How Do You Make Over Half A Million Guns?
650,000 guns. That’s the most recent count of the number of guns in Borderlands. Each with a unique appearance and effect.
So how is Gearbox making all these guns?
Third-world slave labor? Shooting up their art team with methamphetamine? Super-intelligent monkeys?
No, nothing that insidious. They’re actually using a process called procedural generation. In this, developers write procedures into code which dictate the generation of content.
In other words, the developers don’t make the guns. They make the rules that tell the computer how to make the guns.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The problem with procedural generation is that if you’re not really, really careful with the rules, the finished product can end up whacky, like a purple handgun that shoots intercontinental ballistic missiles.
As one Gearbox employee put it: “Procedural generation of weapons = Pain in the posterior.” This element of Borderlands is one of the most ambitious. I also suspect that its one of the things that might have delayed the release of the game. But hey, if it works and we get 650,000 cool weapons, it was worth it.
Comments
650,000 guns? I think Gearbox is just doing it to get the headlines that will come with having a game with so many weapons.
Its to help differentiate the game from all the other titles. 650k guns isn't going to make a bad game fun though.
Half a million guns, yawn. There are single blocks in Baltimore with 3x that number. Haven't you ever seen the Wire?
The difference is, they aren't 90% glocks Chazz
Why are you hating on a game that no one has even seen, let alone played.
Talk trash after you play it.
Coming from a coding lifestyle, that really isn't that absurd of a claim.
Say you were to have 10 variables, each with 5 possibilities.
The total amount of combinations you get from that would be 10^5 Possibilities.
Or 1,000,000
Very big number from some very simple combinations. Now yeah, you're going to have to apply rules to limit it. So it'd be like "If rocket-launcher, it cannot be fully automatic"
Which will start to cut down on the number, but more specifically require the people to think through a lot of the combinations, making it a pain.
In the end, Very easy to create, Slightly boggling to truly balance so you don't get broken results, but not amazingly so.
If you had to weed through 1,000,000 possibilities afterall, how would you do it?