Quirks with the pseudo-RNG within Dialogic/Godot

[aumusic]

Hi,

I'm not sure whether this is actually an issue with either Dialogic or Godot (or whether I'm simply an idiot), but after toying with the "set variable to be a random number from x to y" parameter, it seems that the 'y' number is never selected. Of course, a simple fix is to simply increase 'y' by 1 so that I get the number spread that I would like, but it struck me as odd that the number spread would include 'x' but not 'y'. Is this simply a misunderstanding of how this is supposed to work on my part, or a legitimate issue of either Dialogic or Godot?

Thanks

[CakeVR]

Randomisation in computer science is often exclusive of the range's upper number.

What number generation do you use?
The docs describe this behaviour: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_randomnumbergenerator.html

[aumusic]

@CakeVR , thanks for your response. To go a bit in-depth on my end, the 'code' I was using for that test was just a single line within Dialogic (which I seem to remember finding somewhere in the documentation, though I can't find it now). Mine was nested inside of a variable to set its value:
VAR {Errata} = range(1,11).pick_random()
So the (eventual) idea was that it would pick a 'random' whole number between 1-10.

Taking a quick peek through Dialogic's code, the only place where I'm seeing 'pick_random()' called out within Dialogic's own code is in lines 104-115 of event_variable.gd, and if this is what I'm calling with the previous code, I would assume that the 'random_max' number should be inclusive, rather than exclusive:

	value = str(value)
	match _value_type:
		0: # String
			string += '"'+value.replace('"', '\\"')+'"'
		1,3: # Float or Expression
			string += str(value)
		2: # Variable
			string += '{'+value+'}'
		4:
			string += 'range('+str(random_min)+','+str(random_max)+').pick_random()'

return string

Otherwise, I'm not really sure off-hand just which method is being utilized.

[CakeVR]

The range function is part of Godot.
This will explain how it works: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/[email protected]#class-gdscript-method-range

As I mentioned, it's common that integer ranges are exclusive of their upper bound's number.

[aumusic]

Thank you for providing this information.