reliable-random

This is an implementation of the PCG PRNG in typescript. The advantages of this generator are outlined in more detail on their website, but here are a few:

• Excellent statistical quality
• Challenging prediction difficulty
• Reproducible results (great for sharing!)
• Multiple streams
• Arbitrary period

Installation

yarn install reliable-random

Usage

The main draw for this package is the ability to produce random numbers from a user-defined seed.

The PCG implementation also allows multiple different streams of random numbers from the same seed. This can be very helpful when creating games with a random element to them (roguelike games for example) because the seeds can easily be shared with others.

The generator requires two values:

• initState: The base seed.
• initSequence: The secondary seed.

Wht the roguelike example, the base seed may be chosen randomly (or set by the user) and the secondary seed may be used by the developer for different sources of randomness in the game. If the player encountered certain items on a given seed, then they would expect the same items on a second run, even if they didn't play the run exactly the same as the first time.

To enable this, the developer could use one random sequence for the items, and a different random sequence for the enemies. Both of these random sequences can be generated from the same base seed, so the user doesn't have to worry!

Another example might be in infinite world generation. It would be a problem if the order the user generated new chunks had an influence on their randomness. In this case, some defining feature about the chunk could be used as the second seed, and the same chunk would always generate the same!

API

Check out the docs.

Made with typedoc!