Replay bug- again !

[Johan K]

Zooko almost said:
No offense, Johan K, but if your C code runs differently on different systems, then there must be a bug in your code, such as reading uninitialized memory, making unportable

Sure there have been plenty of those bugs. But there have been compiler bugs and inconsistencies too. The Dominions battles are oversensitive to these things, otherwise the compiler shortcomings would probably never have been noticed.

[sushiboat]

I am confused about how the replay bug occurs. My (obviously faulty) understanding of a Dom2 battle is that the host machine runs it and writes the series of events (call them A, B, C, etc.) to the Turn file. When I replay the battle, my machine reads the file and displays A, B, C, and so on. How does my mental model differ from what the game really does?

[Oversway]

For size, I don't think the battles store every event - like every unit movement/death/etc. They just store the initial state and random number seeds, and then the algorithm is such that every battle with those conditions should turn out the same. But if the conditions are somehow different (like intial version number), or due to compiler/os/etc. issues where the state gets off, then each battle could wind up widly different.

Thats because they are cycling through a big, big list of random numbers... but if you have 1 more or less attack in one version of the battle, that throws off the entire cycle.

btw All the above is an educated guess.

[Johan K]

Yup, that's how it works Oversway.