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jcompton
Registered: Feb 2006
Posts: 70 |
Release id #164803 : Star Trek - The Rebel Universe
Attention underemployed trainers looking to be the first to address a long-standing issue! Please consider offering a trainer that neutralizes the effects of the Catastrophe Pods, Mike Singleton's regrettable design decision that makes the game stupidly difficult to play without constant restarting.
https://www.lemon64.com/reviews/view.php?id=990 |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Yeah, so with the pseudo-random number generator's seed always being the same, what were you aiming at?
Snippets of code implementing the procedural universe generation? :) |
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jcompton
Registered: Feb 2006
Posts: 70 |
One of the ways to make playing Elite a little fresher is to put in a new seed, since every planet will be entirely different.
It would be interesting to see what new and nearly-unlimited Rebel Universes might be created by changing just a few bits in the seed... |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Ah, i see. There might be a handy seed value somewhere in memory to just change for different universes, but there might also be many interlocked pieces of code so changing the effective seed without breaking things might be very difficult. |
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jcompton
Registered: Feb 2006
Posts: 70 |
Oh, agreed, it might be an unplayable mess without anything except for the One True Seed they built everything around. I'd just be curious to see that unplayable mess (or wondrous new galaxy) if anybody happens to know where those bytes live, that's all. :)
Thank you for finding the Catastrophe Pod routine and providing the quick patch. |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Quoting jcomptonthe One True Seed There might be many good seeds, but with unknown constraints on the seed number. Such as certain bits have to be clear or set, or the sum of all bytes must be zero, things in that vein. "Somebody" "should" "some time" have a look at what's really there. :)
But this reminds me of Artefacts, where i needed to find seed values that would make for exciting enough differences from one loop to the next and also not generate boring or ugly stuff within the first 5 or so minutes. The values were even different for PAL and NTSC versions, iirc. |
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jcompton
Registered: Feb 2006
Posts: 70 |
Like so?
.ifdef NTSC_VERSION
getrandom: eor Artefacts+$0655
.else
getrandom: eor Artefacts+$0653
.endif
(I had never seen Artefacts before! Thank you for mentioning it.) |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Indeed. Also note how that is a very very cheap pseudo-random number generator, nothing like a linear feedback shift register or the like.
But it turned out that simply reading the numbers from the re-interpreted actual program code (with the initial position acting as the seed) was random enough for my purposes. :) |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Ok, i dug a little deeper and found that no, there does not appear to be any kind of handy little seed value to play with.
Instead, there is some kind of star map with 512 byte-sized entries at $f623 plus a global "Quarantine Zone" map with 20 entries at $f60f.
System coordinates and properties seem to be derived from the entries in those maps, and the systems' names are generated from their coordinates.
The maps are readily there in memory after loading/depacking, and i haven't found any code to generate them.
So for playing around with alternative universes, you'd have to create those maps yourself, with all the unknown constraints. So... =) |
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jcompton
Registered: Feb 2006
Posts: 70 |
Still very cool information. Not surprising that with all of the constraints (like multiple specific paths to winning the game) they'd have to give over more data than just a six-byte seed. Thanks for digging in!
(meanwhile I have been enjoying tweaking the Artefacts seed at $1bcd, although have yet to come up with anything nearly as good as the one it ships with. Occasionally there's one where the artifact is just a rectangular slab with very little detail in sky or ground, that's kind of interesting...) |
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Krill
Registered: Apr 2002
Posts: 2969 |
Not sure about the constraints in this case, though.
I overwrote the star map once with the same value all over the place, and then the wireframe rebel ship was quite broken. So it could be that they actually re-used other data (namely the ship wireframe vectors) for the star map. :) |
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