I have removed all traces of the random numebr generator seeds from gnome-games. No more large, possibly negative, integers in the title bar. No more multiple “New Game*” menu entries. No more fidly little dialogs for you to enter random numbers into. The reasoning behind this move can be found in a thread of games-list@gnome.org. Briefly the reasons are:
- Massive UI ugliness.
- It exposes the implementation details.
- Lack of protability (e.g. glib’s RNG changed from 2.0 to 2.2).
- Anyone who wasn’t brought up on 80s video games has no idea what a seed is.
There are a few things seeds are good for, but none are convincing:
- Replaying a specific game: we have a restart button for this.
- Reproducing bugs: In practise there are far more variables between the bug reporters computer and my one than the random numbers used.
- Playing all possible games: With 32-bit seeds there are four billion games. Good luck.
The only really good reason I could think of was the case where you email a friend with the seed, a score, and a note saying “beat this sucker”. We also have high-score tables to sort out this sort of rivalry. (The idea of an explicit challenge is however one we don’t cater for, seeds are not the way to do this though).
In short, even if the seeds are an answer they aren’t a good answer. So it is all gone now. I fell good about this.