Balanced Items Generator

This is a little Python 3 / PyQt5 application to assist in the creation of Balanced Items / Weighted probability pools. This was mainly created to assist in editing Borderlands 2 / Pre-Sequel mods, since "weighted" or balanced pools are used throughout Borderlands all over the place. Figuring out the exact weights to use by hand is sometimes rather annoying, so I wrote this to compensate. See this blog post or this wiki article for more info about the context in which this came about.

The main point, really, is that next to the actual numerical weights (in a text box, for easy copy+paste) is the actual percentage chances for each line, which is generally what you're looking for when constructing these as a human.

Note that this does have one major deficiency when it comes to Borderlands modding, though: it doesn't take into account any of the constants or dynamic variables which are available in the game. For instance, you can't plug in a "common" or "uncommon" weight and do anything useful with it. It's only really useful for getting raw balance/weight numbers.

Some of the behavior here may not be entirely intuitive, but hopefully a minute or two of playing around should make things clear. Note that the individual weight textboxes are not editable when the balanced pool as a whole is being locked to a specific weight target. (This is there so that you can adjust weights which must "fit in" to a larger pool, such as the altering the weapon rates inside the Slot Machines, without altering the chances of dropping a weapon in general.)

Requirements

This is a Python 3 + PyQt5 application. It's been developed entirely on Linux, but it works just fine in Windows (and should in Mac as well) so long as you've got the necessary stuff installed, though Linux folks will have the easiest time of it.

Linux: You may already have these installed via your package manager, but if not, just use your package manger to install a package named something like python-pyqt5 or pyqt5 or the like, and that should take care of it for you.

Windows/Mac:

1. Install the latest Python 3.x.x version from python.org. The latest (as of April 8, 2022) is 3.10.4.
2. Be sure to check the option that says something like "Add Python.exe to path" or "Add Python to environment variables" when installing.
3. Hop out to a commandline/terminal/powershell and see if running the command python -V outputs something like Python 3.10.4.
4. If so, try just running pip install PyQt5 or pip3 install PyQt5. If that seemed to work, you may be good to go at that point!
5. Just double-click on balanced.py in an Explorer/Finder window, to launch it.

Usage

Simply run balanced.py and it should do its thing. If that's not working, try running it from a commandline/terminal/console, to see if it's printing out any error messages.

Bugs/TODO

• It'd probably be nice to have it understand at least some of the Borderlands constants / AttributeDefinitions, AttributeInitializationDefinitions, etc.
• The app probably gives too much empty space to the right, when doing actions which re-scale the sliders.
• It'd be nice if the far-left side of the slider was more fine-tuned; use a logarithmic scale or something.
• It'd also be nice to be able to manually specify the bounds of the weights, when not being bound to a specific total weight value. Manually entering a high number in the weight box, for instance, should probably auto-grow it.
• The code is a mess and nearly completely undocumented. This was thrown together in an extremely ad-hoc fashion after I got sick of dealing with weights manually.
• Really this should be a plugin in BLCMM, not a standalone application.

Changelog

April 8, 2022

• Added text labels for rows, courtesy apple1417
• Updated with some fixes for newer Qt versions

August 3, 2018

• Initial version

License

This is licensed under the 3-clause BSD license. See COPYING.txt.