How Did Rogue Generate Its Random Dungeons?
howtomakeanrpg.com
howtomakeanrpg.com
To any game developer planning to call their game with random upgrades a "rogueli[tk]e": play Nethack. Your favorite roguelike was almost certainly created by someone who did.
Rogue has been under a BSD license since 1986, so Nethack’s predecessor is also F/OSS.
fun game. Book of the New Sun meets Nethack meets Gamma World.
Did it have a specific PRNG and seed?
Was it platform–dependent?
The article even tells you it's C. The copyright dates on the code are 1980ish. It's talking about rogue, not rogue.exe, so this is going to be on Unix, real Unix. So, it'll be using rand(), the bad one, surely, just by what it is and where it is. That completely answers all your questions.
All you had to do was click links.
edit2: lmao okay so I read the code myself and you'll never, ever guess what it does. It does NOT use rand().
#define RN (((seed = seed*11109+13849) & 0x7fff) >> 1)
I would not be surprised if other contemporaries like glibc, Borland, Watcom, Lattice, etc all did the same. Or did they do something else/better?
I think the algorithm used and the seeding method are very relevant in procedurally generated games like Rogue, Elite and Minecraft so I was disappointed when the author just used Random().
And yes I could have read the code or remembered a previous time whence I might have learnt the same bit of information but instead I read the article.