Any java devs interested in working on a MPQ Simulator?

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NorthernPolarity
NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
edited November 2014 in MPQ General Discussion
This is a long shot, but I figured what the hell.

Some time ago, I thought it would be cool if we could have some more accurate statistics regarding character abilities. For example, ever wonder how many cascades are actually caused by a surgical strike? What about what the probability is for activating Blade's thirst passive assuming that you avoid red matches for levels 4 and 5? There have been some scripts written for calculating the odds of some basic stuff like expected matches from Loki and tiles destroyed from X-Force.

Well, the only way we as a community can know the answers to these tantalizing questions is if we somehow recreated the MPQ game engine from scratch and ran a bunch of simulations on that. Well, I've had some time on plane rides to and from break to start writing that up, and here's what I have so far: https://github.com/NorthernPolarity/MPQSimulator. The base framework is pretty much there, but it's pretty buggy and doesn't actually work yet. With school starting back up, I'm going to have a lot less time to work on this, so I was wondering if there was anyone here that had Java experience and wanted to help complete the damned thing: otherwise you guys will probably have to wait until the end of the year before we can finally get these random, probably useless statistics about this sort of stuff.
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  • simonsez
    simonsez Posts: 4,663 Chairperson of the Boards
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    I applaud this effort, but aren't we crippled by the fact that there's a great deal of skepticism that tiles drop randomly from above? Isn't there a consensus that these drops are contrived to yield extra matches? Curious to know where you stand on this.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
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    simonsez wrote:
    I applaud this effort, but aren't we crippled by the fact that there's a great deal of skepticism that tiles drop randomly from above? Isn't there a consensus that these drops are contrived to yield extra matches? Curious to know where you stand on this.

    Yeah, thats the one snag that I'm not too sure about. If only there was a generous developer or representative from the company that could give some insight on how the tile dropping algorithm works... Even if the simulator isn't 100% accurate though, the relative numbers are probably good enough to allow us to reach some sort of conclusion regarding abilities, such as how many cascades level 3 dino purple causes compared to level 5, and whether or not the upgrade is worth it. The absolute numbers may not be important when all we care about is whether or not those 2 extra covers are worth.
  • Unknown
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    If the tile drops are not random the only other pattern that'd remotely make sense is that it gives slightly more weight to the color that is missing. But it's certainly not a very high weight, otherwise you'd see a board after Surgical Strike just keep on drop 3 of whatever color was eliminated on a regular basis, so there's really no reason to assume anything but random.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    There was a post a while back where one of the devs verified that the drops were random. I don't remember where, but I know it was re-posted in a thread not too long ago.
  • simonsez
    simonsez Posts: 4,663 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Phantron wrote:
    If the tile drops are not random the only other pattern that'd remotely make sense is that it gives slightly more weight to the color that is missing.
    No it's not the only pattern, because that's not what I'm thinking they're doing. My assumption is something along the lines that the probability vector for a given tile is skewed such that there's a higher probability assigned to a color that matches an adjacent tile.
  • jojeda654
    jojeda654 Posts: 1,162 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Here's a year old thread where tile drops is discussed. viewtopic.php?f=7&t=679

    Relevant quotes:
    IceIX wrote:
    Misguided wrote:
    I remember when the original Puzzle Quest came out and people cried foul that the AI was cheating because of the cascades, but Steve Fawkner at I.I. said the code was astonishingly simple and having the AI look ahead to see what was about to drop and making decisions based on that would have been crazy complex. Iirc, the original code in the first game didn't have any sort of streak breakers in it, either.
    Correct, it did not. All it did is roll a random percentile, look up which value that was on a weighted table, and drop the right gem. This game does pretty much the same thing with a couple added minor streak breakers to figure out which tile to drop.
    IceIX wrote:
    Spoit wrote:
    Streak breakers?
    There's a bit of code that lessens the (already) low chance of getting more than 5 tiles of a single type in a row, and also a little code to increase the odds of a tile dropping of a certain color if there aren't any of that type on the board.

    While the algorithm may have changed, it probably isn't anything too major.
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
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    jojeda654 wrote:
    Here's a year old thread where tile drops is discussed. viewtopic.php?f=7&t=679

    Relevant quotes:
    IceIX wrote:
    Misguided wrote:
    I remember when the original Puzzle Quest came out and people cried foul that the AI was cheating because of the cascades, but Steve Fawkner at I.I. said the code was astonishingly simple and having the AI look ahead to see what was about to drop and making decisions based on that would have been crazy complex. Iirc, the original code in the first game didn't have any sort of streak breakers in it, either.
    Correct, it did not. All it did is roll a random percentile, look up which value that was on a weighted table, and drop the right gem. This game does pretty much the same thing with a couple added minor streak breakers to figure out which tile to drop.
    IceIX wrote:
    Spoit wrote:
    Streak breakers?
    There's a bit of code that lessens the (already) low chance of getting more than 5 tiles of a single type in a row, and also a little code to increase the odds of a tile dropping of a certain color if there aren't any of that type on the board.

    While the algorithm may have changed, it probably isn't anything too major.

    The changes to the algorithm do indeed seem minor. Now if only we had the exact percentages that they use to do this...
  • JamieMadrox
    JamieMadrox Posts: 1,798 Chairperson of the Boards
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    The streak breakers don't work. lol

    I've had two matches this week where the AI destroyed an entire column and the gems that dropped were an entire column of the same colour.
  • simonsez
    simonsez Posts: 4,663 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Jamie Madrox wrote:
    The streak breakers don't work. lol
    Gotta agree with you. I think somewhere in that little piece of code, they're multiplying when they should be dividing icon_e_smile.gif
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    simonsez wrote:
    I applaud this effort, but aren't we crippled by the fact that there's a great deal of skepticism that tiles drop randomly from above? Isn't there a consensus that these drops are contrived to yield extra matches? Curious to know where you stand on this.
    no computer generated code can be truly random due to it requiring a numerical sequence (at least to the best of my knowledge
  • Demiurge_Will
    Demiurge_Will Posts: 346 Mover and Shaker
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    NorthernPolarity wrote:
    If only there was a generous developer or representative from the company that could give some insight on how the tile dropping algorithm works...

    Just triple-checked in the code - there's no streak breaker, or increased odds if there are no tiles of a particular color on the board. There's always an exactly equal chance of each of the 7 tile types (except in certain missions in Chapter 1, before Team-Up tiles are introduced).

    Sorry for the misleading information last year. Joe must have been thinking of another game in the PQ family - he's worked on all of them.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    Demiurge_Will wrote:
    NorthernPolarity wrote:
    If only there was a generous developer or representative from the company that could give some insight on how the tile dropping algorithm works...

    Just triple-checked in the code - there's no streak breaker, or increased odds if there are no tiles of a particular color on the board. There's always an exactly equal chance of each of the 7 tile types (except in certain missions in Chapter 1, before Team-Up tiles are introduced).

    Sorry for the misleading information last year. Joe must have been thinking of another game in the PQ family - he's worked on all of them.

    So, if I read what you're saying correctly, IceIX's real name is Joe, then?
  • HailMary
    HailMary Posts: 2,179
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    Archimedes1902 wrote:
    no computer generated code can be truly random due to it requiring a numerical sequence (at least to the best of my knowledge
    Kinda, but "sufficiently random" is pretty easy to do.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    simonsez wrote:
    Jamie Madrox wrote:
    The streak breakers don't work. lol
    Gotta agree with you. I think somewhere in that little piece of code, they're multiplying when they should be dividing icon_e_smile.gif

    Nah, the ai just divides by zero.
  • simonsez
    simonsez Posts: 4,663 Chairperson of the Boards
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    Archimedes1902 wrote:
    no computer generated code can be truly random due to it requiring a numerical sequence (at least to the best of my knowledge
    Depends what you mean by "random". It's random in the sense that it will produce a series of results that conform to a random distribution, but the actual numbers are generally predetermined based on the initial seed; but if you seed it with digits taken from your system clock, it's hard to see how this wouldn't satisfy whatever requirements you place on what "random" means.
  • pmorcs
    pmorcs Posts: 126 Tile Toppler
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    With that straightforward an implementation of the tile drop logic, NP's simulator should probably already be capable of telling us the exact spread of odds on getting certain-sized cascades.
  • Unknown
    Unknown
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    I've built a good start on a simulator in C++ already. I hacked it together pretty quickly just to test out Devil Dino's purple, but it could easily accommodate other moves. My current implementation just counts initial matches; it doesn't cascade anything. One of the issues I have with cascading is where to place the critical tile on a match 5+. With just match 5 it's easy, but some abilities can yield some pretty funky shapes in a match 11 or so. Can anyone shed any light on that?
  • NorthernPolarity
    NorthernPolarity Posts: 3,531 Chairperson of the Boards
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    sarlok5 wrote:
    I've built a good start on a simulator in C++ already. I hacked it together pretty quickly just to test out Devil Dino's purple, but it could easily accommodate other moves. My current implementation just counts initial matches; it doesn't cascade anything. One of the issues I have with cascading is where to place the critical tile on a match 5+. With just match 5 it's easy, but some abilities can yield some pretty funky shapes in a match 11 or so. Can anyone shed any light on that?

    I'm working on the algorithm being the top-left most intersection of two or more match-3s in the shape.
  • Dayv
    Dayv Posts: 4,449 Chairperson of the Boards
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    HailMary wrote:
    Archimedes1902 wrote:
    no computer generated code can be truly random due to it requiring a numerical sequence (at least to the best of my knowledge
    Kinda, but "sufficiently random" is pretty easy to do.
    Especially when all you need is one out of seven possibilities, over and over again.
  • Dayv
    Dayv Posts: 4,449 Chairperson of the Boards
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    NorthernPolarity wrote:
    I'm working on the algorithm being the top-left most intersection of two or more match-3s in the shape.
    I think I've seen them in the top right of some shapes, such as an inverted U of eight tiles.

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