As part of integration with Gaming.SL, some games are capable of using random numbers generated from the Gaming.SL server rather than Second Life. As many people are aware, most computers are not capable of producing truly random numbers. Any time a computer gives you a “random” result for anything, be it shuffling cards, rolling dice, etc. it is not actually doing it randomly. It is giving you a number that appears to be random, but is in fact determined by a complex mathematical formula. There are different algorithms for doing this, and some are better than others.

Second Life generates random numbers through an LSL function called llFrand(). This function is often criticized for producing poorly generated random numbers. A common complaint with things like dice rolling in Second Life is that you may roll 5, 3, 2 by calling the random number function 3 times in a row, then immediately after, you roll again, and get 5, 3, 2 for a second time. Realistically speaking, this is POSSIBLE when you are rolling real dice as well, but it’s not very LIKELY. However, it happens frequently in Second Life, often many times during the same game, and for this reason people often feel like the numbers they’re getting are a mistake or a problem with the game, when in fact it’s just the numbers that the random number generator gave us to work with. Any attempt to mitigate these kind of results from the random number generator would rightly be viewed as tampering, and would not actually improve the random number generation at all anyway.

Games that are equipped with Remote Random features will instead be pulling random numbers into Second Life from an outside source, namely the Gaming.SL server. This lets us control the algorithm that is used to generate the random numbers and with some luck, find one that is better than the one built in to Second Life. In any situation where the game is not able to communicate with the Gaming.SL server for any reason, it will automatically default back to using the llFrand() function so the game can continue unhindered.

This feature is considered EXPERIMENTAL. If you do not wish to use it, you may turn it off from the Administration menu of your game by choosing the “Local Random” button. Upon doing so, the game will begin strictly using llFrand() again and not pull any numbers from the server. You can re-enable it at any time by choosing the “Remote Random” button.