User talk:Orthotope/mobs

Few errors
--mgr 17:06, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Animal drops 1-3 exp.
 * Magma Cube's normal drops should read: "-2..1 + 0..Looting magma cream, if size > 1"


 * Thanks for catching those. Fixed. -- Orthotope 00:40, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Chicken Eggs
Thanks for pointing out those errors. I see in your code list where it shows the time for laying eggs, though it makes me question if the "actual" average is 7.5 seconds rather than 7.2. Do you know how random variables are spread in Java? For thrown eggs I was confused by having read, a while back, that it could spawn "one to four" chickens (and I swear I've gotten two at once before), but I see now in the source code it is either 1 or 4. Pareidolon 05:06, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * The mathematics of random number generation is complex, but I'm fairly confident that the distribution is linear (as the Java documentation says). In theory. With only 50 values generated across a range of 6000, it's not surprising that they aren't perfectly distributed. It takes a fairly large number of trials for actual results to approximate the theoretical prediction; if that person had waited for 500 eggs to be laid, the average would be much closer to 7.5 minutes. As for spawning either one or exactly four, I doubt that would have been noticed without looking at the code. If you throw enough eggs to get a multiple spawn, there will be enough chickens running around that it's hard to see how many spawned from one egg. Maybe if you carefully threw each egg in a clean, chicken-free environment, but you'd have to be really bored to do that. -- Orthotope 06:16, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Well you can make a small pit with a target wall over it, fire eggs at the wall and watch them spawn mid-air. I tried it for a while, but not patiently enough to really see what was going on.  Did two spawn at once, or was that two eggs in a row?  Was that three that just spawned at once, or did a fourth appear behind the wall?  Maybe the spawning algorithm itself fails under certain conditions. Pareidolon 07:07, 11 March 2012 (UTC)