In my game Creeper CHAOS, when night falls about 1/6 of players will automatically become Creepers. However lots of people are complaining about how unlucky they are, as they are becoming a creeper far too often.
I need a way to get around this without letting a player directly know it they’ll become a Creeper next round or not, because other wise players will just abuse this by annoying humans during the building stage to make their lives easier as a Creeper.
I was thinking of a chance thing that changes, but i’m not sure how I would go about implementing that.
The earliest, easiest and most convenient example I can think of is the old Roblox University game The Mad Bloxxer, designed after murder mystery type games. It had a chance system but last I recall it relied on some ugly and cheap trick of repeating the player’s name n amount of times into a table, n being the “percentage” chance they were to hold a certain role. Not the best.
It’d be worth looking into this game’s source code and seeing if you can salvage anything. If this isn’t to your wants or standard (think about efficiency, performance, how it functions, so on), then it’s worth further investigating on how to do this.
Small Roblox University blurb:
Roblox University was an event that ran briefly in 2014 where it aimed to teach users how to create games. Both its classes were of two prominent game types at its time: racing games and murder mystery games. The source code for each of those games is built up in YouTube videos and the templates of the completed games are fully functional and available as open source files.
This is almost exactly what OP was doing before and wants to avoid for the reasons specified in the thread. They are looking to use weighted chance (% chance over others to attain a role) invisibly to make the playing field more fair for players who don’t want to be Creepers but are selected often.
A raw call to random is not weighted. Players will all reserve the same weighting with this code and the same problem will occur.
For your creeper assignment problem assign each player a number upon joining and then have a random number generator which would count the number of players then when 16.6666667% (1/6) players are selected stop creeper assignment.
Unrelated but you might want to rename your creepers since they are protected under copyright by Microsoft and mojang.
You could assign a bool value to each player, if the value is true then it would mean that they were creeper last round. If they get selected the round before then they can’t be selected the following round.
This would fall under the problem of players abusing the fact that they know they wont be a Creeper the next round. I would prefer something such as a percentage that changes, but this isn’t available to the player to know.
My recommendation is to have the last (or several last) creeper players stored in a table. When picking the next creeper, any players within this table will not be picked.
Fairly easily progammatically:
local last_players = {}
local memory_size = 3 -- last 3 players stored in the table
local function choose_player()
local plrs = game.Players:GetPlayers()
-- search and remove last_players from the list.
for i, v in pairs(plrs) do
for j, k in pairs(last_players) do
if v == k then
table.remove(plrs, i)
end
end
end
local rand = math.random(1, #plrs)
local chosen = plrs[rand]
table.insert(last_players, chosen, 1)
last_players[memory_size + 1] = nil -- remove n+1th entry
return chosen
end
This will guarantee that a player won’t be chosen again for memory_size rounds after being chosen.
This was typed on mobile so if I made mistakes feel free to yell at me
Refer to my reply. That’s not real weighting, that’s overcomplication of the base system that OP was running with and will not solve the problem. Assigning numbers is pointless when you can just perform the RNG in the iteration of a for loop that runs for an integer-rounded division of 1/6th of players.
Well, there’s the option that @ee0w provided, however, here’s something I suggest.
If you want the uncomplicated solution, I assume you’re using math.random() instead of Random.new(). If you are using Random.new() then here’s another suggestion.
The way I assume most “murder games” calculate their percentages is quite simple. Each time a player joins, they get assigned a NumberValue for chance. This starts at 1, and increases by one each round they play without being murderer. Each round, the game grabs the total “chance” values of each player, and gets a random number between 1 and the total “chance”. That number then determines who gets to be murderer.
For your game, instead of iterating through each player with a 1/6 chance of being creeper, do this:
Get the number of creepers you want first. Divide the number of players by 6 and round that off (up or down is your choice). After this, use the weighting system I described above except numerous times (the amount of creepers there will be). Each time you pick a player, remove them from the list of people being picked, and repeat the step until all creeper slots are full.
