Arcanaville

You appeal to sanity. There's an XP curve that is based on average performance. Critter XP has been rebalanced around that metric at least twice since release. You note that every archetype generates an average reward earning rate very roughly around the same rate, the same rate that your reward system is balanced around. Every archetype except one. So you fix it. Period, end of story.

There's no need to justify fixing something your own design rules say is broken. The justification that's required is for explicitly *not* fixing something your own design rules say is broken, and when it comes to the fundamental metric of player reward earning rate, that justification has an extremely high hurdle.

Now that will be a Magi run worth recording.

Isn't that always the way.

Awesome work, by the way. Now its just a matter of mapping textures and adding animation rigs and scripting physics and ...

Wait. That's how three weeks turns into two years.

I'd like to see those fifty lines of code.

I can confirm at least some of that information independently and I'm pretty certain I know how Unsub's source is, so that information can be considered at least generally authentic.

I do know there were several false starts within Paragon to make a successor game in some form, and I know the secret project was not a successor to CoH. I know about the CoH2 thing but I think that didn't get far, but it did exist.

As to the rest, I believe its always been true that the most likely reason for NCSoft shutting down CoH was actually that they were shutting down Paragon and CoH was a collateral casualty. That they had changed their minds about the viability of Paragon Studios' other projects is one very good possibility as to why they would be compelled to do that.

I'm not exactly sure if you're agreeing with me or not at this point, but as peak performance was not relevant to the original point, the ability to create bots to achieve peak performance, whatever that's defined to be, would be twice removed from the original point, which was about whether developers target the average capabilities of their intended playerbases or not.

If you capture just one second of demorecord, you can use the F2-enabled free camera to fly around your base and see any room from any angle.

See this proof of concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjOXiNFhQhU

You don't even need to pause the demoplayback because it loops continuously by default. You could take your time, position the camera exactly where you want, and then OGLE-capture your base or use whatever OpenGL cap tool you prefer. Its this free flight camera combined with the fact that demorecords encapsulate the entire geometry of your base in an encoded block at the start of the demorecord that makes this possible: its what is being referred to in the OP of this thread.

Did it cover why Pluto is allowed to be naked, but Goofy has to wear clothes?

Could be worse. The IAU could lock out all the astronomers and replacement astronomers could declare Venus to be a distant moon of Neptune.

I always suspected.



I think it was the stubby arms that gave it away.

That's irrelevant to the point. No one said anything about the average player achieving peak performance. That doesn't even happen here. The subject was, as even you put it, "designing to the statistical performance of the target audience." Every game, Eve Online included, does that. In fact, Eve Online does that to a higher degree than City of Heroes ever did; they have far stronger design tools to do it with. From the very beginning they were extremely cognizant of what their players were doing across the spectrum of players and they very closely monitor what the playerbase does. In fact, their exploit detection systems are explicitly designed around recognizing what their playerbase is generally doing and looking for anomalous behavior.

It can seem on the surface that Eve Online is a completely lawless game where the devs control nothing and everything is within the control of the players, particularly the economy, but nothing could be further from the turth. The truth is behind the scenes, CCP exerts powerful control over the large scale macro-elements of the Eve economy and other game systems. Their balance criteria is far harsher than City of Heroes ever was, far more quantitative, and just as keyed to their overall player performance.

The IAU doesn't even care what astronomers think; I have no illusions about them caring what I think.

The same thing's going to happen when the Sun eats Mercury.

Also, Pluto is a planet. I'll consider Pluto not a planet when the IAU makes a definition for planets that isn't completely stupid. The IAU's explanation for redefining what a planet is was that it was scientifically important to make a definition that could be consistently applied. Then they made that definition only work within our Solar System: the definition for planet everywhere else in the universe is different. Pluto would be a planet by IAU definition if it was in a solar system exactly identical to ours ten light years away.

The definition is also very hazily argued to include the Earth as a planet, even though it does not technically meet the neighborhood requirement, as the Earth does not "gravitationally dominate" the orbit of the Moon and is a satellite of the Earth only by the circular argument that the Earth is a planet in the first place. If the IAU cared about Science, it wouldn't care one way or the other if the Earth was defined to be a planet or not. It does, because it knows it can redefine Pluto's status but if it redefined Earth's status everyone would ignore them completely.

Knowing that, and generalizing the sentiment scientifically, I ignore them completely.

That's very parochial, counting from the inside.

I'm not a member of any of the base building channels that might be out there: the only way I had to get the word out was to PM the few base builders I happen to know and post in this forum. I'm hoping other base builders pass the word out to any who might be interested by whatever means are available.

Also, its possible to preserve friends' bases if you're coalitioned to them and can step into their base, but can't contact them for whatever reason. You just need one second of demorecord within the base to capture the base data.

Everyone says that, until the Publisher decides to sunset you.

At this point, I think its still important to try to reach as many base builders as possible, especially those that may not be reading the forums. We have all the time in the world to view and experiment with bases, but if they aren't demorecord captured before the game shuts down, there's no way I'm aware of for a base builder to get that information unless someone else happened to have previously recorded it at some point.

That's because there is less discussion about targeted performance for other game types, and because its primarily in MMOs where that design target can be effectively iterated. However, the principle forms the basis for basically all game design. Virtually no one designs games with an abstract target, and then doesn't care how many people can actually play it effectively.

I would be surprised to find a professional game designer anywhere that doesn't believe in some variant of that basic design philosophy.

Yeah, Leandro mentioned above the camera works in the live client as well, but I will also mention for the record that you can record in any of the three clients and any of them will still play the record back with a caveat. Things that don't exist in that version of the client will obviously not playback correctly. So if you record I24 content that uses new maps in the beta client, that won't work right in the live client because it doesn't have those maps.

But, for example, I had no problem playing this demo from 2004 back in the live client. Incidentally, the reason I was specifically looking at that demo was because of 1:20, where you can see some interesting flock behavior of the critter AI from back then.

I notice glitches: since dragon's tail's animation was changed a while ago, playing back very old demos of my MA/SR with the current clients has the glitch that when she uses dragon's tail, nothing happens on screen. All the other attacks animate. But not only does this allow for saving bases, it also allows, with those glitches in mind, replaying very old things people might have demorecorded and forgotten about.

Also, there are older versions of the client "floating around" that can be used to play older demos with better animation fidelity.


But for emphasis: you DO NOT need to record with the beta client. You can record in the live client and still playback in the live, beta, or test clients. There is NO REASON to attempt to rebuild bases on Beta.