Daily seed?

[chucker]

Right now, randomness gets seeded on startup. We probably want a deterministic (but not guessable?) way to get a day's game, so that people can play it in sync.

[ricardoboss]

Actually, the seed is determined every time a GuessGame service instance is requested (based on the current ~hour~ minute).

I thought this way we can request different instances of this service and use it in different games, but requesting them in the same hour currently leads to the same target language...

A better way might be to add a Initialize or Seed function where each instance deterministically seeds the random and chooses a random target language.

So for example:

GuessGame g = new();

g.Initialize("reavealer"); // initialize for the "revealer" game

// then use g.TargetLanguage to check guesses and if the game is won

// in another file...

GuessGame g = new();

g.Initialize("snippet"); // initialize for the "snippet" game

// then use g.TargetLanguage to determine the code snippet

Both GuessGame instance may use the same seed (the day of year for example) and the Initialize call offsets the RNG. So in the end, the GuessGame.TargetLanguage yields the same language every day but different languages for different games.

[chucker]

There's a simple implementation of this at #71. I'm not opposed to redesigning GuessGame as described here or in #42, but I think that's scope creep.

[ricardoboss]

So this is essentially fixed then? The current solution produces the same results every year, but we are fine for now.

[chucker]

Yes, this is IMHO fixed, but I do agree GuessGame needs a redesign. I'm not sure where to continue that conversation, but it technically doesn't belong here.