2 bugs: Being passed and Napalm not burning

[Thul Dai <thuldai@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi y'all,

So I'm one of the few (?) ppl that are hooked on this game, so in the 
hope that somebody is going to change something here two bugs I have 
noticed that (mostly) seem not to be mentioned in the NOTES and the like 
(and they bother me quite a lot every so often):

1. "Being passed":

Every so often a round starts and the AI's fire off without me having a 
chance to fire myself. This is particularly annoying when you're out of 
shields and need to score quickly on some other unshielded tanks with 
your last nuke to get back in to the positive money. It's also annoying 
(but to a somewhat lesser degree) when you're totally in control of the 
game and would like to douse the hillside in Hot Napalm just to watch 
the AI's kill each other with their left-over funky bombs.

I usually play against 7-9 AI's and I feel it could happen about every 
7-10th round, so it could be that one outcome of the random generator 
that picks the order of the players to shoot is being handled improperly.

So a couple of Gameplay Options might be somewhat relevant: Mode 
"Synchronous", Order "Random".

If there's anything else needed to help with that, let me know.


2. Napalm:

Every so often Napalm doesn't act or flow correctly. I'm mostly talking 
about Hot Napalm here, i.e. big amounts of it, but I see it also with 
the other forms. I can distinguish two different situations where it 
goes wrong, not sure if they are connected or not.

- Hitting the ground and disappearing: Sometimes when hitting the ground 
the game just stands still for a second (like it's burning someplace 
outside of the frame) but then continues without there ever being any 
Napalm spreading or visibly burning (little flames showing up). 
Sometimes it DOES ignite and spread out over the floor, so it seems that 
the 'ground boundary' might be changed during the game (by explosions?).

My settings in Physics Setup (moslty default I think): Gravity 0.5, 
Ground Damping 0.8, Borders Extend 2500, Walls Are Wraparound.

- Hitting dirt and not going anywhere: Sometimes I hit dirt with Hot 
Napalm and it seems to remain confined to one pixel (or so) that burns 
(little flame) but it doesn't flow anywhere. I have the impression that 
it happens generally on dirt surfaces that haven't been nuked yet, i.e. 
that still have plenty of little wiggles (Landscape Setup: Bumpiness 
50.0) and that it tends to happen when I use high velocities to fire it. 
 I see that this is mentioned in doc/NOTES but it happens with me 
without tunneling.



I'm using xscorch version 0.2.0 on Mac OS X.4.9 on an Intel iMac. I 
installed and compiled it using fink (0.27.1). It seems that the version 
on my PPC Mac (also through fink) is slightly different (e.g. no black 
market MIRV's), although it shows the same version nr and exhibits those 
same bugs.

I'm not experienced in C but have some other programming experience, so 
if there's anything I can do to help, let me know. I could maybe find 
and correct the first bug (if it has to do with the random generator 
output) if you could point me to the right file.

Sorry for the long email. Thanks for your time. Thanks for that game.

Cheers,

Thul Dai