furthest unoccupied, open space and just goes with that.

In this case, the distance generated all four times was bigger than any available on the map, and that corner of that room provided a nice set of suitable spaces where none other existed on the map.

Is this a correct analysis?

If so, I'm not sure if one should call it a bug. Or even undesireable.

Unforseen consequence, maybe?