#random seed

Absolutely insane seed

Cogmind’s Seeds

People have asked me about random seeds before, but I always like being able to point people towards more resources. Particularly when it’s a write-up like this one, where Josh Ge has provided a slew of technical details about how Cogmind uses seeds, where some of the pitfalls are, and many applications of being able to store seeds.

Being able to repeat the conditions that lead to bugs is, as Josh points out, a very useful feature of storing the seed. Cogmind also stores seeds for each pile of loot (enabling it to generate treasure on-the-fly and have it always be consistent).

There’s also a rather clever naming system for the seeds, a discussion of how sharing seeds can help a community form, how to plan for a replay feature, how to save large worlds using seeds, and the interesting idea of Brogue’s seed catalog.

http://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2017/05/working-seeds/

What is a random seed?

I’ve gotten questions about how to use random seeds. They come up a lot in discussions of things like Osmos’s fixed level generation, but it can be tricky to jump from knowing they exist to figuring out how to use them.

To understand random seeds, it helps to know how computers generate random numbers. Most random number generators are actually pseudorandom number generators. When computers do an operation, they’re supposed to get the same result every time. That is, they’re deterministic. PRNGs use some clever math to take one number and jump to another number in a way that’s unpredictable.

Thus, the RNGs that we use output a sequence of numbers, each one based on the last one that was generated. A seed is just the starting number.

This can lead to some unexpected technical issues if you try to use a random number generator without considering how they work under the hood. But as a general rule what you want to do is to set the seed at the start of your generation and then use that generator for all of your calculations that need a deterministic, repeatable result.

(I sometimes set up two RNGs: one for the important calculations that other stuff depends on and one for the incidental stuff like randomizing the paths of particles, where no one will notice if they’re not exactly the same.)

Civilization II

I found my old Civilization discs over the holidays, so what better time to discuss the quirks of the Civilization II map generator?

Civ2 was the gold-standard Civilization-style game in the late 90s. With the collapse of MicroProse it looked like the end of the series, and most other civ-style games at the time were clearly direct reactions to it.

And, like the first Civilization, it had a map generator.

Not a terribly realistic generator, as you can see from the pictures above, but one that looked close enough to work for gameplay.

The random seeds for the special resources and bonus huts followed a predicable pattern, with resources being a knight’s-move away from a central square. An example:

There were 64 different arrangements of this resource pattern, with slightly different offsets based on the seed. This was partially obscured by the different terrain types, so it took a little while to catch on. (The huts followed a similar but different pattern.) There was enough interest in the game that the details were reverse-engineered and custom map generators were created.

This pattern fits right in with the radius of tiles that a city could use, so I presume that it was deliberate. However, none of the later Civilization games had similar quirks in their generators. Probably because having such a dominant city location ultimately works against the hard-choices gameplay. Alpha Centauri corrected this in spades, but that’s a topic for another time.

Civ2 also has maps that are way too big for the amount of interaction you have. Late game, you’re inevitably going to end up with a lot of empty map or way too many tiny cities to micromanage. (Of course, I’ve played what I’d guess to be thousands of hours of Civ2, so this drawback only goes so far.)

I find that when I think of Civ2 maps (versus Civ4 maps) I remember the individual tiles much less and the shape of the continents much more.

The map editor helped a bit with that, I suppose; one of the games that sticks in my mind is the early game I played on a very narrow but very tall cylinder, where I had the south pole to myself thanks to a ring content I drew in the map editor. But there was also the high-difficulty game on a completely random map where I got stuck at the north pole and had a difficult time moving down to the warmer continents. I couldn’t begin to remember what the individual tiles looked like, but I could probably sketch a vague map of the land-forms.

This link can automatically redirect your current page to a totally random article page on Wikipedia. Usually it takes you to very small and obscure pages, possibly revealing the majority small page nature of the website. Now remember that I take no responsibility for whatever fucked up page you might end up on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random