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[Neonivek]

So I was trying to make a seed and I put in my name... Learning that it doesn't take letters I transformed my name into a sequence of numbers 11422914 and was happy to behold a totally weird world covered in Snow with little water... where the absolute top was practically Lava (it also had a large number of Volcano)

So even though uttarly pointless in everyway shape or form other then being a cool gimic

Id like it if the Seed could take Letters as well... either by making the seed Alphanumberic (so 0-9-A-Z) or by having it secretly behind the scenes convert your letters into numbers.

*Runs and hides*

[Capntastic]

While not really useful in any way, this is a tiny tweak that wouldn't be bad at all to throw in sometime.   Unless there's some issue I'm not foreseeing.

[Goran]

Do it yourself. $p34|< 1337.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Actually, the world seed takes any number up to 2^32. That's around 4.3 billion. If you take alphanumerics, that's 36 symbols, 26 letters + 10 numbers. The closest number not above the limit is 36^6, and that's around 2.2 billion. If you rig a program to split a 12-letter string into two 6-letter strings, and add the two results together, you end up slightly (by almost a hundred million) above the limit if your string ends with Z's. In other words, you can make a simple converter program to convert an alphanumeric string into a normal numeric string. It would, of course, be easier if the game allowed such things by itself.

[Omega2]

Actually, the world seed takes any number up to 2^32. That's around 4.3 billion. If you take alphanumerics, that's 36 symbols, 26 letters + 10 numbers. The closest number not above the limit is 36^6, and that's around 2.2 billion. If you rig a program to split a 12-letter string into two 6-letter strings, and add the two results together, you end up slightly (by almost a hundred million) above the limit if your string ends with Z's. In other words, you can make a simple converter program to convert an alphanumeric string into a normal numeric string. It would, of course, be easier if the game allowed such things by itself.

Wouldn't it then be a matter of embedding that program in the game?

[Draco18s]

*Cough*
62 characters if you allow UPpEr and loWer CaSE.
And about 94 if you use every symbol on a standard keyboard.


Not that doing that helps.  At that point you'd convert the symbol into it's hexadecimal representation, then convert to decimal.  Which if maintaining the limits of DF, you'd get 700 million (62^5) and 78 million (94^4) results.

[Joseph Miles]

I don't really see much of a point in adding letters to seeds at all.

[ArchMageOmega]

There's no need to restrict it to just the number of characters that fits the existing limits. Instead, you simply wrap any excess around the ends. Still, there are standard ways to do this, so it'd be easiest to just find some free code to do string hashing.

[Align]

I don't know what language DF is in, but surely a type conversion is very easily done in this case?

[Neonivek]

"I don't really see much of a point in adding letters to seeds at all"

for the most part... Letters are more personal then numbers...

I guess you could put your phone number, address, or age... However letter have
-Your name
-Your Girlfriend's name (The Planet of your Girlfriend)
-Your Friend's name
-The name of your favorite movie / Game / Book
-Your country / Town / State / Province / Territory

[Yourself]

Introducing letters, however, essentially destroys the uniqueness of a seed.  If you allow an alphanumeric string as an input and then run it through some kind of hashing function to yield a 32-bit value, it's possible for two completely different inputs to produce the same world.

Not that this is a technical problem or anything; it's just a little counter-intuitive. 

[Neonivek]

But what are the chances that you would stumble upon two of the exact same seeds knowing that there are already over a billion combinations?

[Sean Mirrsen]

You will never ever get two identical seeds if you treat the string as a number in base 36, or however many symbols you want to allow.

It's basically just the matter of Toady choosing a specific limit for the generator. If the seed wasn't limited to four bytes (8x4=32bits, 2^32), alphanumeric seeds of some 6-8 length would be possible.

[Keldor]

There's actually an interesting ramification that you're missing.  Allowing letters in seeds will reduce the number of digits needed to represent a given number.  Simply adding in (non-case sensitive, for simplicities sake) letters will allow a 10 digit number to be represented in merely 7 digits!  A 9 digit number would only take 6 digits!  The use for this is simple - which seed is easier to remember - 386521925, or D7GNPX?

[Calessa Lynn Orphiel]

I wouldn't bother to memorize a seed.  I'd write it down.