I ran the game through Valgrind to catch various issues.
One thing caught my attention -- map.resumedelay. This is
used by The Tower/etc to add a delay before the game is
resumed (probably for camera controls delaying it) for
spawning the player. This variable was uninitialized. Notably,
if I explicitly set it to 592851 or similar, it reproduces the
bug, even if I cannot reproduce it with my typical compilation
flags. So fixing this by initializing it to 0, alongside some
other Valgrind warnings, should fix the problem entirely.
* Add a null terminator to loaded TinyXML files
The TinyXML parse() function expect a C-like string, including terminator.
When xml loading was changed, it loaded the file, but included no such thing.
Thus, we load the file, then reallocate the memory so that we can insert a
null terminator to it, before passing it to parse().
* Tweak TinyXML file loading
Instead of first loading the file content into memory, then reallocate it
to add a null pointer, add an argument to the file load function for whether
to append a null terminator or not, defaulting to false. It still returns the
length without the null pointer in case a length ptr is passed.
Fredrik Ljungdahl