How does generating random numbers in this script work?
while wait(math.random(5)) do
script.Parent:Play()
end
OK.
This is my script I have in my game. Basically what it is suppose to do is randomly play thunder in my game. I just don't want the thunder to be at the exact same time each time so I tried doing math.random and I got everything figured out, but how does the parentheses work?
I assumed if you put a number in the parentheses it'll choose a random number for 1-whatever number you chose. In my case I have five so thunder would play 1-5 seconds each time , right?
3 answers
Yes. math.random has three ways to be used:
math.random(low, high)lowandhighmust be integers, and it will return a random integer betweenlowandhigh(inclusive)math.random(high), the same thing asmath.random(1, high).math.random(), returns a random number (not integer) between 0 and 1 (including 0, not including 1)
Thus math.random(5) will either be 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.
If you wanted to have a continuous range of numbers, e.g., 4.3, 4.45, 4.973234 also being options, you could use something like
wait( 1 + math.random() * 4 )
to be any number (not just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) between 1 and 5.
To get better random numbers, I would recommend using a seed value derived from os time, and then taking off a few of the values - here is a function I use to consistently get random numbers from Lua - otherwise you may end up getting the same numbers all the time, in the same order, when you call the math.random function.
local function randomnum (minimum,maximum)
math.randomseed(os.time())
local r = math.random(minimum,maximum)
r = math.random(minimum,maximum)
r = math.random(minimum,maximum)
return r
end
Yep! That should work the way you want it to! However if it doesn't then try this:
while true do wait(math.random(5)) do script.Parent:Play() end
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