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StealthyCoin
2007.07.24, 06:44 AM
This is more for trying to figure out what the hell my friend is talking about more than anything else.

What are all the techniques for determining what items a monster drops.
I came up with three:

Fixed- Troll always drops 2 troll eyes and a something else that never changes
Random- randomly drops any item
Percent- There is a list of items a monster can drop, each has a %chance to drop (as well as a random number of items dropping probably.)

The game in question is maple story. I asked what the drop rate of a certain thing was, and he responded that there wasn't one. This lead to him trying to describe something that was random but not random. Which I told him was a percent chance to drop.
If it was fixed or pure random there would be no such thing as a rare/common item. If something was "Rare" you could just go kill something that always dropped it. And a pure random system would be absolutely stupid unless there were a very small number of things to drop in the game.

The system i've always used and assumed every game used was the % system, since I think every way you can do something random while retaining rare/common items has to have percentages involved somewhere.


Anyway tell me if I missed something.

OneSadCookie
2007.07.24, 06:55 AM
Warcraft III uses a very sophisticated system, where items have levels and types, and you can choose to have a given creep drop a random item of a given level and type, for example, but it's a bit more flexible than that, I think.

PowerMacX
2007.07.24, 11:11 AM
What are all the techniques for determining what items a monster drops.
I came up with three:

Fixed- Troll always drops 2 troll eyes and a something else that never changes
Random- randomly drops any item
Percent- There is a list of items a monster can drop, each has a %chance to drop (as well as a random number of items dropping probably.)

Well, you can implement the three just by using the right percentages and number of items:
1. 1 item, 1 in 1 chance
2. n items 1/n chance for each
3. n items, each with a (potentially) different chance, with the sum being n.

There is also "chance altering items", for instance if the player gets a lucky charm of some sort, some items' chances of being dropped may increase. For this to work, each item would have to have a "desirability" index associated with it.