airhead

THANK YOU Samuraiko!

I am now buzzing along making animated PNGs in Paint.Net. I then learned that animated image desktops have been eliminated before Windows 7 due to being a security risk or somesuch, so I'll have to make a movie file instead and get a program to show that as a desktop. But at least it's now possible The link below goes to an animated PNG, so will show in Firefox but maybe not IE. It's just a few frames, massively shrunk, and still a 2MB file. My toons animate through their better costumes, with a couple of cameos lurking in the background



Thanks again! You're a gem.

/Airhead

Good idea! Oops.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -fullscreen 1 -screen 1680 1050 -demoplay "C:\Program Files (x86)\NCSoft\City of Heroes\client_demos\airheads-edited3.cohdemo"

And no UI is visible when the demo is running, I guess I haven't tried turning that off/on specifically, I'll try from the console now. Also I can only reach this board from the office, so I won't be able to reply again for 14 hours or so. But I will be back

Brilliant idea TA. I would love to include other peoples' heroes in my demo screenshots too. Anyone is welcome to include Airhead in their demos. His second costume is more shiny / golden-age, in case you prefer heroes to be that way

Hi all,

When I run my demo with demodump turned on, it crashes out before making even one image. Turning on demodump 1 within the (working) demo also crashes it. Is there some setting(s) not compatible with demodump? I saw an old post by Zloth in 2009 which describes a similar problem, but his solution was to run the demo in his "Test" version of CoH. Do I need to do that? Is that equivalent to downloading the Beta version?

Airhead

Michael Clarke Duncan was always going to be a superhero. I loved him in Green Mile. I will miss him, although he leaves a fantastic heroic legacy. Nobody else is so hulking and so kind.

Dearest Rednames,

Thank you so much for City of Heroes. I imagined playing it in 2004, admired the website, but I only joined late, in 2007, when I finally had a non-work computer. The game got me through life's challenges in 2008 and is still strong for me today. City of Heroes ran quite often on my puny old back-up laptop. Sometimes for even an hour between crashes! I played from Malaysia, China, Thailand, Korea, India, Australia, and more. It even worked from the United States! I was a bit too foreign to enter NCSoft-sponsored games, but players hosted games and I joined in those. A quick special thank you to @Bubbawheat and @Cobie, and there were plenty of others who stood tall putting others first. The game also contained all the people that I met more than once. My first online game, the text-based MUD called Angalon, never went away, and I was clueless enough to think this game would just become quieter too. Airhead, indeed.

Thank you so much Positron and ALL of the developers. Actually I should name Fearghas too. I played his AE arcs, many made with slots donated by other heroes inspired to fuel his passion. And I saw his dream come true, and stay true, for so long, landing in the imaginary world he'd loved from afar.

It was the premises of City that made it work. Adventures that encouraged collaboration in a limited time, that made me feel heroic for being there. The vast scope to decide what I looked like and later, create arcs to amuse others. I could even imagine my Mind/Forcefield controller was not hurting people Arresting, to be sure. The gameplay also forgave distractions and poor hardware. I have now had a nice laptop for the last few months, and I am so glad I got to see the full beauty of the game. I will be doing what I can to follow this community and its pilots into the unknown. Super is how the world should be. I will not grow up.

I'm amazed at all that's going on for CoH posterity. This is absolutely fantastic, thank you very much. I demorecorded all my favorite costumes just in case after learning the command (and how to demoedit) last night. It's great to see everyone being reminded. Now I'll figure out OGLE, thanks to all who are trying it and have described their hurdles.

This post is timed to say THANK YOU to Arcanaville for reminding me to turn off client updates. My greatest fear is hopefully absolved by that. My greater fears already having reached fruition.

I still hope we win. Lovin' you Zwillinger, I've been trashed on a peak by unrelated fiscal games before, standing tall puts you above it all. And you can feel fantastic about it years later, when karma kicks in

Yup, I cheated It's still looks real, they "breathe" in that CoH way during the demo play.

If you don't have too many toons you might be able to fake it in-game in the AE, the limit being the saveable filesize there. And not knowing which toons will show up in each spawn Or you fill the AE with friendly NPC versions of your toons and gather them up as you wander around. I like the demorecord option because I can customize the /emotes and use maps not present in the AE, as well as fine-tune the seating arrangements.

Thanks Mr Rik! I think the demo editing tool I have tried has some capability to pull objects from one demo script into another, but I haven't pushed that very hard. I open up both scripts in Notepad windows (on Windows) and cut-paste from one to the other.

For running demos on a Mac, I don't know of anything that will help. You could figure out the "properties" to add to the end of the game's startup command line, perhaps someone has done that for a Mac before. I used Windows gadgets by Zloth listed on http://home.roadrunner.com/~scuzzbopper/demos.html . Without being able to run the demo, it'd be a nightmare to try to edit the demo (easier to learn as you can test).

Let's see if it can be explained better by someone else, but otherwise I or someone else could arrange them for you. Capture some demo scripts as described above, ZIP them up and put the zip file on a file hosting site... post a link to it here and see if anyone bites. I will give it a go once I figure out animated pictures, within my free time...

I learned how to make and edit a demo last night. I downloaded a couple of tools, a limited demoeditor and a convenient demo player. I also read the help on a wiki. I put together a panorama of my most-played toons, each switching through its favorite costumes every two seconds.

[this will be ancient news for many]: While it's not rocket science, it might not be everyone's cup of tea. However demos can be run offline, without an internet connection. The camera can be moved around, and toons can be put into animations (my scientist below is mixing formula; my shield tank is rocking a villain pose). Other peoples' toons can be added, if they have a demorecording somewhere that captures their costume. But it is nigh impossible to create a new costume this way, and it is very hard to guess the coordinates of your favorite place in the game.

So make at least one demo of each memorable toon, cycling through its costumes, taken in a place you find memorable. /demorecord myheroname, /cc 0, (30 seconds) /cc 1 ... to the last costume. Then /demostop.

The files end up in your City of Heroes installation in the client_demo directory. Don't edit them yet, just back them up somewhere. Even if you don't learn to edit and play demos, someone else can, sooner or even much later. Now all I need to do is turn my demo into an animated picture file for my computer desktop. There are enough instructions out there on the internet, for me to learn tonight.

To all you wonderful fellow heroes,

City of Heroes has been a wonderful distraction for me for so many years. I am reminded however to spend more time on the real world, things that I can win by myself, and do not depend on the whims of collective fundraising and corporate margins. Of course, if collective heroics do ultimately find a way to save this community then I will be doing my bit, including the write-ins and such.

Just in case, you will still be able to find me at my neglected blog, www.milandare.com and at deviant art, milandare.deviantart.com. The art/multimedia section of this forum has been a home for me, a hive of positivity almost all of the time. So a quick picture – the number works out to about 2.5 hours per day every day for 5 years! That’s not quite true. For the longest time I played on a primitive computer, and I’d stop playing when it crashed too many times. So for most of that game time I was link-dead Admittedly I still played a lot...



For a while yet, seeya in game!

Very nice model! And very nicely placed in the room.

It's like a Rikti, but more spiritual than tech, perhaps Rikti meets First Ward. Those party blowers on the back would make great weapons (I imagine them unfurling to the sound of a bagpipe). This critter would probably talk different to Rikti though - smilies instead of colons?

Uh, back to the modeling, this really does look great. Does your model of the room include the natural light window?

Love that wall-buster one! That's one tough kat, if steel breaks before she does.

I bet half-head's gonna cop it in the next panel. Heh. Panel-beating.

Tree of Light ... or ... Unsoiled

Perhaps this is old news, but it's the first time I'd seen it. Shadows moving with the sun... in Talos... in a tunnel:

I don't have many high tech characters, but I have a cyborg mummy.

Giza (Geezer) the Egyptophile terrorist learned bomb-making the hard way. But with the help of prosthetics and a whole pile of bandages he keeps on keeping on, driven by the dream that one day he'll get it right.
To that end his nuke blast attack applies one of six macro files that rotate each time he says something. Five files link to his "Nova" attack. One in six fires the cyborg pack "Self Destruct" power instead.

(1) Giza the cyborg mummy.

Woohoo! I'm actually able to sign in for once, being in some obscure city where Australian Olympic medalist speed skaters are manufactured

I'm going to go at complete odds with the colouring and vote based on how much I really want to open the comic:

1: Scrapper Lock
2: Plum Whine
3: Cookie Dough Crusaders

CDC is still my favorite rendering. Looking at that television... is that tongue?

Hello again!

My next commission came through incredibly quickly, even with a round of edits. It was my Belarussian stalker, Baku Fu who appears in game as:

This thread snuck in while my access was limited. There's some amazing pieces of art here! I love the lustre of Avionetca's picture of BrandX and Emiline, then again with Cinder Seer and Spoilsport. And Emmalynn. And Neko. At least I have been enjoying all of these on other pages. Group shots are always fun, the Teen Phalanx shots are cool.

The last page - Bokuman, Felsus, and the hackle-raising 'ViolateKate' are fantastic. Bokuman does great work but there's plenty of other artists I need to consider now. Great to see another art addict having so much success!

Oooh - and I almost replied when your Dualmask arrived. Verrry nice!

Thanks BrandX, Chris and Caemgen! It was an older idea, and took a little while to complete, but it is wholly out of my head now. Now I can start filling it with new ideas. Villains, cameo easter eggs... maybe even scenes that make sense to someone other than Airhead! Or maybe not.

Happy birthday Agent Foo!

I had high hopes of sticking with the Fan Art contest this year, but after one entry I found I couldn't keep up with my work, this forum, and the other forum where the contest moved to. Made worse by this forum's login process being broken for Singtel users (almost everyone in Singapore), so that I can only post this at work. Where I am not, now, of course, since I am working very hard. Anyway, my first drawing garnered a minimum of votes (understandably, the competition was intense!):



Yet, with all the thick skin of my hero, I persevered. Estivador (whom you may remember as Wakabee) did a brilliant job bringing the picture to life, as well as adding some extra characters:



The new cameos stole the show

Estivador did such a brilliant job (again - previously he did Airhead pondering ragdoll in the forest with the stone pots) and even threw in a quick portrait of Knitwit to tide me by:



Pictures link to bigger versions with comments, should any of the characters be unfamiliar (sh'yeah right : ) ). Thanks Estivador!