Gaze of death

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Gaze of death

by Major Crunch :: Rate this Message:

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I'm bitter.

The first time, I was ok with it.  While
hallucinating, I happened to
see a catoblepas which happened to kill me on level 3
by gazing at me.
This was unfortunate, but really YASD.

However, the second time, when the chameleon turned to
a catoblepas on
my quest level, I had reflection and thought I was
safe.  It was on
the same row as me and clearly in site.

But no...

I think there may be some flaw in the logic in
handling the gaze of
death...

The code I question is in mhitu.c:

    if (!Blind) pline("%s gazes directly at
you!",Monnam(mtmp));                    if(Reflecting
&& m_canseeu(mtmp) && !mtmp->mcan) {
        if(!Blind) {
            (void) ureflects("%s gaze is reflected by your
%s.",                                      
s_suffix(Monnam(mtmp)));
            if (mon_reflects(mtmp,
                        "The gaze is reflected away by %s %s!"))          
                    break;
            pline("%s is killed by its own gaze of death!",
                                        Monnam(mtmp));
        }
        killed(mtmp);
        if (mtmp->mhp > 0) break;
        return 2;
    } else ...

I had reflection, and I was invisible.
m_canseeu(mtmp) does the following:
    if ((!Invis || perceives((m)->data)) && \
        ...)
so the monster couldn't see me.

So, the condition worked out as:
    if (1  &&  0 && !0)
        ...

and thus, I was killed for being invisible?  Does that
mean that
reflection is countered by being invisible?
    - My amulet wasn't invisible -- shouldn't it have
been working?
    - If the monster couldn't see me, how could it
"gaze" at me?

This logic is contrary to gazemu() for stoning, which
just checks:
    couldsee(x, y)
rather than checking invisibility too.  In fact, there
seems to be
special code in gazemu() which tests for Reflecting &&
!m_canseeu().

I would like to petition to have the gaze of death
work more like
stoning.  This didn't feel like a stupid death.  This
felt like it was
totally out of my control, some random chance of
insta-death.


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