Ironman rooms + Paths of the Dead = endless hang

[Lord Estraven]

I've noticed long hangs before while generating levels, usually with Ironman rooms and Moria. ToME can hang for up to about a minute, maxing one CPU core, while waiting for level generation to complete.

However, I hadn't tried Paths of the Dead with Ironman rooms. It's even worse... Currently ToME has been unresponsive, 99% on one core, for the last 5 minutes or so while trying to generate a level.

I will try to debug this using GDB and whatnot, but I'm betting it will be difficult.

[AnonymousHero]

I think this is just a symptom of the game being willing to try to generate infinite numbers of levels if it can't place vital structures (or structures it thinks are vital, anyway).

I'm not particularly familiar with the level generation code, but I imagine this could be solved by placing an arbitrary limit.

(I'd probably also try to remove the "always generate interesting levels" option. At least you could try setting it to "off" in-game and see if that helps.)

I probably won't have any time to do any substantial work on ToME 2.x for the next month or so, so I cannot help with any code...

[Lord Estraven]

Yeah, "auto-scum for interesting levels" was the problem. I'm thinking maybe that option should be removed?

[AnonymousHero]

Yeah, "auto-scum for interesting levels" was the problem. I'm thinking maybe that option should be removed?

The only problem I have with removal (and I've considered it) is that not using it may lead to levels that are too uninteresting. It's been quite a while since I've played a really long game with it off, though, so maybe it's not a real issue.

I can't even recall which it actually looks for when judging what's interesting or not... it's probably some sort of scoring function. Maybe adjusting the scoring function to be "somewhere in the middle" and just always turning "auto-scum" on permanently would also work well enough.

[Lord Estraven]

Experimenting a bit with auto-scum off, I'm not convinced it actually does anything useful; the game is still plenty lethal, and even produces some vaults at mid levels. I say remove it.