ScuzzBlog: Diaries October 2019
Entry 24th October 2019: Post 01: BASIC Dice - Part I.
BASIC Dice - Part I.
One of the most common criticisms of any MMO is RNG or the random
number generator. The percentage possibility is something that is
controlled by the developer to reduce the possibility of getting
a reward from the game. And it has been around since computer
games came to be. In fact it's been the core mechanic in all games
in truth from the beginning of time... more commonly known as dice.
So why are MMO gamers always moaning ? Well imagine a game of
chance where rolling a number depended on you being successful and
then imagine a dice that has infinite sides instead of six. And
that is what computers can do.
I recall my Games Workshop days when most serious gamers that
bought box games tried to find games that almost eradicated the
use of dice. I have played games that have no dice. These games
involved a decision making process by players before combat starts
and then each subsequent action resulted in a certain written
action beforehand that was then played out..
When I first started to program way back in the early eighties I
often would use the RND function to generate a whole bag of data
with random variables before the game started. The numbers were
never truly random, but as close as you could get.
Anyhoo, I was tidying up a whole stack of books for various types
of computer and their BASIC program systems and I was amazed at
how many differing command lines there were, even in BASIC for
random numbers. So I have photographed quite a number of the
different manuals as a way of showing how BASIC dealt with this
relatively simple command.
One other point to consider when viewing these images is that I
am pretty sure there were way more folk programming computers in
the early days than there are now. After all, users of computers
had little more than a flashing cursor to go on and so needed a
working knowledge of BASIC to get anywhere on a computer.
The processes of BASIC were somewhat hindered by bug testing and
recording efficiency of tape machines. There was nothing more
frustrating than having created a long program to suddenly lose
it due to a crashed program or worse failure of a tape drive to
record all those endless lines of program text and digits.
All in all an interesting time, and although we were all using
BASIC, not all of us were using the exact same form of BASIC.
By the way this little episode took me two days to complete.
Basically cus I was trying to fit in Lightning Returns on the PS3
and it took me till 4 in the morning to finally defeat SNOW. The
game is on a time clock and so you have to be really efficient.
And there is nothing random about clocks.
BASIC Dice - Part I.
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