07-15-2003, 10:46 PM
Interesting. To me, it seems possible that the shrine you found was actually being seeded by garbage produced by some other feature of the first level. Otherwise, one would expect the SAWH pattern from a hidden shrine on level one. If it were being seeded by something on the same level, then that memory block would be overwritten with the same data every time that level was loaded, so the shrine would always produce the same result.
The question then is whether one could find a hidden shrine on level 1 of a different single player game which initially follows the SAWH pattern, but changes after a specific other level is loaded. If I recall correctly, Sourceror did something very much along those lines during the sequence of events surrounding Jarulf's DSF post about unitialized shrines. If that is true and can be repeated, then the only thing new about your observations is that a shrine could be "seeded" by garbage from the same level as the shrine itself. This means that even on level 1 a person is not guaranteed to know what shrine they will get (although the 'educated guess' is going to be right the vast majority of the time). It also makes me wonder whether other occasional glitches in level generation may be caused by multiple features using the same block of memory for different things.
The question then is whether one could find a hidden shrine on level 1 of a different single player game which initially follows the SAWH pattern, but changes after a specific other level is loaded. If I recall correctly, Sourceror did something very much along those lines during the sequence of events surrounding Jarulf's DSF post about unitialized shrines. If that is true and can be repeated, then the only thing new about your observations is that a shrine could be "seeded" by garbage from the same level as the shrine itself. This means that even on level 1 a person is not guaranteed to know what shrine they will get (although the 'educated guess' is going to be right the vast majority of the time). It also makes me wonder whether other occasional glitches in level generation may be caused by multiple features using the same block of memory for different things.