To the software engineers here (Destiny)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Monday, June 26, 2017, 16:18 (2796 days ago) @ Blackt1g3r

"[T]he tuning path is pretty different this time. The weapons are all hand built in a way where, before, they had random talents– We can look at an entire archetype like hand cannons. And then we can look at data on usage rates for hand cannons, and sort usage rates, and then within usage rates, check [kill death ratios] per hand cannon and find out what is actually effective and what’s not.
And then, because the weapons are all hand built, we can take a given hand cannon and say “let’s change this one hand cannon” rather than “let’s pave this entire archetype.” So we have opportunities in front of us that we haven’t had before because of the way we’ve built the weapons and hopefully we’ll seize those opportunities."

Anyone else read this and think, "They favored composition over inheritance this time around, giving them more flexibility to generate new weapons and sub-archetypes."

I've been studying a lot of CS lately and that's the first thing that came to my mind. Kudos to them for making a more flexible set of weapons. Should make sandbox updates considerably better in D2.

My understanding is most game developers have been writing games like that for years now. This is known as an Entity-Component-System (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity–component–system). I'd be surprised to find our they didn't handle it like this in Destiny 1. It seems more likely to me that they did do this, but the weapons and the attributes were actually too separate such that they weren't able to modify how a specific attribute behaves when attached to a specific weapon because they didn't have a way to distinguish which weapon the attribute was attached to. Most likely the attributes had to be split up so that hand cannons get hand-cannon-specific attributes which they could tune, but they couldn't tune the attribute for specific hand cannons.

I pretty much fully agree. I doubt destiny's guns & archetypes are coded in-code as an inheritance tree. Perhaps they were represented this way in the data defining the guns & how they behave, and the specific perks followed a composition pattern (again, in the data, not in the source).

BUT! In the spirit of what BeardFade was wondering... yeah, the concept fits.

What I suspect is that Bungie has enumerated each possible unique gun (be it random roll, or a set of hand picked perks) so that they can inspect & target each unique gun for balancing.

What I HOPE is that they've reduced the possible combinations of perks (hand picked rolls if you will) and will communicate which roll/unique_gun it is in the gun name. I'm thinking of how they're reducing the combinations of possible sub-class configurations, you get choose this set, or that set; only I'm applying that concept to the possible rolls of a gun. Your roll is this set or that set. We'll see.