Some stuff about Weapon/Mob randomization

I can't wait for all the procedurally generated shoulders, dood!

 

So let me get this right...
Rifles would work much like the guns/lightsabers in SWTOR? You find a weapon you like aesthetically, and just swap around parts that have your preferred stats? That's going to be amazing if so.

 

oooaah, this looks awesome indeed.

 

Nah, all the part picking happens at item generation just before you see the item drop for you.
You don't pick the parts, they are random and come with both stats and looks.

The point of a system like this is that normally if you want your game to have 6 different rifles you've gotta make 6 different rifles!
Now let's imagine Starbound only having 2 different versions of 3 rifle parts.

Rifle Barrel A and B
Rifle Body A and B
Rifle Clip A and B

Okay, that's 6 parts for the devs to create.
Let's see how many different kinds of rifles they can form.

2*2*2 = 8

Rifle 1: Barrel A, Body A, Clip A.
Rifle 2: Barrel B, Body A, Clip A
Rifle 3: Barrel B, Body B, Clip A
Rifle 4: Barrel B, Body A, Clip B
Rifle 5: Barrel B, Body B, Clip B
Rifle 6: Barrel A, Body B, Clip B
Rifle 7: Barrel A, Body A, Clip B
Rifle 8: Barrel A, Body B, Clip A

So just by making 6 parts Starbound now has 8 possible weapons!
What if they made 1 more part of each type?

3*3*3 = 27
Dang, so just by making 9 parts they've now got 27 different rifles!

And due to the math it just gets crazier the more parts you add.
Let's say they work hard and make 10 different parts of each type. (30 parts)
10*10*10 = 1000.

Yes. 1000 weapons, by making only 30 parts.

They obviously aren't as unique as going and making each weapon by hand, but that's an insane amount of different weapons.
Cool thing is the Developers can just throw in any cool parts they can think of and feed 'em into their code and they get a ton of more possible weapons.

 

People keep taking about word monsters but I'm more interested in what weird, out of place weapons we'll get.

Like finding a sniper rifle with the longest barrel being paired with a really short body and stock. The star bound universe will have lots of botch-job weapons floating about... awesome.

 

Give me a pump-action minigun with a sniper scope and I will be happy.

 

can't wait

 

Your arm is gonna get so tired... ;-)
But this sounds great.
If he does this with monsters, then all the monsters are going to look like the creatures from Spore.

 

Hey! My Spore creations were good!

 

Maybe...but about 50% of them were like this:

 

And the other 50% are this

 

haha, which looked awesome, but never appeared in-game except as a "rogue" because they were too OP.

 

So u can get a sniper with a shotgun barrel?
or is it weapon kind bound?

 

We have no clue. A minigun style sniper rifle would be win though....

 

Does this game have limit ? HELL NO

 

Wait a second, if

100*100*100 = 1 000 000 weapons

and the devs add just one single weapon part via update wouldn't it mean that

101*100*100 = 1 010 000 weapons?

So, for every single weapon part that will be added there will be 10000 new possible outcomes, this is amazing. As things are now it will probably be impossible to acquire even half of all weapons! I just fell in love with this game again, for the 17th time now!

 

I will sit and wait patiently for my pump-action magnum.

Perhaps the monster randomization would work better with different body frame types, such as Humanoid, Centaur, Beast, etc, and having different parts within those for randomization.

 

Or maybe a breakdown by composition? Nothing wrong with combining humanoid and beat, really, provided the colour palette makes for a smooth transition. You wouldn't want a creature, though, that's half-fur half-gelatinous.

Or Borderlands-style revolver-snipers? Loved those.

 

Not what I meant. I meant animation frames, something along the lines of A Monster "Class" (The biological classification).

 

Ah, I see. Yeah, I can see animation being a bit of an issue... Though really if you give the legs a movement, all you have to do is keep the torso attached, and from there have the torso's animations.