The flaw of random generators in modern games.

[Saltome 16]

Hey guys, have you ever noticed how you tend to fail random checks in games nowadays?

Missing from point blank at 99% hit rate in tactical games like Omerta and X-COM

Failing spells that have decent success rate in rpg, and all sort of such.

It's so bad that it's pointless trying anything that has less than 60% success chance.

I never paid attention to it until I noticed the absurd amount of misses in X-COM, and I've been wondering what the hell is wrong with the battle systems nowadays.

Now it's common knowledge that there is no such thing as true randomness in computers or anywhere else for that matter.

But I was doing some digging into random generation, like checking the c++ libraries on the matter, and I noticed something. It seems that because of the way it works, the most common random generator tends to land on the lower end in the scale of possible numbers, which means that it is in fact inaccurate.

This is a serious problem since it's so commonly used, a lot of games suffer from it's implications.

You would assume that the wider your range is the more sensitive and therefore more accurate your system is, but in fact the bigger the range is the bigger the offset gets.

So what this basically means is, that all of the functions which use random numbers are not working correctly.

The complications include not only missing someone when you are supposed to smash them into the ground, or failing your spell when you should give them a nasty case of poisoning, but also explains why usually when you have a database to pick random items from, there are some items that come up all of the time and some that rarely ever come up.

I guess that's the one benefit of this behavior, if you want some items to come up more often than others, you can do it without actually building a tier system. On the other hand if you actually have such a tier system the problems in random generation are likely to be corrupting it too.

[Bob423 52]

I've never noticed this with games. probably because i dont play many modern games.

[dolarmak 23]

This is something I noticed as well. I find it annoying when in games like Fallout 3 (which i'm replaying now) and I have a 50% success rate, it can at time take 5-15 times before I actually succeed. This is a terrible rate considering, with this you would think i was trying to do a 15% or something.

[Broken Messiah 20]

Morrowind spellcasting comes to mind. If you weren't good enough, it would almost never work.

[dolarmak 23]

Morrowind spellcasting comes to mind. If you weren't good enough, it would almost never work.

that was one thing i was glad they fixed in the sequels.