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How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

arstechnica.com

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Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#71

Post by EpicEng »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #43
rando14775 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

>Now, if they could randomize dungeon maps in the original zelda...

They do, and have for some time.

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#72

Post by trevyn »

seph-reed wrote: post #64
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking of it like a mating display. Supposedly the goal of such a display is for the male animal to demonstrate its superior genes by wasting resources in a show of wealth, so it must purposely seek out something that is difficult or expensive to accomplish.

Heh. It's pretty amazing how much of life boils down to this. I think the greatest form of it may be the act of saying "fuck you!" to every bell curve imaginable. Fuck bell curves, I'm going to do something else. I really want to start a cult of bell curve hate.

Welcome to the other side! :-) Life is good here.

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#73

Post by cyphar »

jfengel wrote: post #33

Randomizers 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…

While Chess960 is being played more, my impression is that Blitz and Rapid have done more to breathe life into modern chess. Slow chess has become more and more about playing for draws in the past few decades (high-ranked players would prefer to keep their rating rather than risk it by playing more aggressively -- but nobody really cares about their Blitz or Rapid ratings).

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#74

Post by radicalriddler »

evo_9 wrote: post #25

There is a great mod for Dark Souls that randomizes enemy starting placement. I really wish this was a feature built into the main game as I tend to play DS on PlayStation or Switch; it's a surprisingly effective way to make an already challenging game even more engaging.

That honestly sounds like torture. Do the enemies randomize on spawn / death / bonfire rest?

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#75

Post by ThePadawan »

BigJono wrote: post #65
mxwsn wrote: post #5

Randomizer 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…

That head to head bingo format sounds really cool. Do you have any good example VODs?

I really like Joshimuz running Minecraft Bingo.

He ran Head-to-head bingo at ESA recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMPSoThpXt8

As it is a marathon run, it features a little bit less risk-taking than non-marathon runs (I don't recall if this was a moderated seed or completely random).

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#76

Post by IggleSniggle »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #57
willis936 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Spelunky, a procedurally generated platformer roguelite, has an extremely rich competitive speedrunner community. That is my primary relationship to speedrunning, so I'm answering in the context of "whats fun / worthwhile about speedrunning"? 1) There's lots of different categories to compete in. As new possibilities are discovered in the game, the community congrats around goals of speedrunning any given seed. In th…

See mossrankings.com to explore how the Spelunky community handles competitive speed running.

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#77

Post by someguyorother »

wcarss wrote: post #22
mxwsn wrote: post #5

Randomizer 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…

There does seem to be a kind of turnpike theory-like effect to technological development.

I'm reminded of Schmidhuber's PowerPlay (https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5309), too. It just trains on increasingly difficult problems with no direct objective function beyond solving the current problem and devising a harder one.

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#78

Post by genera1 »

dmurray wrote: post #52
deusofnull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've played a lot of chess variants of various levels of sophistication. Here's one due to a friend of mine that I've been enjoying recently: - normal chess, except you can't move the same piece your opponent just moved. So if I move a pawn, you must move a king/queen/bishop/rook/knight. - check and checkmate are as normal, no need to capture the king. It's checkmate if the only move that would stop check is to move…

Castling is a king move in regular chess

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#79

Post by ajsnigrutin »

mebo wrote: post #70
joshschreuder wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of Game Genie is very much still a thing, most notably with Cheat Engine: https://www.cheatengine.org/

Which is more powerful than any game genie by a great amount, with its included debugging tools - really not just useful for games, but in general for all sorts of RE on Windows. Sadly only on Windows, I've always hoped that maybe they would add support for GDB stubs some time - there is a remote mode already, afaik. It's also surprisingly all written in Pascal(or Free Pascal) which is actually a pretty pleasant lang…

For cheating (and all sorts of other stuff) on linux, you can always use scanmem (also has a gui):

https://github.com/scanmem/scanmem

Re: How “randomizers” are breathing new life into old games

#80

Post by daxelrod »

anilakar wrote: post #24

Randomization taken to the extreme: http://www.farbs.org/romcheckfail.php It's an old one-gimmick game by today's standards yet addictive. AFAIK the author intended it to be a demo for a tile-based game toolkit.

Holy crap, thank you! I’ve been trying to remember the name of Rom Check Fail for years so that I could play it again.
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