ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

When I press the Shoot hotkey, the monster is not directly in my line of fire. However, if I hold Shift and move the target 2 squares left, I get the image shown above. Then hitting Enter causes the game to say that I shoot, but the arrow never goes to the monster. I get no hit message and no miss message. I tried about 10 times in a row. It's perfectly consistent.

Occasionally I can see the missile graphic tile, 1 or 2 tiles away, but it's so fast/brief that it's a rare event. It seems to fire, but not to follow the path it's supposed to.

I'm fairly sure I've reported this in the distant past, but I can't find the old topic.

This ONLY happens with Shoot, not with spells. If I do the same thing with a Flame or Manathrust spell (before level 3), or with Stalactitic/Earthen Missiles, it'll hit, assuming the monster doesn't dodge.

OK, here's another aspect of the bug:



Snakes are twisty dodgy little things. I can't aim THROUGH the snake for the reasons stated in the first post -- the shot won't get there. So, what's stopping me from aiming straight left to the maximum range of my bow? When I manually select the spot as shown above, the game never shoots. I hit Enter, and nothing happens except that the target indicator goes away. No monsters move.

I'd at least like to be able to shoot an arrow at the empty space, and hope that the snake dodges into it.

But wait; there's more!



If I hit Enter here, nothing happens. From this, I can conclude that there are no monsters on that path. So, this bug allows me to detect the absence of stealthed opponents along a trajectory in line of sight -- or, if there are any such monsters, then I get to shoot 'em. Win/win.

Um, what's happening is that base shoot isn't passing through the interveining squares. It's only affecting the square you're targeting, instead of moving through everything in between. Or at least it's not triggering on the things in between. It'll still hit walls.

There's a number of talents that do that, some quite annoying because of it. Freeze doesn't hit in-the-way critters either, for example. Throw bomb does the same thing, to its benefit, but it's pretty annoying for solo characters.

EDIT: My mistake. The aim-at-ground thing is still an issue, and shoot acts a little differently from the mentioned talents, but yeah. It happens with a few things.

The most obvious effect of this bug I've seen with archmage is that bolt spells don't have the "stop on target" flag. If you aim past a monster with a bolt spell, it won't hit the monster, even if on the path. Beam spells however will work.

Re the spells I had assumed that it was intended that way. Whehter or not it is called a bolt, really I am pointing finger at the bit of troll that is showing above/between the two snakes that are in that line of snake and closer. After all, if I couldn't see even a bit of the troll, I wouldn't know it was there.