Gradual Reduction in MF Effectiveness

[Jarulf]

I was taking part at a discussion over at diabloi.net in the single player forum regarding the -seed command. SO I checked up a bit on how the game initializes itself in that aspect. Basically, the game starts up and will normally, through two seperate calls right after each other initialize two different seeds (I can't tell if two such calls right after each other will always, never or sometimes generate different seeds, I can't recall if it was a tickcount based seed or a "performance" counter level (or whatever it is called). One would be in millisecond and the other in much more higher frequencey. Anyway, one is placed as the starting map seed, used to generate the map and the other would be the seed used by the game for most purpuses other than the map. When you use the -seed command, the specified seed is set to BOTH those two. The game will then when initializing itself, use the game seed to "roll" new seeds for various things and store away some of them as "initial" seeds for objects and a few other things. I never bothered to track if they were ever used however. When the game create "units" (which is anything in the game by the way), it will always take the current game seed and initialize the units seed with it (anything the unit then do uses that own seed of the unit). Thus casting a few spells will create a different current seed for the game and would affect an items to drop magical properties. The initial selection of base item and quality would on the other hand use the droping monsters current seed, so any differences in its random behaviour (like the player moving differently) would affect that. That is why things differ in games, even if you use the same starting seed through the -seed command.

Just a small off topic talk :)