What is a good random number generator for a game?

Question

What is a good random number generator to use for a game in C++?

My considerations are:

1. Lots of random numbers are needed, so speed is good.
2. P

Answer 1

An additional criteria you should consider is thread safety. (And you should be using threads in todays multi-core environments.) Just calling rand from more than one thread can mess with it's deterministic behavior (if your game depends on that). At the very least I'd recommend you switch to rand_r.