UO Second Age

So I have been testing this and thinking about it for quite sometime. I believe the "randomness" code that the Singing Crystal Balls uses is bugged, broken, not working properly.

I believe this because after hundereds of sound events, there are a certain number that repeat over and over and over, while a lot of the sounds in the pool are rarely if EVER heard.

Ie: you will hear the bong sound, birds chirping, birds singing, drums etc over and over and over.....often repeating sounds, yet sounds like the "help meeeeeee" is so rare, I have only ever heard it ONCE. Scared the piss out of me too when it triggered lol.

My personal thought it whatever the code is for the "randomness", it is not creating a true random event.

Can anyone who knows code comment on this? To test for yourself, find one of these on display, run by it 50 times and you will instantly see what I mean.......many sounds repeat way to often for it to be a true random sound.

Thoughts or ideas anyone? I bring this up as I think it would be cool if these items actually worked as described.

This is a good question for Anarcho since he can review the specific code we're using. I had a singing ball on OSI and I had one on UOSA. The OSI ball definitely had more noise and was pretty obnoxious in general compared to the UOSA sounds.

Yeah I have had both as well, and on here, it repeats a set of sounds waaaay too much to be truely random.

Brules wrote:Yeah I have had both as well, and on here, it repeats a set of sounds waaaay too much to be truely random.

I always suspected it was random, but the soundbank it was pulling from was extremely limited. This is something Anarcho is going to have to look at since he has access to the source files.

WTS gf Singing Ball

Boomland Jenkins wrote:

Brules wrote:Yeah I have had both as well, and on here, it repeats a set of sounds waaaay too much to be truely random.

I always suspected it was random, but the soundbank it was pulling from was extremely limited. This is something Anarcho is going to have to look at since he has access to the source files.

I would think it is the "random code" vs the sound bank. It will make other sounds, but they are extremely rare......of the thousands of times I have heard it, only 1 time have a I heard say the "Help meeeeeeeee" sound. Same with some others. I think it is a randomness code issue more than anything.

Will be interesting to see what Anarcho comes up with.

Anarcho? Anyone?

I don't know what our current code for the singing ball looks like, but I haven't been able to find a list of the actual sounds that the crystal ball could make on OSI servers. I know that the current bank of sounds we have access to via the modern day client includes several sounds that weren't present when they coded the crystal ball, so we would necessarily need to exclude those, but exactly what those sounds are as opposed to the sounds that it could play would take some comparison between different clients.

In practice, this likely means that the "help me" sound that you're referencing, or that other sounds that currently play weren't available back then, and couldn't be played, even it played the entire range of sounds that was possible at the time (I don't think that it did, but I don't have a list of what it actually did play).

Irregardless of what it did or did not play, the randomness of it is broken. As coded now, here, it obviously has the help me sound in the pool - but the # of times it is played is far to few as compared to other sounds it will repeat over and over.

So my core question is - is the code that generates the "randomness" broken? I think so as I have played with ball repeatedly and there is no way it is random or the random code is severely messed up.

That then begs the question - is that code used for anything else like random rare spawns etc?

Regardless*