Why Video Game Luck Isn't Real (And How to Take Advantage of That!) | Tech Rules

if you're a frequent consumer of speedruns roguelikes or just very luck based games in general there's a term you're probably very used to hearing RNG as you might be able to tell it's a pretty common term that a lot of people are familiar with it stands for a random number generator you'll most often find RNG used in video games and their purpose is to well create random numbers these random numbers are used to decide outcomes in various aspects of the game in other words it handles luck say for example you're playing cards in the game and you're about to draw the next card from the deck how does the game decide what card you pulled well it asks the random number generator to pull a random number and it pulls for example a 78 the game knows that 78 represents a 7 of diamonds so that's the card the player pulls simple right well not exactly there's one pretty big issue that machines like computers come across when trying to be random which is computers can't be random after all they're based off of zeros and ones everything is either one thing or another and while you can change those zeros and ones together to handle much more advanced situations that basic rule never changes I guess you could say that this video is about the individual approaches developers took to deal with that and of course how we can exploit that and always shift luck into our favor so let's not waste any time welcome to tech rules before we dive in I'd like to give a huge thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring today's video Skillshare is an online learning community that offers membership with meaning if you're interested in picking up a new skill such as design business freelance and countless others Skillshare has the resources to help you learn a new hobby or even career when I talk with aspiring youtubers a complaint I frequently get is how hard it is to actually get people to be interested in your content and for those people I recommend this class content that attracts discover content ideas and grow your audience it's a fantastic class for beginners and will give you more than a head start and growing your content and before you start worrying about the expenses you should know that skill share is less than $10 a month for a membership who says learning isn't affordable and right now Skillshare is giving away two three months of premium membership to the first 1000 people who click the link in the description box to help you explore your creativity and after that it's only around $10 a month so I encourage you to join Skillshare and start learning today anyway on to the video frankly it shouldn't be surprising that computers are incapable of true randomness considering the fact that true randomness well isn't very common the everyday things we call random are typically just results of us categorizing things we don't understand let's go back to our card comparison this time with an actual bank of cards you could say the cards you'll draw is just luck or randomness and you'd be right but to be more specific you simply don't know what card you're going to get because someone shuffled the cards around without paying attention to what was on them not that I need to explain that I'm sure everyone who's played with brand-new poorly shuffled cards is painfully aware that just a little reminder from your friendly neighborhood tech rules being able to do a fancy casino shuffle doesn't matter if the cards don't get properly shuffled around Ryan Point being any sort of luck or randomness has a hidden factor like that there are some exceptions in the world but until my playstation can take advantage of quantum mechanics video games are gonna have to follow the same rules conventional randomness cannot exist without uncertainty and computers by definition only consist of certainties but that's enough talk about why it doesn't work obviously there's a way to make it work because randomness is one of the most commonly used mechanics and video games so what's their secret simply put they take advantage of the outside world in hindsight it's a really simple solution while it is true that computers can't do randomness or any form of luck that only affects what they directly control meanwhile the factors outside of the game are always unique so they are perfect for making the randomness mechanics as random as possible these outside factors are then converted to brand new data that ideally is different every time in RNG terminology this is called the seed the same kind of seed you might be familiar with if you play Minecraft or some sort of randomizer there are many ways high-level randomizing devices can gather this data it can involve cameras microphones basically any kind of environment based sensor like that however the average video game console obviously doesn't have an so let's take a look at what they did use I'll go ahead and mention that this isn't necessarily going to be a breakdown on how every game generates its numbers the code and algorithms these generators use tend to be pretty complicated and it would probably take me an entire video in a lot of research to explain just one game especially if it's one that revolves around RNG like an RPG that's a lot of G's but we're mainly going to focus on is what information it takes from outside of the game and how we can use that information to manipulate the games as far as how I went in the classics everyone is familiar with like Mario Zelda punch-out and other NES games the variable they take advantage of is player input itself either the game uses the inputs directly to make a seed or the seed is changing constantly as the game is playing and since it's extremely unlikely for a player perform an action at the same time repeatedly it generates different results every time even if you were aware of this and purposely tried to perform an action at a specific time you're going to have a lot of trouble doing that you typically have a one or two frame window to grab the same rng seed and the NES runs at 60 frames per second I don't really know too many people who are so good at a game that they can play through it frame perfectly I do know plenty of not people that can though naturally I'm talking about tool assisted speedruns or tests essentially a speedrun of the game that uses external tools to beat the game as fast as possible the most common usage of a task is to play back an input file that takes the game from power on to n screen these input files are free from any human error and can perform every input frame perfectly and if your random number generator is based on input you'll find that a test will have the exact same look every single time well my favorite examples of this is a classic one the TAS of Kings bounty Kings bounty is a game where you travel the world and find clues to the whereabouts of the scepter of order which is randomized for every play session that being said nothing's stopping you from finding the scepter right from the beginning if you get insanely lucky or just manipulate luck in your favor the moment the game starts buttons are deliberately being pressed in the menu to force a particular RNG C that will put the scepter mere steps away from the game starting area from there the player simply walks over to exactly where it is and retrieves it it's in my opinion one of the coolest examples of inhuman RNG manipulation there is it's not entirely hopeless for us non robots though because essentially every game generates its random numbers differently and each have their own gimmicks you may be able to take advantage of these can range from poor algorithms that generate predictable numbers to often too easy and game methods of doing things frame perfectly to straight-up glitches that disable or bypass the generator entirely and these are just hypothetical I can give you examples of each one on the poor algorithm side of things we have the Fire Emblem games for the Game Boy Advance the random number generator for this game is extremely simplistic which for an extremely chance based tactical RPG is bad that's because it doesn't generate random numbers at all instead it just goes down a list of hard-coded numbers ranging from 1 to 100 under the assumption that you'll always use them in a unique way every time not only is this extremely exploitable these numbers are used for basically every random action if you know the next random number the game is going to use and want a different one you can burn that random number on a useless action and there's a really easy way to do so on the game's map screen involving this arrow that shows your units movement path diagonal tiles require travelling through two adjacent movement tiles to get to and if you force the arrow to path out one of these diagonal tiles it'll randomly decide which of the two ways it wants to draw this arrow to do this it uses the next random number and once a random number is used it's gone and the next one will be used for the next grain of action considering this game has plenty of checkpoints in Auto saves this flawed system is immensely exploitable and on the glitches end we'll use maniac mansion for the NES a port of a point-and-click puzzle game on the PC one of the biggest obstacles in this game is getting the combination to doctor for its laboratory to get it you have to go through a lengthy process of locating tools a flashlight and batteries turning off part of the mansion's power using a breaker behind a hidden door and using the brief window of time to fix the wires so you can play an arcade game with a quarter that requires its own lengthy process to obtain of course to check the high score which also happens to be the randomized combination for the door that's a lot of words while this game has multiple ways to beat it they all involve grabbing this combination granted there's only a few different possible combinations but the number is only actually decided when you fix the power to avoid brute forcing the combination the problem lizz they accidentally made it even easier instead of the intended result of the combination not existing until the machine is powered its instead just not set meaning it's zero zero zero zero as long as you never fix the wiring the combination will always be zero zero zero zero allowing you to bypass the RNG entirely and for our example of frame-perfect gameplay we have none other than Pokemon starting with the very first generation this is because the majority of the inputs you can make in Pokemon can be buffered a turn you might already be familiar with when I say an input can be buffered I mean that if you press the button a little bit before you're normally supposed to be able to the game will hold on to your input and execute it at the earliest frame possible for example think about how in the overworld your trainer moves in squares or you know a grid if you decide to go write all of your directional inputs will be ignored you till the trainer moves to the next square despite this if we were to hold up while moving right the trader will move up the exact moment he's able to this is an important development choice to make the controls feel smooth and responsive but it has an interesting side effect it doesn't matter when I start holding up in this in-between state as long as I start before the trainer finishes moving he'll move up at the exact same time every time this jerk applies to a surprising amount of the game most important being the main menu funny enough once the game is reset the rng seed is reset as well so if we can get through the menu with the same inputs every single time we'll have the same seed every single time it's not even very difficult to do when the copyright screen appears you can hold up select and be to consistently skip straight to the title screen at which point you can buffer the rest of the inputs to start the game this works because the up select B combination is supposed to auto advance you to the save file deletion screen but you can veil at the last second and switch to just starting the game instead and perfectly buffer into the game right down to your very first movement this allows you to start the game on the same frame every time and always get the same RNG scene provided you never stop moving if you keep using this method to reload the same save file and go down the same path you'll encounter the same Pokemon at the same time every single time the buffer window for Pokemon battles and dialog boxes is smaller but they're still perfectly buffer Irbil if you buffer to your inventory at the start of a battle by holding down and before the menu pops up you have around 17 frames to buffer the first item on the list and if that's a pokeball you can use the same technique to throw the ball at the earliest possible frame and get predictable catching RNG this is appropriately called Yolo balding and with proper planning you can use it to catch things when all the odds are against you figuratively speaking of course the odds aren't actually against you the odds are whatever you want it to be at this point I guess before you start putting together a plan to catch that shiny pokemon you want though keep in mind that we're still talking about generation 1 which unfortunately did not have shiny pokemon the people who take advantage of this the most are speedrunners that use this information to catch Pokemon early or go a large distance without encountering anything no the earliest game for catching shinies would be the ones that make up generation - unfortunately generation 2 also introduces a new outside factor to base the RNG off of the date and time the battery inside the cartridge keeps track of date and time constantly while the system is powered off and because of that simply pressing the same buttons when you power on the game isn't enough you might think well if it's the battery that's the issue I'll just open the cartridge and rip it out don't do that you would be correct that would solve the date and time issue but the battery also powers the chip that stores your save data unless you plan on starting a new game every time you power the system on I would advise against it that's not an issue exclusive to Pokemon either or even date and time mechanics there have been some pretty clever methods developers had used to grab data way before and that's not even mentioning the biggest issue of them all which is simply how in the world do you figure out how to get the rng seed you need so that you can get your desired outcome there are two solutions to this one trial and error well you may not understand exactly how the random numbers are generated you may be able to figure out how to make them do the thing you want by bashing your head against it until something you like happens of course not only is that inefficient but it's also time consuming and more often than not you'll lose interest and give up before you make anything happen the other solution well hacking in other words using methods like brute forcing a good RNG outcome with automated scripts or watching it closely in a memory viewer to get a better understanding of what exactly the random number generator is doing now what most people consider this cheating yeah you are looking at values you're explicitly not supposed to be able to see I'd call that cheating however what's stopping you from using the formation you learned from this on real unhak runs of the game because that's something that actually happens quite often if you were to look at a bunch of speedruns that use heavy RNG manipulation you'll find a lot of situations where the routing for it was in part assisted by a script that helped find the best possible ways to get the numbers the speedrunners needed to shorten their time Pokemon speedruns included in other words your chances of being able to manipulate RNG in any given video game is for the most part dependent on the interest hackers have in reverse engineering the RNG and considering Pokemon is a hardy popular game that greatly benefits from RNG manipulation an astonishing amount of work has been put into this and despite the complexity of the games there have been some extremely creative methods conceived and manipulated without any sort of external tampering again covering them all would be a video on its own but I at least want to show you a really cool example of this from ultra Sun and ultra moon these games attempt to further complicate their RNG by using something called the initial seed which is created anew every time you boot up your game this means that any potential RNG manipulations you can find would be exclusive to that session and they obviously don't allow you to view your seed through normal gameplay not intentionally at least as it turns out this particular loading icon' of a clock that appears on the file select screen is one of the things affected by your initial rng seed in the last frame the clock appears on will have the clock hands in certain positions depending on your seat we can exploit this with the help of 3d s RNG tool which is as you might have guessed a tool made specifically to assist with RNG related matters for the 3ds Pokemon games if we can somehow check the last frame of the clock enough times usually with the help of a video camera and input the hands we get into the tool it can tell us exactly what our initial rng seed is from a loading icon' I just wanted to make sure you were appreciating that at this point though I think you get the idea RNG and video games is complicated so the act of trying to control it is usually equally complicated at the same time though when someone goes to the effort of figuring it out anyone can really benefit from it this is really cool to me since a lot of the stuff I bring up on tech rules isn't really easy to reproduce unless you have experience in hacking in a lot of patience but you right now could read up on a well-documented game and reasonably manipulate its RNG in a relatively small amount of time in fact I challenge you to do it it doesn't even have to be anything convoluted or game-changing just figure out something luck based and force the game to give you the outcome you want every time if anything it'll at least be an interesting project if you're looking for some time to kill right now but I'll leave that decision up to you and as always I hope you keep an eye out for more tech rules [Music]

Channel: Tech Rules

Views: 696,165

Keywords: Luck, RNG, Random Number Generator, RNG Manipulation, RNG Manip, Hacking, Pokemon, Red and Blue, Sun and Moon, Fire Emblem, Maniac Mansion, Glitch, Speedrun, Challenge Run, Shiny Pokemon, Explanation

Id: -4qG989ZXUQ

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020