My favorite new feature of C++

Mersenne twister, that's my favorite new feature. Oh sure, I already use it, but you've got to understand just how beautiful of a random number generator it is. It's probably the best that's ever been made. No, not mathematically. In fact, as random number generators go, it is technically not very special. But I didn't say the Mersenne twister was a mathematically high quality random number generator, I said it was beautiful, and it is.

Really good random number generators are very, very ugly. True randomness is ugly. This may sound counterintuitive, but try working with a real, high quality random number generator some time. You have no idea how ugly real random numbers can be. For example, most people expect that when picking a random number between 1 and 10, you'll get a sequence of numbers like: 3, 9, 4, 1, 6. This sequence will virtually never happen in a quality true random number generator. Instead, you'll get sequences like 7, 7, 7, 1, 1, 4, 1, 7. Seems counter intuitive, right? This happens because a sequence like this is truly random. The first sequence is asthetically and numerically pleasing, but it isn't as truly random like the second sequence is. A truly random number generator generates truly random numbers, and truly random numbers are bizarre because of their random nature.

That's why I say the Mersenne twister is beautiful: because it produces asthetically and numerically pleasing series of numbers. These are the kinds of series you will never get with a truly random number generator. Sequences like 4, 1, 6, 5, 9, 2, 7, 3, 8. You'll notice that not only are no numbers repeated in that sequence, but the space between each number is distant but not extreme. If you're placing dots on a grid with a truly random number generator, you're going to get a bunch of dots clustered in all the worst locations, and a bunch of empty space everywhere that dots should be. With the Mersenne twister, you'll get an impressively even distribution of dots as if a certain number of dots were allocated before hand to every millimeter of the screen.

The Mersenne twister is my favorite new feature, but I'm still waiting for the feature I want most: object serialization.

Things people like to do in games.

Things people like to do in video games:
- Create stuff
- Destroy stuff
- Collect stuff
- Click stuff
- Get better stuff
- Wait (People think they don't want to do this, but in reality they do) (Examples: Everquest, Ultima Online, Dragon Warrior, Cow Clicker, Farmville, Tamagotchi)

However, creating a game that people actually want to play involving any of the above is nearly impossible. It's really easy to say what people like, but it's really hard to give people what they like.

Here's a game that involves all of these: you go around destroying buildings to get money to build your own castle to house all the awesome plants and animals you collect that get better every time you click on them provided that you've waited long enough after the last time you clicked, and the more you upgrade through clicking the stuff in your castle the better stuff you can find outside your castle.

I have no doubt that such a game would fail miserably.

Noobs, roguelikes, selling games.

Recently there was quite a debate over at Ascii Dreams about the list of potential roguelikes of the year. Several things stand out to me about this debate. Let me preface this by saying that I'm quite a fan of Ascii Dreams and have been for some time.

That said, it seems like suddenly tons of people have come out of the woodwork to complain about omissions from (or inclusions to) this year's "Roguelike of the Year" poll. These people don't seem to be regulars on the site. Most have never commented there before about any other post. Instead, they seem absolutely obsessed with this "Roguelike of the Year" business specifically, and don't really seem to care about much else. This seems disingenuous to me. These people aren't really a part of the larger roguelike community, but they're very upset about percieved problems with this single poll. I don't know what to say about this, except that it seems very disingenuous to be totally inactive in the RL community except to complain about a once a year poll. It comes down to the fact that all these noobs want their favorite roguelikes to win, and they want their most hated roguelikes to be removed from the list. That's just childish.

A few people made comments about how roguebasin is a "fringe site" that can't compare to other sites like "planet roguelike." Now, I would bet that most people who've been in the roguelike community for more than a year know Roguebasin very well, and have absolutely no idea what "planet roguelike" is. In fact, "planet roguelike" is not even a site, but a feed of news items about rogue likes that's hidden under a small section of a much larger site. Calling roguebasin a "fringe site" while advocating "planet roguelike" is just crazy.

There are also several comments about how roguelikes have "gone commercial." There is no such thing. Roguelikes have always been sold. The original Rogue was sold at one point in time, and so were many other roguelikes (ADOM comes to mind). Just because a few roguelikes are on Steam does not mean that the roguelike community as a whole has changed at all. Some roguelikes have always been sold, and some have always been free. Nothing has changed.

I like these new commercial roguelikes. My only problem with them is that many of them (but certainly not all of them) were made by people who were completely inactive in the roguelike community until they released their commercial games. These people weren't really roguelike developers. They were random people who decided to cash in by making commercial roguelikes. That part bothers me, but everything else about the recent commercial success of some roguelikes I'm fine with.

So, please support REAL roguelike developers by buying Cardinal Quest.