Comp 198

[debo]

Comp 198 is up. It's an Eddieband Dwarf Paladin.

16 days is a bit tight for a comp of this magnitude, but we want to wrap it up in time to open our Sil-mas presents. We can always run another one in the new year.

Check it out, and use the threads that PowerDiver has helpfully started (linked in the comp description) to ask questions / discuss things you like and dislike.

[bron]

I'm coming a little late to this comp (real life has been a bit hectic). I've downloaded the source and compiled it, and can run the game. But when I try to use the competition savefile, I get the error:

Error (Savefile is from the future) reading 80.75.3 savefile.

My *guess* would be that the savefile was created from the Windows version t4nk made (?), and that this has a different version than the source download (?). Has anyone else had this problem ?

[t4nk]

Originally Posted by bron

Error (Savefile is from the future) reading 80.75.3 savefile.

debo zipped the savefile, just unzip it.

[debo]

Savefiles from this era are like 7mb of stuff that deflate 99% when you zip

[PowerDiver]

I'd like to suggest a change to the comp scoring.

The standard comp comparisons are based upon exponentially increasing experience. In 3.a, experience gains generally drop with time. Comparing non-winners, something like exp^2/turns would probably make more sense than exp/turns. I'm not sure that's strong enough, but at least it has a chance that people won't prefer their DL30 char to their DL60 char. Another option might be exp / (turns + 250000). This only just occurred to me, so I have no idea what makes more sense.

E.g., t4nk has both DL42 and DL71 currently listed on the comp page, and using exp/turns the DL42 scores higher.

[debo]

Any scoring change that isn't a direct comparison of a quantity that shows up in a chardump is probably going to require some work from pav. I can't actually do anything beyond setting the basic parameters (comp description, deadlines, savefiles) -- the scoring is always set by a quick email exchange with pav.

I think what this means is that someone should really just win and save us all the trouble of thinking about this

[debo]

Also: hi everyone. Why aren't you playing this, you really should be, it's pretty neat.

[Philip]

Finally got around to downloading Eddieband. Then got around to downloading savefile. Downloaded as 40.0 KB. unzip seems to think it's an image of size 6.5 MB, which is about the order of magnitude of the game itself. When I cat the file it unzips to, it throws up nonsense.

[bron]

Originally Posted by t4nk

debo zipped the savefile, just unzip it.

Ah, so the answer to my question is: "You're an idiot who didn't bother to read the instructions." Yes, that makes perfect sense.

Everything seems to be working now. Thanks!

[Philip]

Oh, so apparently the patently ridiculous size is intentional. Now, why does Linux thing it's a picture? .dwarfpal isn't a standard extension, of course, is it trying to parse it as one? Also, angband doesn't even seem to notice it's there, it says "Savefile does not exist." and then puts me straight into character generation.

EDIT: killed the .dwarfpal bit, renamed file to compo, doesn't help.