Arcanaville

Between that and the death panels eliminating all the older subscribers, I would expect the next two things to shut down will be the GetOffMyLawn MMO and the state of Florida.

I'm never too tired.

Zombie Man opening himself up so TheNet can expose himself is either the script to the worst porno movie, or the best horror movie I've heard all year.

More than eight years later, still one of my favorite City of Heroes videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtyDC_F1tVo

Because it reminds me of how I felt when I first started playing, and everything was amazing to me.

(The double shot at 1:37 captured back when we didn't know how to edit demos still amazes me)

And then we got to blow the place to Kingdom Come. Mu hu ha ha ha!

Seriously, I did like most of the writing in Praetoria, and the design of the zones was very well done. The biggest thing that hurt Praetoria was the non-normalized critters in Praetoria that were almost twice as dangerous as in Paragon. Its too bad we couldn't get that addressed quicker.

It depends on the level of accuracy you want and how much you want to support every single possible power and invention, including procs. Something like a couple hundred to a couple thousand hours.

It would not be difficult, it would just be enormously time-consuming to add full support for all the different powers and inventions and mechanics. Part of the problem is that Mids doesn't fully represent everything properly to do that, so a Mids build would have to be converted to a more attribmod-accurate representation, which then a more generic engine could process without having to make a lot of special exceptions.

That reminds me. I have to contradict something Zwillinger said during the last twitch broadcast. He said NCSoft "owns" everything. I'm not a lawyer, but I do have some experience working in IP and my understanding of US copyright law is that is incorrect. There's a very specific distinction here.

NCSoft owns all the IP in the game. That includes all the copyrightable art assets in the character creator, and all the copyrightable story elements of the game. You can't write a story about Crey Corporation, including mentioning them in a character bio, outside of the game. You can't specifically use their art assets in another game, or put a screencap of your character on the cover of that new novel you wrote about your character.

But the copyrightable elements of your character that you uniquely made you still own. NCSoft cannot assert ownership of them for the simple reason its legally impossible to do so under US copyright law. Ownership and authorship have very explicit and specific conditions under which they can be transferred from the original creator to some other entity, and signing an agreement that says "anything and everything I make you own" doesn't qualify. Such an agreement is actually illegal except under the specific condition of work-for-hire.

What NCSoft gets within the EULA is a perpetual, non-exclusive license to use and sublicense anything you make in the game. That means they can use our character creations in any way they want. They can sell those rights to other companies. They can do so for as long as they want. The only thing they cannot do is prevent us from using them as well, or selling those rights to others as well. We still own those characters.

BUT, and this is the big catch, NCSoft does not grant us any reciprocal rights to any of their assets outside of the game. Which means my main character, Lady Arcana - I own that character, its concept, and its general appearance. I could write a novel starring that character, and NCSoft would have no legal ground to stop me.

But, I couldn't use screencaps. I couldn't mention City of Heroes itself. I couldn't mention she lived in Paragon City. I couldn't mention she was experimented on by Crey Corporation. I couldn't mention she survived the Rikti War. I would have to change all of those details, because I don't own them and have no right to use them.

She could still be an energy blasting superhero. But I couldn't use the specific details of the energy blast powerset. She could still have a red and purple costume and a cape, but it could not copy the art assets in the game. The specifics of my origin idea about her powers coming from an experiment combining magical and technological portals is something I own and NCSoft does not. To the extent that I mention it in my character bio, however, they can use that idea to whatever extent they want.

Deleting characters from the system doesn't eliminate NCSoft's rights to them. They could, if they wanted to, recover them from backups and still use them in any way they wanted to. So whether you delete them or not, probably doesn't change anything much. Whether you delete them or not, you still own them. Whether you delete them or not, NCSoft still has full rights to use them. So this should not play any factor in whether you keep your characters on the servers until the end or delete them before the end.

I was told the plans for 25 and 26 were going to equally wow me. Having seen 24, I have no doubt about it.

You can pin it on him yourself.

Its this bug:



I think it happens when a dev accidentally misplaces a space, and "Enhances the damage resistance of a power by 15.9% and reduces endurance cost by 26.5" becomes "Enhances the damage resistance of a power by 15.9 %and reduces endurance cost by 26.5".

Then, the %a becomes the format string for "double precision 64-bit number" and the string becomes "Enhances the damage resistance of a power by 15.9 [gibberish] nd reduces endurance cost by 26.5"


Yes, I farmed the **** out of those. I needed influence for my I19 builds, sue me.

It went:

Players not blaming Positron for bugs = very few

Players blaming Positron for bugs = too many

You spent four years in QA? For this game???

Now I think we need an eleven inch deep tub so we can get that Sister Psyche action shot.

INDEED

It kind of looks like a simultaneous problem with scaling and remapping onto multiple faces in different orientations.


Neat. Camera movement doesn't matter: as a proof of concept it works fine.

I honestly have difficulty looking at that picture. I'm a cold pragmatist in many ways, but not that way.

Yep. Also, some inventions still have %s8347593747459 gibberish that is due to broken format strings (i.e.: %s).

Sort of like Cthulu and Second Life had a love child.

There's a number of people looking at this problem, but I'll also take a look at it when I have some contiguous time to do so, possibly this weekend.

That's one of the nice things I have. Lean a little closer to the monitor please.

I still have nice things, so Sam must be extremely inefficient in that regard.

In the old days, people would even lie about being able to really see what was happening in the game client. Once someone claimed to have figured the entire powers database out, so to test them I asked them a question using Pcodes (I forget now what it was). If you decoded the Pstrings they obviously combined to form a question. When he called what I wrote "gibberish" I knew he was full of crap. He didn't even know what a Pstring was.

That's damning, because its the easiest thing to figure out. Why lie about something like that, I often wondered.

BaB got forum banned a couple times for being worse than me.

Its understandable: I was annoyed by the people who pretended to be insiders also. The truth is, being an insider is not all wine and roses. The great irony about being an insider is that I would often deliberately not ask or discuss certain things with the devs, because if I did that made it extremely difficult to discuss on the public forums. It was often better to not know. I had to balance knowing and helping, and not knowing and being able to rip the devs on the forums. And that was a tough choice.

Can't wait. Reminds me of my college days when I used to spawn off a bunch of POYRAY (DKBTrace initially - I'm that old) renders across the network (no, I didn't have permission) and wait for them so I could combine them into a short animation.

I can vouch for that. It took me a while to figure out when to take the devs seriously, and then I realized I should always take you seriously, just also completely loony.