No, but "just" the study time is bad enough. I took a look at the rules
especially at the G2-changes:
<<The noble will learn any skills known by the dead character. The
eating noble must pay any NP cost associated with the learned skills. =
If
the NP cost cannot be afforded, no skills will be learned, but the body
will still be destroyed. The original owner of the dead character
receives the number of NPs invested in the character.>>
I will try to explain my theory, I hope you understand what I am trying
to explain. Since english is not my first language it may seem a bit
fuzzy, especially for something like this.
What really happened is that the eating really succeeded. The bug is =
the
following, the program has somewhere a bad counter that didn't got
reinitialised or something. And the eating does not work when you do =
not
have the necessary NP's. So the program gives a wrong value of 720000( =
a
bit more actually) of necessary NP's but Ruben really only needed 1 NP
and had it.
My opinion is that the attempt succeeded but that the program returned =
a
wrong number of NP's required and hereby the body was destroyed and
Ruben did not recieve the spells (the eating failed because he didn't
have the NP's). So you don't have to go look what went wrong with the
spells, you have to look where the function of the program returns a
false number of NP's required to eat the body. If Ruben had the 720000+
NP's, it would have succeeded.
Even more:=20
Would Ruben have learned the last main school that my mage( the brain)
had with the "eater of the brain", the function to count the necessary
NP's would probably not have triggered and would the attempt have been
successfull. That is probably why nobody complained about the bug, the
eater probably had learned the necessary schools before and thereby the
corrupt function in Rich's code wasn't triggered/used before. This
because the frequency the spell is used is probably very low.=20
It is something like this( I used a non existent pseudo code for ease =
of
comprehension):
start function count_NP's_required(NP_count)
function count_NP=A8's_required (NP_count)
{
/*
here the code is bad and the NP_count is maybe taken from a wrong
memory_address or not initialised, it's like printing from a bad memory
address, a kind of overflow
*/
return NP_count
}
if NP_count > NP_available then eating_of_the_brain_failed
else eating_of_the_brain_succeeded
Can anybody agree with this? If not I'll just shut up and go away :))
Dominick
> ----------
> From: Greg Lindahl[SMTP:lindahl@pbm.com]
> Sent: Thursday, July 16, 1998 2:25 PM
> To: majestic@mail.dma.be
> Cc: g2-list@pbm.com
> Subject: Re: NP bug fixed
>=20
> > BTW I saw the mage they tried to eat.
> > Oath2 noble worth 7 NP's. That means one faction lost=20
> > all that and the other one didn't get anything.
> > Seems like a double loss to me.
>=20
> Did they actually lose the NPs or just the study time? When you eat
> someone's brain you have a 1/3 chance of losing the study time. It's =
a
> big loss but not nearly as bad as losing 7 NPs.
>=20
> -- g
>=20