I've come up with yet another long term project that (hopefully) has lower resource requirements than my previous suggested project, but the key to most of that is the use of the game's customization/equipment creation system (which does not have pre-made equipment for player use; it instead allows you to create your own armor and weapons in specific patterns that are partially pre-ordained.)

What I mean by this is all equipment used by the player is created by them using different materials that determine what the weapon will be, such as a hilt for swords and daggers, a shaft for spears and halberds, different stock and barrel lengths for guns, etc. The same is done with armors, with lamellar, laminar, scale, plate, and splint (among other) patterns available.

However, the question I came to ask was if having all the equipment pre-made and "set in stone" would be easier to do than the reversal I had just described above. The reason being that I have noticed that no other game has used the system I have described, and I wonder if there is a good reason that nobody has tried the system I proposed yet.

There are other reasons the game could be complex, but one way to cut down on the resources necessary while still having a customization system with a significant degree of depth would be to use the method described above (or is it?)

Anyways, what do all the professional game developers think of this system? Would it be more complicated that using pre-created gear?

obviously, variable weapons (IE weapon design) is going to be more complex to implement that hard coded weapon types.

Yes, that I understand, but would it be more costly and require more resources that hard-coded weapons?

Yes, that I understand, but would it be more costly and require more resources that hard-coded weapons?

This would depend on how many weapons you would have hard-coded.

With a good working systen, you can have many more weapons through build-it-yourself,

these weapons will tend to be uninspired/not individual pieces of art, which means the players will need to provide more of the (creative) content.

The cost(s) will, off course, depend on your overall design, and not just one part of the design,

and likely it would be better to see which design choice you yourself are better with thus decreasing cost.

edit:ninja'd by Norman

Hardcoded weapons/items are easier to implement - unless you're planning on hard-coding 100s of them.

Hardcoded weapons are simple instances and won't require the bookkeeping that a customizable weapon system would require.

An alternative to the possible hassle of a complicated weapon customization system is a hard-coded customization system. So instead of having a "Weapon" which consists of an attached "Hilt" "Blade" "etc", you hardcode all the permutations. Manually if there isn't a ton of them, via a script if there is a ton of them.

So you have something like this when the program starts if you want 100s of them:

foreach( hilt in Hilts ){

foreach(blade in Blades){

foreach(doodad in Doodads){

MakeNewWeapon(hilt,blade,doodad);

}

}

}

then MakeNewWeapons looks up whatever stats that particular component adds to the weapon, creates a Weapon item in a list called WeaponsList or whatever and *kazam* you've got 100s of weapons. Then when a player creates the weapon, you find the right weapon in the list using the components the player used to "create" their weapon.

You'll still have to have all of the logic that a standard customization system would require ( classes for each component) but you won't have to track and save new instances, since they'll already exist. Your "weapon" object will just be a single class instead of a class with references to other classes. Plus, your player inventory will probably just hold an index number. So Gold Blade, Gold Hilt, Emerald Doodad = 341 or whatever.