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Comments
Roulette (and blackjack) dates back to around 1999. For context, it is code from before Achaea ran on its current engine. This has always been problematic because roulette is a popular game and there is very little we're able to change with the system to improve the user experience, because its all over the place (for the C programmers among you, think macros and raw pointers with names such as "ptr123", as well as large sections of the code copy pasted in various places). This also means that the random range is a hardcoded value rather than a defined constant (I'll come back to this).
One minor thing we're doing this year is trying to migrate to a less dated set of random algorithms. This has often been a niggling irritation for us (and probably some of you guys as well who notice that stuff). A good example of where our current ones fail is mob clumping - quite often you'll see apparently random wandering mobs all slowly migrate to a certain part of an area map, for instance.
So, what went wrong. Quite simply, two things:
- The hardcoded range was off by 2 in one place.
- The hardcoded range was correct in one place, because it was copy pasted into a different part of the system.
- By a serious stroke of misfortune, all of our coders sleep schedules lined up for once.
This caused some fairly crazy behaviour, including:
* 0 and 00 got removed (because they were outside the bad range, which is the one checked for valid targets).
* The house edge disappeared (this may have actually flipped to the player due to the second range, we're still investigating that).
* A very predictable subrange that would always repeat.
In conclusion, you can probably expect roulette back very soon. We're taking the time to refactor the bad bits and improve the user experience a little while that happens.
Back in the AOL days they could copy/paste code and it became quite a mess, but they couldn't unravel it as they were merging three different platforms each with its own code.
I don't envy you the continued work ahead!
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Tecton-Today at 6:17 PM
....does this make me a bug abuser?
Walk in and there's one. Two seconds later there are 7 and you're dead
Tecton-Today at 6:17 PM
@Kyrra I didn’t mean to imply you were knowledgeable about the cheating. Chill. I was told Katalyst was one of the people shrines for the abusing so thought it had something to do with saying the number out loud at a certain interval/point. That’s who I was pointing to.
I don’t often give you credit but I know your not stupi enough to post about your own bug abuse. I mean, fuck.
What an epic party trick it would have been though. Line it up, tell a rando to come say a number, bet and spin. BOOM! Panties drop.
A mechanic I honestly do miss a little, but it's funny to know now that the dev at that time probably saw the rng code and thought 'ew! No way am I diving into that. Where's my box of bandaids? '
Tecton-Today at 6:17 PM