Eric Tams Interview

Dungeon Siege Heaven has conducted an interview with Eric Tams, one of the engineers at Gas Powered Games, talking mostly about how the game works behind-the-scenes and the upcoming siege editor:

Q: How random are things? How random are chests? How random are monster placements in dungeons from game to game? How random are the item drops from kills? How random are the items themselves (i.e., do you have Diablo-like random item generation that uses various prefixes and suffixes)?

A: All of the items in the game are generated using a system we call Parameterized Content, or PContent for short. Pcontent is neat because it allows you the flexibility to generate a random item from a list, or to specify exactly what item will drop. We use a combination of hand placed items and random items. The items themselves can have two modifiers. These modifiers can have one or several enchantments, or even a special ability like freezing. All of the modifiers have power levels that are used to determine which ones will go on what objects.