Warning - nightlies unbalanced from r2008

[d_m]

Cool. Fancy sending me a patch for that ;-)

(In that case, #1155 can be addressed by saving the "randart seed" separately in the savefile, and adding an option to use it instead of using a new one)

The new RNG actually needs less state than the old one (despite being better) which frees up a number of bytes to save other "simple" seeds, including artifact seed.

If anyone is worried about having more than 2**32 possible randart configurations then it will take a little work to write a RNG whose seed is smaller than 128 bytes but which provides more state than the "simple" RNG which only uses 4 bytes of state. I feel perfectly comfortable with this though.

Also it's worth noting that even with a saved randart seed, if the randart code changes then old collections of randarts won't be entirely replicable, for what it's worth.

All of this is a long way of saying that I'll try to put some support for viewing/loading/saving a randart seed in my well-rng branch... I'll send you a pull request when I think it's working.

[Magnate]

The new RNG actually needs less state than the old one (despite being better) which frees up a number of bytes to save other "simple" seeds, including artifact seed.

If anyone is worried about having more than 2**32 possible randart configurations then it will take a little work to write a RNG whose seed is smaller than 128 bytes but which provides more state than the "simple" RNG which only uses 4 bytes of state. I feel perfectly comfortable with this though.

Also it's worth noting that even with a saved randart seed, if the randart code changes then old collections of randarts won't be entirely replicable, for what it's worth.

All of this is a long way of saying that I'll try to put some support for viewing/loading/saving a randart seed in my well-rng branch... I'll send you a pull request when I think it's working.

That's very kind - many thanks. I will make sure that the docs make clear that those living on the bleeding edge can't expect this feature to work if the code changes in trunk. And I don't think we need more than four billion randart combinations, so don't feel obliged to put in the extra work!