Thursday, April 3, 2008
SM2 : Weapons balancing
I love when things suddenly start to click into place. For many days I was struggling with weapons balancing problem. I just didn't know if my close combat weapons are to powerful compared to distance weapons, or maybe vice versa. Besides of balancing issues I was also thinking about system which would allow me to place weak items in early levels of dungeon and gradually introduce more powerful ones. And just today, during the lunch break, when I was waiting for my meal, I just did it.. I can't say that I invented this, because there wasn't any "invention process". It was like one of those Terry Pratchett's idea neutrino hit my brain :-). Now I feel stupid, because it's so simple, yet I needed about two weeks to come up with this solution. But straight to the point. I've created a formula which calculated a "power" score for each weapon. It take into consideration such things as minimum and maximum damage, attack range of weapon, one or two handed. Thanks to this I can see how much one weapon is stronger from other, thous making balancing process much easier. Also, I can use this score to place items in the dungeon, for example at the beginning I could only generate items with score less then five. Additional and free feature of this is that I can generate prices for items basing on that score. Nice, isn't it?
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3 comments:
Sounds a bit like the CR (creature rating) from Neverwinter Nights. Pretty nifty idea :D
Btw, I just noticed this now, but thanks for linking Solariad. Hopefully, one day you will work on Project GAWIN again, but your current stuff looks interesting also.
Creature rating you say? hm I wonder how useful it is in NN.. maybe this is also an answer to generate monsters in the dungeon :)
I think that a link to Solariad is more then six months old ;)
Lol maybe it is, I just never considered that anyone would bother with linking it :)
The way CR works is, from what I remember (haven't played with NWN for many years now), it gets adjusted by the base attributes and special skills of a creature. I think equipment worn by creature actually didn't affect it, but that might be something you could look into. It's kind of an "adjusted level" I guess - a creature might be humanoid level 10 but you boost the stats so the effective level is higher, and CR reflects that. Actually I wonder if this concept was originally in the D&D spec, it might've been taken from there.
I don't really remember if it was used for spawn points, although there's no reason why you couldn't do that. But in the Game Master's Client when you select creatures to place, you also see their CR iirc, so it's also useful as help for the GM.
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