Likely the first computer game to get randomised was Pac-Man. The original Pac-Man boards were deterministic enough that it was possible to memorise and follow a pre-planned route through the game https://archive.org/details/How_To_Beat_The_Video_Games/page... . Apparently this was addressed by an official Pac-Man Update Kit.
How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
41–50 of 85 posts
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#42Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
The problem with randomness in speed-based goals is that sometimes it’s harder than others. How can you compare two runs if the game could randomly give you zero opponents? It’s an extreme example, but the point stands that if the game’s randomness isn’t tuned to fall within a tight difficulty window, then run-to-run comparisons are useless. While still fun to do and watch, it takes a lot of wind out of the sails of speedrunning because a lot of the allure is in record setting. The record has to mean something.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do they deal with the linearity of Zelda games, where you NEED a certain item to succeed in a dungeon, before you can then get access to more items later? If I need the hookshot to pass the water temple, but it gives me the floating-light-boots, how am I supposed to beat the level?
Not an expert on how they do it, but I've played a few. The logic in these things is excellent, they won't ever give you an unsolvable game (and the Zelda ones have been playtested to death at this point). I think they just specify the prerequisites for each item and then just don't assign them if they are impossible to get, not sure how exactly the algorithm works but I can think some easy ways on how solve this pro…
Essentially there is a couple of state machines for area access and the conditions/items that enable access.
So within each subarea the candidate items can be distributed.
Now, if they could randomize dungeon maps in the original zelda...
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#44Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
Described in this way, it feels like a reasonable argument that humanity is like a paperclip-optimizing AI that just maybe just chooses random things to go deep on optimizing. We created a problem for ourselves that was fun -- games -- but once we'd beaten "games", the reward function kept running and now we're adversarially inventing new ways to "optimally" beat harder and harder versions of "games", ie new objectiv…
I conjecture that you are right and the reason this works is that a large class of optimizing goals actually converge in the long run.
In other words, whether you choose paper clips, Bibles or human DNA as your optimization goal, over very long timescales (like a billion years) the optimal algorithms for all of them converge. If you want to make a solar mass of paper clips, you need a lot of infrastructure in common with a solar mass of any other goal.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#45Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
The problem with randomness in speed-based goals is that sometimes it’s harder than others. How can you compare two runs if the game could randomly give you zero opponents? It’s an extreme example, but the point stands that if the game’s randomness isn’t tuned to fall within a tight difficulty window, then run-to-run comparisons are useless. While still fun to do and watch, it takes a lot of wind out of the sails of…
It's set up so all contestants get the exact same set of mods. Finishing in world record time in such a competition is indeed meaningless; it's just about winning the race.
So this isn't necessarily what you'd call a randomiser — often the mods aren't randomly generated at all, but carefully curated by the event organisers. But it's à propos in terms of 'new experience every time'.
One neat aspect of this approach is how unexpected the mods can get; e.g. your player character could be swapped out for a character from a different game. Then there's the extreme variant of mystery races, where the runners don't even know which games they're going to play.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds like an amusement source for an immortal being locked in a prison with just an Apple ][e during a randomly selected century (decade? year?) of their existence -- maybe an unexplored subplot of groundhog day? Anyway, that's really cool!
> ...immortal being locked in a prison with just an Apple ][e... Sounds like me as a teenager.
I was about to post the same thing. People today can barely remember what time felt like before the invention of the Internet eradicated boredom.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#47Reminds me of "really bad chess", a version of chess that was released as a mobile app where you play with a randomized set of pieces. was a big hit, and definitely added some new dimensions to one of the oldest games, period.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#48Randomizer speedruns are an awesome recent innovation in speedrunning, where the aim is to beat the game as quickly as possible (in a category called "true any%" [0]). For most popular speedrunning games, randomizers reward a completely different skillset than standard speedrunning. Typically, world record speedruns are a result of a community collaboration between theorizers, glitch finders, and routers, who devise…
Existing randomizers randomize things like enemy layout, chest contents, etc.
An interesting different type of randomizer would be one which preserves everything like that, but adds better randomness (i.e., randomness independent of the emulator) to the game's own RNG. Currently, tool-assisted speedrunners and sometimes even live human speedrunners exploit the fact that a game's RNG is deterministic and predictable. Breaking that would lead to additional speed running research on the "original", "canonical" game.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#49Randomizers are also breathing new life into chess. Randomizing chess has been around for centuries, but especially since the 90s, when opening theory had become so stable that some grandmasters became bored with the memorization. Computers were especially good at that (though these days they've grown past that.) So they're holding tournaments now with randomized chess pieces. They've just completed the first FIDE-re…
Unfortunately, a lot of strong chess players do not enjoy playing Chess960 because we've already invested hundreds of hours into learning openings and how those openings transition into a middlegame. While it's certainly fair (position is the same for both sides), it gives positions which are almost impossible to evaluate. This is exciting for spectators, but for me it's excruciatingly nerve-wracking. I can't play it…
I spent hours going through this list on wiki of chess variants. are there any on there that sound compelling to you or less nerve racking? there are even historical variants I've heard of, like one from the mongolian empire where there were "fortress" squares that were immune from attack. theres also a gimick version that sounds fun called "atomic chess" where when a piece dies, it takes out surrounding squares. and another called monster chess where white plays with only 4 pawns and their king, black has all their pieces, but white moves twice per turn.
Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games
#50I would imagine most randomizations render the game impossible, since the first dungeon will require a specific item to complete, and any other item won't help you. Are players forced to leverage glitches? Or is there some way to restrict only to "viable" randomizations?
A lot of effort goes into ensuring that you don't randomize the game into an unwinnable state. Many of these games are so well known by speedrunners and fans, that they know what items are required for each part of the game. The Link to the Past randomizer, IIRC, actually gives you the option to randomize the game in a way that requires no glitches, or randomize the game so that glitches may be needed.
I thought this was a good introduction to that problem of unwinnable configurations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGIDzGvsrV8
Sounds like a good opportunity to dust off those graph algorithms many of us learned in undergrad CS.