Arcanaville

Not sure if I'm going to miss that or not.

Well let me put it this way. I spent hours yesterday writing a script that would create a demorecord that would show my main using power thrust to send a warhulk into orbit and quite a while afterward watching sequences of me knocking things miles into the sky while giggling to myself.

I don't think you had all that much to be worried about.

Semantic note: "penultimate" is the second to last. If Ascension was the ultimate power, that would make the Well the penultimate power.

A fresh out of college CS major that scores a 100k+ job in the Bay area has effectively hit the lottery. Also, no fresh out of college CS major is worth $100k. I don't care if he graduated valedictorian from Stanford and flew to the job interview in his personally constructed jetpack.

The devs for expediency usually hand-waved the meta-concepts behind most of the way powers and enhancements, and everything really, worked. That's unfortunate but not *necessary*. It just requires work not everyone thinks is worth it (but I do).

Getting defense from things that improve attacks sounds nonsensical, and it is without any conceptual scaffolding. If the thing was a boost to dexterity that simultaneously made one more elusive and have a greater chance of scoring critical hits, there would be a conceptual logic behind that one thing doing apparently two different things. But that has to be done in a systematic way at the very beginning and not retrofitted later, so that the core system has a very small, simple core set of foundational blocks; otherwise it ends up being a blizzard of semantic sugar coating.

Its unfortunate that the invention system has all the detail min/maxers want, but none of the logic non-maxers often need to make sense of it all. Unfortunate, because in my opinion it is an unforced error, even factoring in the whole "limited resources" thing.

Unless that's average salary and benefits of $90k and sixty thousand dollar parking spaces for each employee, I have no idea how Paragon Studios could possibly have been averaging a net total cost per employee of $150k.

For reference, last I checked the industry average for game designers was something between $50k and $90k depending on experience and other factors, and senior designers (usually, that title means manager) between $80k-$120k.

I've always used a figure of merit of about $75k average salary and about $90k total benefit cost per employee averaged across all employees, about $7M in incremental annual employee cost for about 75 employees. If Paragon Studios had a higher total operating cost than $9M to $10M I would be highly surprised.

Remember that out of all those Paragon employees, for every senior producer/designer/programmer making maybe around a hundred grand, there was a QA person making far less: probably closer to $40k-$50k.

As far as I know, Tyrant himself is immune to -regen. I believe its just down to -res and damage for him. So the most valuable things to have are resistance debuffs, damage buffs (especially team-wide and league-wide buffs), Scourge (since the critical moment when you need the most damage comes when Tyrant is at low health), high damage in general, and high damage lore pets.

*The* biggest singular buff you can have are Ultimate (level shift) inspirations. With all the lights up we are -6 to Tyrant. A level shift upward *doubles* your damage and effects on Tyrant because of how steep the purple patch is there: you are at 15% at -6, and 30% at -5. So one shift up doubles your damage and doubles your resistance debuff strength on Tyrant.

Its also ironic that for the most part I left the machinima aspects City of Heroes to the real artists because there was plenty enough to do elsewhere and there was lots of time to eventually look at it. Now that there isn't a lot of time left there's so much potential I want to investigate in the system, and its taking up the bulk of my attention now. I may find myself actually spending more time with the game after November 30th when I can no longer long into it.

Its oddly exciting in a way that the sunset of the game has freed me to look at aspects of the game I've always been interested in but never had the time to explore.

I think that's generally a question of what kind of game you're trying to make, fundamentally. There's no reason for any sort of quantitative balancing at all if the game you want to make is "we're going to throw stuff into the game, and the players are entirely on their own as to what happens." But that is not this game. If it were, there would be no reason to think hard about, or at all about, things like debt management, XP curve balancing, or any of the other things that were done primarily to constrain the average player experience within a specified, if larger than normal for MMOs, range.

In City of Heroes' case specifically, it isn't a question of pitching to the median, its more a case that this game *defines* performance in terms of the median experience in the first place. Its not like a test that if everyone gets Ds you assume everyone is an idiot. In City of Heroes if everyone gets Ds you assume the game's too hard. That's not so much a debatable point as it is an axiom of the game design.

I think you should always *consider* outliers, but I don't think its a good idea in general to "accommodate" them in the literal sense. For me I think if the game design intends to do that, it should do so in a systematic way that makes them no longer actual outliers to the performance band the game targets, except coincidentally (meaning, it only happens to be true at this moment in time that the players cluster on one place, except for a few people; the game would function perfectly fine if tomorrow the players' performance ranged evenly across that entire range).

For example, I've always thought that CoH should have found a way to accommodate the playstyle of people who like to herd up tons of things and people who like to fight just one or two very strong things. But the reward system should have reflected that, so that allowing players to build for and execute the mass case wasn't the overwhelmingly higher reward choice. When it takes roughly the same build effort to kill a couple very strong things as it does to mow down hundreds of weak things but the latter generates far more rewards, that either implies the mechanical design is broken or the reward system is broken in some way. Either alone is not a problem: the combination together is.

In that respect, part of the problem is deciding which outliers to keep and which to bar, because certain combinations of outliers are (for the most part) objectively broken.

Because what's always bothered me about that calculation is the apparent presumption Alcubierre warps bypass the law of conservation of energy. I presume the energy that accelerates those particles comes from the gravitational energy of the warp, but there's no reason to presume that's unlimited.

The devs chose to balance the game, under the pretense they were game developers. They did not decide to follow your game philosophy, under the pretense they are not sociopaths.

So based on my testing, it seems the best alternative I can find to FRAPS+Virtualdub is a program called Bandicam. Its free, although the free version watermarks the videos with their URL at the top and its limited to a maximum recording length of ten minutes at a time. It can record full screen, a specific window, or an aperture - meaning you can draw a rectangle on the screen and Bandicam will record whatever happens within that rectangle. It can also record with various codecs: MPEG1, Motion JPEG, or Xvid for example.

For reference, I recorded a two minute segment of a Magi with FRAPS and Bandicam at 1280x720 native resolution. FRAPS generated a two gig file in its proprietary format, and then Virtualdub converted that to a ~150M file Divx file. Bandicam set to its highest quality (q=100) xvid setting generated a ~500M xvid file. Set to a lower but still reasonable quality (q=70) generated a significantly smaller file (~250M).

To be honest, I have difficulty telling the difference between FRAPS optimal and Bandicam q=100. Bandicam with xvid q=70 is noticeably lower in quality, but not dramatically so. Compare for yourself:

FRAPS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdDNEi13Y6s
Bandicam xvid q=100: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wj0z8W5uq4
Bandicam xvid q=70: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVKmRWmIn3s

(note: all three should be played at HD720)

To be fair, this does not contain content best suited to detect encoding differences. Its just what I happened to be playing around with at the time. But it does suggest to me that Bandicam is perfectly acceptable at reasonably high resolutions, if your computer is fast enough to play both the demo and recording software without overloading. Personally, I think if you're going to do this a lot, Bandicam is probably worth the $40. And unless you like manually fiddling with re-encoding video, its probably a superior solution to FRAPS for most people.

PS: my client was running with the highest graphics settings for pretty much everything, so it was having trouble keeping up 30 fps in the demorecord: with either FRAPS or Bandicam recording it dropped to around 20 fps on playback.

Well, you don't really need to pause a demorecord of a base since the demo loops automatically and I doubt there's much happening in the base that the looping would be distracting. But if you do want to extend the length of a demo without pausing, you can add commands to the end of the demorecord. A safe one would be to find the last CAM command and append more of them to the end. However, my preliminary experiments suggest you cannot simply add one with a huge amount of time in the time column; above about 3000 milliseconds seems to cause problems. So you would have to add multiple 3000 CAM commands at the end to extend the demorecord about 3 seconds per line. Copy and paste can, of course, exponentially add more time (3 seconds, then 6, then 12, then 24, then 48, then 96, etc, by copying and pasting all lines previously pasted).

Or you could just start the demorecord, go to lunch, come back, and stop the demorecord. They don't take up a lot of space either way.

Incidentally, wegame no longer appears viable for those wanting to make videos. I'm testing a couple of other capture and record programs; I hope to have something like a bake off of them either today or tomorrow.

Depends on the software you use. FRAPS, for example, has two modes: native resolution (which records at whatever resolution your actual demo is playing back at) and half-res, where both x and y are cut in half (so technically, that's a quarter display, but whatever).

Demos playback at whatever settings the client itself last used. So if your beta client is running windowed and at 1180x990 or something, that's what demo playback will use. If it was full screen 1024x768, it'll use that instead.

I tend to play and record in windowed mode. Among other reasons, windowed clients can be resized on the fly. But it can be difficult to know precisely what your x/y resolution is in a window, precisely because it can be resized to anything. If you really want to know, start the client normally and look in SETTINGS with the button at the bottom (you don't even need to log in to a server). The Graphics settings menu should tell you what x/y resolution your game client is set to, even if it is windowed.

P pauses. Hitting P again unpauses. As far as I know, there's no way to rewind or fast forward.

Also, P pauses demorecords in both the beta and live clients, so I believe this feature has been there for a while, just undocumented.

As far as I know so far, no. (the obvious - /loc in the demo cmd window - doesn't seem to work)

No.

Yes.

This is all very new to me, so I'm still exploring what's possible. At the moment, I don't know how to do what you're angling to do. But I don't yet know that its impossible yet. It may take some time to figure out one way or the other.

You know I know the score when it comes to developmental practical realities, so I say this not so much as a critique of the devs as my own personal take on the situation.

If you look at all the games out there that have survived past ten years old and still have a significant player population, it seems to me that 90% of them share at least one of two traits:

1. They are a blood sport in Korea

2. They are platforms.

In my opinion, and I fully appreciate the limitations the devs were operating under, not making the AE and the demorecord-based features an extremely high priority were errors. The AE and demorecord, developed properly, were our keys to immortality.

I once calculated that a well-optimized demorecord system could probably capture the entire leveling path of the average character from level 1 to level 50 in under a gigabyte of storage. Imagine if everyone could go back and look at anything they ever did since the beginning of time. From any angle. Share comic-book like moments with their friends on Facebook in full rendered video. Stage video events and stream them from within the game.

That was well within our grasp, and that doesn't even count the possibilities related to machinima. How hard would it have been to market the game around those capabilities? I'm not the biggest fan of social media in the world, but if you could tweet an event in CoH, and with a link another player could see what that player was looking at fully rendered? What would that have been worth?

Now that you mention it, silly me there is a way to do that without using a launcher. In the shortcut, just don't put any name at all. Just add the -demoplay at the end, but no filename. Now, if you drag and drop a demorecord file onto the shortcut, that should launch the shortcut with the name of the file you're dropping onto it as a command line parameter, basically doing the same thing. And I just tested it now and it works.

So make the shortcut with no demofile name, and then drag and drop demorecords onto the shortcut to launch them. That should work without having to constantly edit the shortcut itself.

Edit: Ninjaed!

The floating camera thing only works during playback. In terms of taking the playback and converting it to video that I can youtube, I use FRAPS. There are other recording software tools out there: wegame for example specializes in recording gaming content with the option to upload it to their site. An advantage of wegame is it records directly into a compressed DIVX format you can easily play, share, and upload. But I've found FRAPS to have better performance, particularly when recording higher resolution video. The disadvantage of FRAPS is it records into a very bulky format to get that speed (meaning, its not compressed a lot: video files can get gargantuan) and you need a separate tool to convert them offline into something more streamlined like DIVX. I use Virtualdub for that.

So I /demorecord, then I playback while FRAPS is recording, and then I take the FRAPS recording and feed it into Virtualdub to compress it into a nicer video file, and then I go get a sammich and let it do its thing. Ironically my bullet-time Magi is actually ultrahigh res recorded, you can play back full screen at 720 from youtube (the recording is actually even higher than that) and pthhthh I accidentally had the client playing back at low detail for my OGLE captures.

Wegame might be simpler for most people, although I haven't used it in a long while. I'll try to reload it and test it this weekend to see how it works now.

I'm sure you are correct that someone has already considered this

Slowly floating through the zones would be pretty slow. Now, if someone were to run a very fast racetrack through each zone and demorecord that, and you could pause the demorecord at any time and then free the camera at that location, that might be interesting.

Demorecords do not record audio. The game client infers audio from the event information in the demorecords. It was definitely working up to the mid-teens of issues, and then somewhere in there it broke. But there's no reason for the game client to not play back sound in a demo playback, and its probably due to someone breaking it one day and not bothering to fix it.

If its a really old demorecord or something that doesn't use very new art assets, you could play it back with an older client to get the sound. I don't know how many versions of the client are floating around out there, nor am I certain which versions I might have in backups. Someone gave me a copy of I10 and I17 recently though, and I have confirmed the I10 client plays back with sound (it also borks my graphics settings a bit because it doesn't understand the new ultramode settings and resets them in the registry, forcing me to reset them back when I switch back to the live client).

Hilariously, if you try to play back something like a Magi trial with the Issue 10 client, you actually get the sound, but the graphics and animations are so borked the playback turns into a studdering scrambled mess. But you get the sound.

You can also hit P.

It was working until not long ago, so I'm guessing something broke it. I wonder if the right hammer would unstick it. IASAL (I abuse software a lot)

If you mean using the mouse to alter your camera pointing direction, that actually works in I24 right now.

I'm really missing audio. I'm actually beginning to wonder if it can be hacked back in.

mouse_invert doesn't seem to work from the demorecord command console.