Comment by bombcar
13 hours ago
My favorite is the Doom random number generator, which is just a list of “random” numbers that it cycles through and if you know how to use it, you can do things like concentrate BFG attacks.
13 hours ago
My favorite is the Doom random number generator, which is just a list of “random” numbers that it cycles through and if you know how to use it, you can do things like concentrate BFG attacks.
decino made a video about that, and at 13 minutes in the video they show what happens in-game if you set all values to 0 :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq3x1Jy8pYM
EverQuest also used pre-generated numbers. The randomness was derived from the large number of players using the same list.
That sounds like a pretty strong source of true randomness, frankly.
(It's then filtered through the list, so the list needs to have good pseudorandomness properties anyway, but still.)
> (It's then filtered through the list, so the list needs to have good pseudorandomness properties anyway, but still.)
Not sure? Suppose your list only had two number 0 and 1, and you build your random numbers one bit at a time.
Or more realistically, you have 256 numbers on the list 0, 1, 2, ..., 255 in order. If the 'large numbers of players drawing from the same list' assumption holds, it doesn't matter much that the list is in order.
What's just a bit weird is why anyone would want to turn an embarrassingly parallel problem into something with a sequential bottleneck?
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Reminds me of a "Dice" electronics kit I assembled when I was a kid. It just used some standard sequential counter ICs run at very high rate. Pressing the "roll" button would just stop the counter!
:)
the closely related not-at-all-random fizzlefade from Wolfenstein: https://fabiensanglard.net/fizzlefade/