Silverware wrote:In your case, there is no need to, speed > quality of random. So long as the random is reproducible.
PCG is rather amazing quality random, but you would only want this for cryptographics really.
And LT has zero need for Crypto.
The site is an interesting read, as I was not aware of some of the failings of MT. That being said, anyone claiming that MT is slow needs to have a good, hard look at the 'average' case:
Code: Select all
uint x = self->state[self->p++];
x ^= (x >> 11);
x ^= (x << 7) & 0x9D2C5680U;
x ^= (x << 15) & 0xEFC60000U;
return x ^ (x >> 18);
It's quite a small number of instructions. As per the 'huge' state...~2KB state...exactly how many RNGs are you instantiating that 2KB is huge?? Seldom do we need more than one RNG...in LT's case we may have a few in existence at any given time.
Still, to see that it fails some of the newer statistical tests is not promising. If indeed anything based on a linear congruential generator can provide better randomness than MT, then I have fundamentally misunderstood a great deal when it comes to randomness
Course, that's probably because the default C library LCG is so bad that everyone has been burnt by it at one point or another. I can remember actually
noticing the 'better randomness' when I switched from rand() to MT in LT. It's bad when you can notice something so subtle like that (distributions of colors in nebulae, procedural names, etc.)
So, perhaps this 'PCG' warrants a read. But seriously, did they have to use an abbreviation that is already quite heavily-reserved in my brain for procedural content generation? Come on guys, there can only be one PCG
Flatfingers wrote:Thank you, Josh.
It was great to meet you in person this past weekend, wonderful to see a new devlog, startling to be able to reply to devlogs, and really pleasing to hear that you're feeling energized by the whole experience.
Looking forward to continued progress!
Also, those star systems are clearly located within a globular cluster. (Although a "real" such cluster would have more old, red stars, but artistic license FTW.)
Likewise, Flat!
You know I actually did a tiny bit of research to try to find out a bit more about the distribution of star temperatures in galaxies, but wasn't able to find anything 'simple' (the general answer seemed to be "it's complicated"; though obviously older -> more red in general). When I tried a red-heavy distribution I ended up not liking the look as much. So yeah, artistic license
At least the star colors are actually based on temperature now and not just random RGB!