While testing 'the("Capitalized Hallucinatory Monster")' I noticed that
some hallucinatory monsters showed up more often than others. When
the random engravings, epitaphs, and bogus monsters were converted from
hard-coded arrays to data files accessed by random seek (3.6.0), they
became subject to the same distribution irregularites that rumors suffer
from. The chance that an entry will be chosen depends upon the chance
that a random seek will hit somewhere in the line which precedes it, so
entries that follow long lines are more likely to be chosen and entries
that follow short lines are less likely. We improved that for rumors
by having makedefs pad the shortest lines. Distribution still isn't
uniform but is much better than it was (and could be further improved
with a longer padding length at the cost of making data files bigger so
possibly slower to access; both overall size and access speed mattered
back when floppy discs were supported but are probably irrelevant now).
Start doing the same thing for the newer files: pad the shortest lines
to increase the chance that seek will find them. The tradeoff is that
the data files become bigger. Rumors, engravings, and epitaphs lines
are all at least 60 characters now; bogus monsters are at least 20.
These are the data file sizes I see (in bytes: old, new; padding for
rumors was already in use so its size hasn't changed):
bogusmon 4449 7211
engrave 1326 2894
epitaph 14159 24075
rumors 49173 49173
The only place that padding is noticeable in-game is #wizrumorcheck.
59beebcbcc