Bombers & the Chance Variable

I am a bit confused as to how to define the Chance variables in Bomber. The guide simply says that Chance variables "define the chance of a specific particle to appear in the output image." But how this translates to the variable input is not detailed. Say I want a particle to appear half of the time, do I set up a slider with a variable of .5, or do I set up a slider with a 1-to-2 range? And if this dictates the "chance" where is the chance actually determined? (If you want a 50-50 chance that's one piece of information - but you need to "flip a coin" or "roll the dice" to determine which part of the 50-50 is met which is a second piece of information. But there's no indication where this second bit of info would be derived from.)

Basically, the help on this part of the component is simply unclear to me. If anyone could explain it I would indebted. As it is, I'm talking to myself, lol.

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gorgon1001 wrote: ...but you need to "flip a coin" or "roll the dice" to determine which part of the 50-50 is met which is a second piece of information. But there's no indication where this second bit of info would be derived from.

It's derived from a random number generator. If the number output by the generator is over 50, then it doesn't place a particle there. If it's under 50, then it puts a particle there. The chance slider simply controls the threshold.

Looking at it, it appears to me that they take the max of all the values and use it over 100 to see how many cells are populated. After that, it's just a weighting - i.e., if the sum of all the values is S and particle 1 has value n, then it will occupy approximately n/S of the populated cells. So if the values are 25 and 50 for particles 1 and 2 respectively (all other values being 0), then 50 percent of the cells will be occupied with 1/3 (25/(50 + 25)) of them being particle 1 and 2/3 being particle 2. Not 100% sure this is what's happening but it seems pretty close to correct and it's probably how I'd portion them out if I was doing it. If you reproduce my example arrangement and then start raising particle 1's chances from 25, you'll notice that the occupation state of each cell remains precisely the same until particle 1's value goes above 50. That's pretty compelling evidence that the number of occupied cells is equal to the max value divided by 100. From there, the distribution of the other particles can hardly make sense in any other way than by weighting so I think there's a pretty good chance that this is exactly the algorithm.