This just doesn't seem right

[Anonymous]

I was conductiong some IC transactions while holding one log and carrying another beihnd me. This is the text that followed.

> offer log
A <merchant> says to you:
    "Let's keep the price at <amount> obsidian coins, shall we?"

> barter
You give a <merchant> a thick baobab log in exchange for <amount> obsidian coins.

> offer log
You may only offer obsidian coins or an item.

> get log
[Dropping a thick baobab log first.]
You stop lifting a thick baobab log.
A thick baobab log settles to the ground.
You pick up a thick baobab log.
It is manageable.

See what I mean? Is this a bug that is fixable, am I insane, or is this just going to have to be tolerated?

[Midland]

You were carrying two logs making it hard to handle and you were dragging one. To 'hand' over the log, you had to put the other one down. After handing over one log, you now had to only handle the weight of one log making it easy to pick up.

You were holding one log, and sold it.
You now still had one that you were partially holding.

> get log
[Dropping a thick baobab log first.]
You stop lifting a thick baobab log.
A thick baobab log settles to the ground.
You pick up a thick baobab log.
It is manageable.

the [Dropping a thick baobab log first.]
Was you setting down the log you were partially holding.
You then picked it up, and since your weight capacity had increased with
the selling of the first log you could fully handle the weight of this one,
and then sell it.

Just like if you were partially holding the corpse of a tall, muscular man
it would play out like....

get corpse>
[Dropping the corpse of a tall, muscular man.]
You stop lifting the corpse of a tall muscular man.
The corpse of a tall muscular man man settles to the ground.
You pick up the corpse of a tall muscular man.
It is manageable.

It shows you what your dropping, even if its what your picking up again,
just incase it something different. A little confusion in the code I guess.

[crymerci]

The reason you couldn't offer it when you were only holding half of it (I'm guessing) is that theoretically someone else could have been holding the other half, and so the code could get abused that way.

[Savak]

There were some issues with how 'partially' held items were being dealt with, which some of the previous posts have touched on.  These used to cause us great grief in tracking crashbugs.  The "fix" to that was to have you completely drop something before allowing you to pick it back up again -- only when an item is "completely" in your inventory are you considered to be in control of it (and thus able to do things like offer/barter/sell it).  So, rather than searching for all the programs and places in the code which deal with things changing hands, the code assumes NOBODY is in complete control of an item until it is in one person's inventory.  Ergo most of the code remains unchanged, but instead we see situations like the initial post.

It's not completely clean, no, but it's the safest workaround to date.

-Savak