Platform Videos Do Not Seem Random

[arekeon27]

Hi all,

Love launchbox for my home arcade but one thing that has annoyed me a bit are the videos that appear on the platform selection screen.

For my arcade section that has 2900 titles it does more or less appear random. But for PSX where I have only a dozen games I've noticed that the accompanying videos don't seem to be random. For example Bushido Blade appear about 65% of the time. 3 other titles make up another 25 percent. Certain titles, despite having video, never show up.

I've also noticed with Sega Genesis and SNES that certain titles seem to come up a little too much to be random. It's not as stark as PSX but Vectorman 2 comes up a lot for having a potential 700 videos to choose from.

Anyone have any advice for setting these platform videos to be truly random? Thanks.

[C-Beats]

"Random" has many different meanings. We do "randomly" pick a game for these functions, we take all the games, give them their own unique random number (similar to a lottery) and then pick one from the numbers assigned. It IS random but because how random by default is done on computers it may not seem as "random" as us humans would like at times. Patterns CAN emerge because of how computers generate random numbers. There ARE algorithms to help ensure "randomness" called cryptographic randomness which helps to smooth out some of those patterns, but those algorithms take far more time to generate their random seed and so we opted not to use them.

[arekeon27]

Ok thanks sounds like not much I can do. Appreciate the explanation.

EDIT: I actually figured out what was going on. It turns out some games had "Theme" videos and some did not (though from Emu they all had video snaps). I removed the theme videos and, once each game only had snaps, they became random again.

Per the link below I found you can also go to options and prioritize the Video Snaps over the themes!

 

Edited October 22, 2021 by arekeon27
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