It seems to be way off from what you would expect. Monsters sometimes hit many criticals in a row (so do the PCs). Criticals seem too common in general as well. Assuming I'm not imagining things, is there a mod to fix that, or has anyone looked at the code to see whether it is as it should be? I would recall reading similar complaints before (in the "Temple of Elemental Evil" section of the forum, not the modding section), but can't recall what the responses were (if there were any), and couldn't find anything after doing a quick and superficial forum search. edit: I also thought to have noticed that monsters get criticals more often when they're in a disadvantage (weaker than the PC group). Maybe it's happened only a few times, so that a group of monsters I should have been able to defeat easily made a good number of criticals in a row, or something annoying like that. Maybe I remember them only because they were so annoying, not because they were statistically very improbable (I wouldn't necessarily know how probable they were).
I don't think anyone has ever found hard evidence of number skewing in the code, but we do know the RNG used by the game (the Mersenne Twister) was found to generate too many results at the extremes and was revamped, but apparently the new improved Twister was never put into ToEE. It would probably take a .dll hack to replace it.
Very interesting, thanks for the reply. I don't have the newest Co8 mod back, by the way, so I guess I should have asked whether something was done about the criticals in the last year or so (after I stopped playing it regularly). But I'm of course aware that Co8 has been using most of its energy on KotB, and not so much on other stuff. Anyway, was the revamped Twister used in KotB? Is there a chance of a dll hack for ToEE?
Unfortunately we don't have a modder capable of a .dll hack atm. It would be nice to have a RNG that seemed more "natural" but it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.
Have you tried this: http://www.dependencywalker.com/ I just opened the temple.dll with it, but I'm not sure what to look for. It does seem like a very handy tool, although the lists of dependencies and functions in the temple.dll are pretty long.
