Bug - Fixed Potential tool drop for gremlin not shown in the relay browser

PeKaJe

Member
I see that the gremlin zones now have "X gremlin" and "X gremlin (tool)" listed as possible monsters, and only the latter has the specific tool listed as a drop. However, as mafia can't immediately determine which it is, it goes with the first. This means that the potential tool it can drop is not listed in the relay browser, and IslandDecorator.decorateGremlinFight has nothing to highlight. Today I managed to kill 5 or 6 potentially tool-holding gremlins that I thought were the other one for the zone, before I thought "Waaaait, this isn't right" :eek:

Not sure what the proper solution would be, though presumably putting the tool back as a conditional drop on the "X gremlin" for each zone would fix the highlighting in the relay browser.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
Yeah, I suppose. Does it properly color the special message when you stasis the gremlin and it pulls out its tool?
 

Bale

Minion
An interesting solution would be to for the default gremlin for the zone to be the tool wielding one if it is the zone where it appears.
 

PeKaJe

Member
That might hit a snag with how the decorate function is called in RequestEditorKit.java:

Code:
    if ( monsterName.endsWith( "gremlin" ) )
    {
      IslandDecorator.decorateGremlinFight( monsterName, buffer );
    }
 

PeKaJe

Member
Hmm, but don't we get the monster ID from the rain-fax drop-down? Or does that use some other means of requesting a monster.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
For rain fax, yes - we should know EXACTLY what monster you get. But we do not use that info: you cast the skill, specifying the monster by id #, but when it shows up, we try to identify it just like any other encounter: monster name, image, what have you.

Identifying Rain-faxed monsters by the ID you requested sounds like a good Feature to add.

The problem that we are seeing here is that there is literally no way for us to tell if you are encountering a tool gremlin or the non-tool gremlin when you are adventuring (or fighting a copy obtained via some way other than rain faxing). Used to be, we shrugged, and said "here is a gremlin. monster ID 0. Oh, well!"

Now, we have both varieties of gremlin and we pick one as the default that will log in the Encounter. (Unless we can tell because it is rain-faxed) I think the "right" one to log is the base - i.e. not (tool) - gremlin. So, I think the solution has to be:

- add the tools as conditional drops to the "base" gremlin - even though it has the non-tool monster ID
- change that test from Island Decorator to be "contains" not "endsWith", so that if we ever positively ID the gremlin somehow into the (tool) version, we'll still decorate it.

... and that will suffice for now. Fixing Rain-Faxing to let us look up the summoned monster by ID, so we can get "erudite gremlin (tool)", say, would be a different Feature Request.
 

Veracity

Developer
Staff member
Revision 16196 does those things.

i don't expect to be at the island war again until the second week in September, so this is untested. Tell me how it works for this issue.
 

PeKaJe

Member
I'm going on vacation soon, so I likely won't be ascending until mid-September, either. I'll check back on this thread when I get to the zone next, if nobody's beaten me to it.
 

Crowther

Active member
Today I didn't see this bug, but last run I did. Sorry I can't be more specific, but I want to say it might have been fixed.
 

Terion

Member
With r16200, I just fought a vegetable gremlin Next to that Barrel (so, the non-tool one) and it had "Drops: gremlin juice (3), molybdenum screwdriver (0 cond)" with the screwdriver not colored.

Then I fought a batwinged gremlin there, which had the hammer shown and colored ("Drops: gremlin juice (3), molybdenum hammer (0 cond)") until it did a bombing run, at which point the hammer became uncolored again and the "This gremlin does NOT have a molybdenum hammer" note was added.

Seems to be working.

Edit: In an ideal world, the tool would only be added as a conditional to the base gremlin version in the areas where the tool version of the gremlin also appears (so that the vegetable gremlin by the Barrel would not have the screwdriver listed), but that is a much more minor thing than not having the drop listed on the base version when we don't know which version we are seeing. If the effort to do that is anything more than negligible, I'm happy with it as it is.
 
Last edited:

xKiv

Active member
Edit: In an ideal world, the tool would only be added as a conditional to the base gremlin version in the areas where the tool version of the gremlin also appears

It has already been explained that wandering monsters (and other copies) can break this, and mafia can't reliably know whether to not expect those.
 
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