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Wi Flag (2002)

asheron.fandom.com

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Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#181

Post by choffman »

jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

Devilmouse!

AC is one of my favorite games of all time (neck and neck with Ultima II (I'm old)). I still play on the emulators from time to time - endlessly searching for more Hoary Mattekars.

I played on Thistledown and ran a little portal bot named Stip Dickens an Ayan Baqur that helped ferry people into the Shard of the Herald event. That was a lot of fun.

The loot system was also one-of-a-kind. I don't see that level of randomness in many other games.

The game felt like the writers and staff were highly literate and well read. I now know so many real life herbs and plants due to their use in spellcasting. And AC taught me words like "Mnemosyne".

And each month we would get several pages of amazing lore. (Side note, there's an ongoing web serial called "The Wandering Inn" that reminds me quite a bit of AC. People dropped into a video game like world, insect people, references to a "Zeikhal"(similar to a town name)....

So, I just want to thank you for your work on AC. It's had a profoundly positive impact on my life.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#182

Post by EarthLaunch »

arduinomancer wrote: post #144
EarthLaunch wrote: post #10

Why does weighted randomness seem so difficult for games? Are there any libraries that simplify this? I couldn't find any for JS. So I created my own "algorithms" for things like randomly choosing which type of plants spawn in the world. It weighs them by the local frequency of each land-type. Eg if there's more swamp nearby, it's more likely to spawn cattails. It's awful. Not intuitive. Weights have to be passed in…

https://leetcode.com/problems/random-pick-with-weight/

First dent in my anti-leetcode opinions. Thanks.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#183

Post by iamthepieman »

jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

A fellow comp sci major in college introduced me to AC. Bought it on a whim after seeing him play it in his dorm. I still remember the physical box with some special bonus map and swag.

Lost so much sleep power levelling on a rock with those ape like creatures and just spamming magic to discover new combinations. The discovery and wonder does not match up with the graphics I see now when I search for screenshots and videos. Beta and early WoW almost had the same effect but your first is always special.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#184

Post by bombcar »

phailhaus wrote: post #62
anyfoo wrote: post #44

Around 15 years ago, when casual little games on Facebook were still a thing (actually when Facebook itself was still a thing), I used to play Yahtzee on the site while watching TV shows or whatever. It was one of the most popular games on there. For me it was something to fidget with (there was no money involved or anything, just a personal high score), so I played it a lot. I felt more and more that dice values of…

You stopped playing because they listened to you and fixed the bug for everyone?

I remember writing a suggestion letter to Maxis about SimCity and they not only replied but also sent me a copy of the Terrain Editor. Very nice of them.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#185

Post by bombcar »

Strilanc wrote: post #122
kypro wrote: post #82

What am I missing here? Unless all the devs were really bad at maths (unlikely if they're game devs) then this seems like a really easy bug to find all things considered? I thought maybe it was going to be some weird DB glitch or something far upstream from the algorithm selecting which player to attack, but it was literally the logic of the very algorithm you would first look at if you were aware of such an issue. T…

I would speculate the main hurdle was probably believing the players in the first place . Humans are notoriously bad at not-noticing-patterns in properly random data. And statistical bugs like this require more effort and careful attention to detail to reproduce than deterministic bugs. Another hurdle is likely that game developer culture strongly favors integration testing over unit testing. Games are optimized for…

Yeah, WoW had many many problems with people not understanding probabilities that they added explicit code to track all drop rates and compare them to intended - and actually found a bug or two that way.

But mostly it was to explain to people that a 1 in 100 chance doesn’t mean you’ll get it even after 200 goes.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#186

Post by bombcar »

arduinomancer wrote: post #143

I totally get how this bug would end up in the game Someone probably manually tested the feature originally and thought “yeah this feels random”

Apple had to add code to iTunes so that on shuffle it wouldn’t play two tracks from the same album after each other because it wouldn’t “feel” random.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#187

Post by ReactiveJelly »

shadowgovt wrote: post #34
veilrap wrote: post #5

I love the "lore" that this sort of bug creates, especially in these sorts of large scale multiplayer environments. Players claiming to be cursed, and the curse was real! A very different sort of event that it reminds me of is the old World of Warcraft plague: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

One of my favorite things in gaming is when lore develops from bugs. When they added the ability for Kerbals to be killed in Kerbal Space Program, they tripped over a bug where the first Kerbal in the game's engine, Jebediah (the one who dated back to the original introduction of astronauts at all, where only one existed), could not be killed. Because of some of the game logic having gone unmodified from the earlier…

I don't think I got the punchline. Thrillmaster and coming back from the dead?

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#188

Post by shihab »

jjcm wrote: post #52

Love bug deep dives like these. Along a similar line is the "foxes lead users to treasure" behavior in Skyrim: https://twitter.com/JoelBurgess/status/1428008041887281157

I don't quite get the bug, that is what exactly makes the fox follow regions of denser triangles?

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#189

Post by anyfoo »

marton78 wrote: post #173
anyfoo wrote: post #44

Around 15 years ago, when casual little games on Facebook were still a thing (actually when Facebook itself was still a thing), I used to play Yahtzee on the site while watching TV shows or whatever. It was one of the most popular games on there. For me it was something to fidget with (there was no money involved or anything, just a personal high score), so I played it a lot. I felt more and more that dice values of…

How do you know they fixed it shortly after the email? Did you keep sampling the distribution and performing chi square tests?

I had the impression 1 and 6 weren’t as rare anymore (even a single game is a lot of dice throws, and I usually played several in a row and restarted a lot), so I sampled again. No chi-squared test this time, that was just for my learning, because it was obvious without.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#190

Post by deanCommie »

bscphil wrote: post #57
anyfoo wrote: post #44

Around 15 years ago, when casual little games on Facebook were still a thing (actually when Facebook itself was still a thing), I used to play Yahtzee on the site while watching TV shows or whatever. It was one of the most popular games on there. For me it was something to fidget with (there was no money involved or anything, just a personal high score), so I played it a lot. I felt more and more that dice values of…

> I wrote up exactly this in a short email to the company that made the Yahtzee game. They did not reply and just silently fixed the bug, right after my email. I was disappointed and stopped playing. I love this. It's one of those things that's entirely intelligible to me but I imagine would be next to impossible to explain to a Martian.

Same :)

But here's another layer, though. What if it isn't?

Our science fiction is filled with this fairly human-chauvinistic worldview where even in a hypothetical future where we are rubbing shoulders with many different alien species, many of them technologically superior to ours, some of them still admire or begrudgingly respect us for our ingenuity, spirit, some je ne sais quoi.

That we're illogical and inconsistent and jealous and petty and insecure, but also humble and funny and empathetic and creative.

But...we have no evidence that this would be unique about humans whether sentient intelligence is common throughout the universe or rare. In fact, it's quite possible, that this is a necessary prerequisite, side effect, or consequence of conscious intelligence.

So this hypothetical martian maybe would just smile, nod and say "Ah yes, the company was embarrassed, or didn't want to risk liability, or didn't want to risk their reputation being compromised. But OP just wanted a thank you. He wouldn't have wanted money, just a 'hey thanks for finding that for us'. And it soured him on the whole experience. Been there, my new human bro, been there."

edit: I wrote this before I saw the rest of the replys, and HOLY, there's a bunch of humans that don't understand why OP stopped playing.

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