Could someone explain:

Suicide Junkie · #1 May 9th, 2001, 01:06 AM

No, its CS 251

Atrocities · #2 May 9th, 2001, 06:08 AM

Thank god, I thought it was Basic Cobolt 101 with a bit of C, not C++. I was getting confused. Often happens after:

10 cls
20 print "WTF"
30 input = x
40 print "enter your name"
50 print x
60 Print "you just froze up my pc."

Lemmy · #3 May 9th, 2001, 11:48 AM

quote:
Originally posted by klausD:
Especially because the entire data of the different sectors have not to be in RAM the whole time, (because only one sector is active in RAM at the same time) it could be a resource saving method. On the other hand the universe could be nearly infinite. (depending rather on HD-space than RAM)

but then how do you calculate what the AI is doing in the different sectors, if the sector is stored on hd, then after each turn one sector should be saved, another one loaded, let the AI take their turn, and load the next sector

or am i missing something

[This message has been edited by LemmyM (edited 09 May 2001).]

dogscoff · #4 May 9th, 2001, 12:31 PM

Does anyone recall Frontier: Elite II? That came on 2x 1meg floppies and the map size on there was ridiculous. There were (literally) millions and millions of systems.

Once I jammed my cursor keys down on the system map and went away for a while. When I got back it had reached grid -1124, 295 or something, and it had still only moved a few pixels on the (full screen) galactic map. To put that to scale, each grid reference had maybe half a dozen 3D systems in. Only the nearest few hundred grid references actually stored system information other than the word "unexplored" but the amount of information was mind blowing.

When I reloaded the game another time and checked back, though, the system data was exactly the same (even at -1124, 295), so if it was generating the systems dynamically, it wasn't doing it randomly. It *must* have been generated on the fly by some kind of fractal routine. Veeeery clever. Shame the rest of the game was so buggy.

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Uh, I think so Brain, but how are we gonna teach a goat to dance with flippers on? "

Askan Nightbringer · #5 May 10th, 2001, 01:03 AM

The Elite guys did randomly create their map. But they stored the 'seed' used to randomly create the map so when you loaded up a game you always got the same result.

This is because random numbers on computers aren't really random. There is just a huge lookup table full of numbers and each one comes out in order. The 'seed' is what is used to work out where you start in that table.

If you use the same 'seed' you'll always get the same numbers in the same order.

ie. If seed = 24
First 5 random numbers is
4 11 3 6 3

So I don't have to store 4,11,3,6,3 all I have to store is the seed (24 in this case).

The original Elite universe was stored in something like 4 bytes of data (which is 32 1's or 0's ). They just had table to look up desriptions based on verbs and nouns. (I guess its the lookup tables that took up all the space)

ie. The Gelbars are known for their fanatical love of sitcoms.

Well thats my bit of completely useless trivia for the week.

Askan

dogscoff · #6 May 9th, 2001, 02:55 PM

Interesting. Not much good for SE though, sinc once the map is generated you *still* have the problem of how to manipulate it all in memory.

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"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"Uh, I think so Brain, but how are we gonna teach a goat to dance with flippers on? "

Krakenup · #7 May 9th, 2001, 03:20 PM

quote:
Originally posted by askan:
This is because random numbers on computers aren't really random. There is just a huge lookup table full of numbers and each one comes out in order. The 'seed' is what is used to work out where you start in that table.

If you use the same 'seed' you'll always get the same numbers in the same order.

Usually, it's not really a table. Most Random Number Generators perform a series of mathematical operations on the seed, generating a "random" number and a new seed. So if you start with the same seed, as askan said, you get the same series of random numbers. Tables of random numbers exist, but, if you are using billions of them, it's a lot easier to generate them on the fly.