The relative value of shops (rantish)

[Aury]

Yes, you /can/ device damage yourself.

[Atarlost]

Hmm, yeah, there's two extremes to RNG output that we don't want.

For those who arn't entirely sure what's going on;

randomness/rng's 101;

Just a quick little mockup I threw together; all the values were arbitrarily picked by me just to illustrate the general curve shapes I want to show.

This graph shows the change between RNG output; center point is no change (where there is the extremely big spike in the green line)


There's overcorrelation; the green curve with the huge spike in the middle. The problem with it is that the RNG is outputting predictable strings of numbers. And would result in the 18 fuel stations Ttech saw the other day.

Then there's under-correlation; faked randomness, clearly made by a human, because it avoids repeating, since lots of people think 'randomness' = never the same, thus the aversion to equal values

Then there's a nicer curve shape (ok, yeah, I only used 7 points, and so its not a nice curve, but whatever), it neither over nor under correlates the data. Somewhere around there is where we want the RNG to be.

Beyond that, we'd have to implement better sanity checking & other protocols to prevent things like an 18 Fuel station pile-up like Ttech had.

Actually, undercorrelation is exactly what we want, at least for retailers. We're not trying to simulate true randomness but human decision making. Those stations are placed there by humans in accordance with economic pressures. The second station of a given type covering a market competes with the first. If both are owned by the same people they should be consolidated into one station. That means any name brand station should be one per system and all retailers should be limited to maybe 3 per system. Drydocks should probably also be one per system. (and the one by the rimward stargate in Rigel is no longer needed now that there's one by the arena) Manufacturers can clump all they want. 18 ice farms in one system may be annoying to the player, but it's not nonsensical the way 18 fuel depots is.

[Aury]

True.

Oh, actually, that gives me an idea. It should not in theory be difficult to simply ditch repeat RNG values and have it re-roll again.

[Dorne]

This is similiar to the concept of shops in Nethack? iirc, there's usually certain fixed levels that have chances of containing shops. Not all of them are guaranteed, but there is a set amount of each shop. Nethack also uses a time seed for its RNG, right?