Randomness in Boom/MBF maps?

[printz]

How would I best implement random effects in Boom/MBF maps? For example I want a switch that will teleport some things by moving a conveyor. I want the things that get teleported to be random. For example, I want a switch that for each press, "spawns" a random item/monster/whatever. Do you think I can use a roaming lost soul for this? Is the perpetual lift initially random? Which has the best randomness?

[Memfis]

"Floor start moving up and down" is pretty good for randomness I believe. In Map04 of Grid 32 it is used to randomly make only one of the four red keys available. Don't ask me to explain how it works though...

[Linguica]

A while back I made a test map to try and implement "true" randomness: https://www.dropbox.com/s/01q2wfwswhgjzim/random.zip

It uses the fact that if a monster is blocked from moving towards the player like it wants to, it will pseudorandomly start checking other directions, starting from either east or southeast, with a 50/50 probability.

You could use something like this to make a monster end up at one of several linedef triggers to do whatever. But it would probably be overkill.

[traversd]

Might be best off to use the lost soul random teleport setup to randomize the sequence at the start of the map and then the switch can cycle through the sequence when the player gets to it?

[Maes]

Trying to implement my Jinx concept with true randomness, rather than imperceptible triggers? :-)

[scifista42]

The idea with exploiting monster walking sounds the best. But for a cleaner way, you would use MBF BEX random codepointers in a custom thing, that would randomly either make itself disappear, or not, and it the latter case it would be set up to trigger a linedef action.

[printz]

scifista42 said:

But for a cleaner way, you would use MBF BEX random codepointers in a custom thing, that would randomly either make itself disappear, or not, and it the latter case it would be set up to trigger a linedef action.

Funny I forgot about that! Thanks.