Clarification on new/old resource/wormhole seeding

[Fleet]

From the release notes "The way that the planet resources/wormholes are populated has now been moved exclusively back to the old method. This means that savegames from 4.067 will show up different temporarily, and then will go back to normal with this new version onwards."

Didn't you just switch to a new method because of some longstanding bug in the old method which reduced randomness? I'm not sure why the old method is being used again..could someone clear up the situation for me?

[x4000]

The old method didn't actually reduce randomness here, as it turns out. The old random was plenty random in most parts of the game, just not a few areas (collisions, etc) in more recent times. Meanwhile, usig a new random method here causes wormholes and resources to change position from older saves. Rather than trying to maintain two different sets of randomization for this one thing, the old is just used.

The new is used in most all other Places in the app, though. It's a bit faster, and may be slightly more random in cases where the mimetic range is a lot smaller than what is in place for the wormholes/resources. We also fixed a bug affecting some stuff like the collisions in general past release anyhow, which was a bit higher-level than this fix.

[keith.lamothe]

The old method's occasional lack of randomness was a problem for some things like collision patterns (and only some of the time... it was randomly non-random, you might say), but it didn't actually seem to be producing unpleasantly non-random results for resource/wormhole positions.

The more important issue is that when someone loads an old save and the new randoms result in those resource and wormhole positions moving.  For some scenarios that can be a game breaker (I know it would be the end of any serious Fallen-Spire game I was playing, where I was trying to sit on top of a wormhole with a city or whatever).

So by switching those specific things back to the old random we can avoid the moving-wormholes problem without actually losing anything significant.

Psuedo-edit: what Chris said

[Invelios]

So will this switch existing saves back to the old wormhole position? I have a game I made several versions ago, and I played it yesterday with the new 4.067 patch and saved without noticing the change in WH position (no wonder my defenses seemed to be preforming poorly yesterday). Will this save revert to the old positioning once the new version is released? and if so, do you plan to release it soon? I kinda want to avoid starting a new game if possible, cause I really want to finally beat a pair of Lv 7 AIs, but keep having to restart cause of big changes in the updates.

[x4000]

Everything will switch back in he new version, yes.

[Invelios]

All right, thanks for clarifying. I hope I can finally finish a game vs lv 7 AIs, the waves on Diff 7 are a lot more brutal than they where on Diff 6. Hopefully with my new desktop, the endgame won't be in constant lag like it was on my Diff 6 AI game back on my laptop. Having your game go 20% on the lowest ships cap and performance file really ruined the feeling of attacking the homeworlds in that game.

[Fleet]

Thanks for the explanation, I feel better now. I was worried that the new method was not being used solely because of the savegame issue.

 I wanted to scream "Just break old savegames for crying out loud and get a "sound" fix in, not some duct tape!" We AI players are a hardy bunch, and are used to game-changing features in the beta; the reward for patience in the face of temporary discontinuity is oh so sweet. 

[x4000]

For sure; but, it really makes almost no difference, here, so you can indeed rest soundly.  The range of integers being used in the randoms in the resource/wormhole seeding is approximately 0-120,000, which is enormous.  The ranges where we were having some trouble were when it was about 0-360.  However, even our findings there were somewhat erroneous, as it was really a different bug (the same seed being used repeatedly, incorrectly, because of a negative numbers thing), which is what led to the collision issue.  Fixing that brought it back in line with the versions of the game as of a few weeks back or so.

The other thing that we found with the random number generator itself turned out to be exceedingly slight, although with very small ranges (double or single digits), it was probably slightly less likely to pick the upper-most element in the range compared to stuff in the rest of the range.  That in itself, again, doesn't affect much once you get into triple or quadruple digits, and definitely not in the six-digit range.

So our original post about the RNG issues was actually a bit premature, it turned out to be a far more localized issue than we thought.  We still managed to get a bit more performance/randomness-with-small-sets out of the core RNG in general, and so we did keep those changes for the majority of cases, but for the resources/wormholes it definitely isn't duct tape to keep the old.

I know you were already happy, but I am actually at a computer at the moment (versus on my phone) and figured I'd plop down a few more details.

[TechSY730]

Does this mean that games generated and saved from 4.067 will have their stuff shifted around in 4.068?

EDIT: And will this old wormhole and harvester seeding method be used for brand new games generated in versions >= 4.068?

[x4000]

Does this mean that games generated and saved from 4.067 will have their stuff shifted around in 4.068?

EDIT: And will this old wormhole and harvester seeding method be used for brand new games generated in versions >= 4.068?

I thought I responded to that on Mantis, but I was writing from my phone and it gave a funny message that made me wonder if it had eaten it -- I guess so.  The answer is Yes and Yes.

[TechSY730]

Does this mean that games generated and saved from 4.067 will have their stuff shifted around in 4.068?

EDIT: And will this old wormhole and harvester seeding method be used for brand new games generated in versions >= 4.068?

I thought I responded to that on Mantis, but I was writing from my phone and it gave a funny message that made me wonder if it had eaten it -- I guess so.  The answer is Yes and Yes.

Nope, it didn't get posted on Mantis

Aw, I'm sad to hear that. I guess I'll have to wait until 4.068 to start my new game.

[TechSY730]

I don't mean to sound like I'm begging, but I am.

Are you going to release the next version soon? The lack of backwards compatibility of this version combined with the lack of forward compatibility to the next version basically makes this version unplayable if I want to keep my save games.

[x4000]

You can keep your saves just fine, the wormholes and resources just get shifted around so you have to move some of your defenses.  It's annoying, but at most perhaps a 5 minute setback.

There will be another release tonight, sometime in the next 3 hours, but it just depends on when I get tired and need to go to bed; there are more needed changes/fixes than time, so I'm pretty much going until I drop.

[TechSY730]

Thanks for the update. I probably will stay up for it, if you can get to it tonight. (Don't push yourself too hard tonight)  

[x4000]

It's definitely coming tonight, one way or the other!