he heh, unless they're calling it and seeding it every time it gets called.
This should only produce a sequence that would repeat if they use time and
connection delays in the seeding. Since high lag seems to affect bad random
numbers though, it might really be true they are using connection return
delay as part of the seed. An ugly thought, but not out of the realms of
possibility from what we've seen from Verant. It wouldn't surprise me at
all if some coder thought it was really 'neat' that the random number seed
was based on the connection response time. High ping wouldn't always mean
bad, but it would mean people would use the same seed a lot as most peoples
ping values tend to stay in the same ranges.
Kit
-----Original Message-----
From:
kim@... [mailto:
kim@...]
Sent: Thursday, December 30, 1999 10:49 AM
To:
eqbards@onelist.com
Subject: Re: [eqbards] Song Fizzles upon leveling
From: <
kim@...>
On Wed, 29 Dec 1999, Papa Legba wrote:
>
> On a second but maybe related note, I believe the random number genrator
> may be flawed in the game. I see too many long runs of unlikly events
> (both good and bad). This would be far from unheard of, as random
> number generators are eseentially impossible to code. (People just
> write code that approximates random number generartion). I did a study
> of the random number generator built into the 8088 (basically the
> original IBM PC) processor. (I used a few different languages to try to
> eliminate any effect they had on it). I basically graphed a "random" x
> and y cooordinate, drawing a line from point 1 to 2 to 3, etc... The
> plots always followed similar patterns... Weird, eh?
Really good random number generators are notoriously difficult
to write. However, you have to keep in mind that unless
they're saving seeds for every event sequence (e.g. whether
your weapon procs, which mob spawns at a site), your
"sequence" of random number events is not a really a sequence.
It's pieces of the actual sequence, the other random numbers
having gone to determining if the mob hit your tank, whether
your caster friend's spell fizzled, whether the guy meditating
at the other end of the zone "passed" his skill check, etc.
The order of these events are pretty much random, depending on
player input, Internet lag, etc. So even if the random
numbers are only quasi-random, *which* quasi-random number you
get *is* random. So I wouldn't be so quick to blame the RNG
just because you get a few unusual strings of sequences.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...
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