Re: Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it

From: "Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>

Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 23:26:06 +0000

> This is hard, but you can make it better by thinking carefully about
> sources of randomness in your game, and using multiple seeded random
> number generators. For example, if Eresea has 1 random number
> generator per location, then if the same units do the same things in
> the same order, they'll get the same random numbers. If you're
> careful, it should be the case that a re-run is going to produce the
> same results in most places...

We're seeding with the current turn number to get reproducible results, and
we reseed once per "phase" of the game. A different seed per region would be
a good idea, but still won't help against the "butterfly effect" - we can't
predict how far a simple change like a fleeing unit will ripple through
(there will be more graves in the region where he runs to if he dies - that
may produce an undead uprising - that may scare away peasants who will run
to yet another region, consume more of the money there, scaring away
malnourished peasants, ...)

> > The whole thing was a real PITA. It's amazing how much a single shithead
can
> > make the world seem to be a much more unfriendly place for 1400 players
and
> > a few GMs with a single email.
>
> Yep. We're lucky that in Olympia, there have been many cases of people
> accidentally printing their passwords, but it has always been done in
> public, so that the player had time before the next turn to change his
> password and prevent a QUIT.

We have lots of safeguards and mail filters preventing the posting of your
turn in public forums, yes. it used to be once a week we would get a
password, now i cn't even remember the last time it happened. but allies
tend to exchange their reports, and since they normally exchange it in a
client-readable form, they tend to forget about the embedded password. which
is why we won't embedd it in future versions.

Enno.

References

Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it
"Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de>
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 21:38:04 +0000
Re: Eressea: How shit happened, and what to do about it
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Mon, 22 Jan 2001 22:32:07 +0000