Arcanaville

Oh, one other thing. The pet project I never thought I would have the time to do, but maybe one day I might still do: write a program that takes Mids builds and PvPs them in a MyBrute-type simulation. In theory, I believe I know enough about the game mechanics to recreate a clock-accurate emulation of how the powers work. It would just take an immense amount of time to do it all correctly. But I do have access to the data to do it, right down to projectile speeds and FramesBeforeHit delays. Everything except ragdoll, basically.

My guess is that's about three thousand hours of work, assuming I had the Mids export format spec, for all powersets and invention slotting to be supported as well as all the actual animation times.


What I will probably do, soonish, is upload the code for my attack sim from the snipe thread and my old old old damage simulator from I7 into a dropbox folder so people can look at those and laugh at my extremely bad coding practices when I'm coding for just myself.

I've been spending as much time here as possible, because honestly its entirely possible we could lose forum access before Nov 30. But I've saved the entire thread, pics and all, and do so regularly. Regardless of what happens my intent was always to continue this discussion on the Titan and/or Unleashed forums as long as people were interested in the topic.

At the moment my biggest Lore-related questions are:

1. What was Prometheus' agenda, and was the intention to eventually introduce the rest of his mythological pantheon?

2. "When" did Ouroboros form, and why?

3. Do all Earth's share the same Well, or do different Earths in different dimensions have different Wells? It was suggested that Primal Earth and Praetorian Earth actually shared the same Well. If so, why would the Battalion choose to attack Primal Earth to absorb Earth's Well, when so many other Earths appear to be so much less well guarded?

4. Did Dr. Aeon's time traveling antics eventually cross paths with Ouroboros? Did they deal with him in the future, or did he eventually become a Mender?

5. Why is the Praetorian Hamidon so much more powerful than Primal Hamidon? Was it the exposure to the nuclear war? That doesn't seem likely since Praetorian Hamidon appears to be significantly more powerful before being exposed to nuclear weapons. Did it have something to do with the earlier, Korean nuclear war? Or was something else special about Praetoria or Praetorian Hamidon.

6. What was the next cosmic threat planned after the Battalion?

That's really cool. Yes, capes offer interesting challenges. When you try to make solid shapes out of them, they often end up with lots of holes. Also, capes are two capes back to back: inside and outside, which can be confusing at first glace as well.

That looks practically good enough to Figure Print, if they supported this game of course.

Incidentally, Figure Prints is the company that inspired me to look at this in the first place. I saw a video on them once: how they work is you give them your character details, they look it up in the WoW online character database, and use their own tools to basically rip the geometry right off the site with a DX ripper. Then they have special software that recognizes all (or almost all) of the Warcraft primitives, so they can use scripts to autoreplace those with ones they have already made print-ready by hand.

If you think about it, our character bodies are basically all the same except for some scaling, so someone could make three generic models that match the CoH ones and reproduce what their scalers do. Then they could take all the costume parts one by one and export them, touch them up by hand so they are more print-ready, and make a database of them. Then whenever someone asks to print a character, we could take just the costume file and convert that into geometry from the library, and then print that. Posing would require a separate translation library of skeletal positions.

That was my ultimate dream. Someone gives you a costume file, and a program turned that into a model and then printed it. You wouldn't even need to log the character in, all you would need was a costume file or an excerpt from a demorecord.

There would be a lot of front-loaded work, but if Paragon went for it their own 3D modelers could help with generating more print-ready geometry, or alternatively feeding them into special blending scripts that would soften them into more print-ready shapes.

What I mean by "print-ready" is certain things wouldn't print well. Floating geometry, for example, or things that are too thin. Some models would literally fall apart because they aren't actually fully connected. That could be fixed with small alterations that made the model have sufficient structural integrity.

My guess was that if we could get the price point down to around $100 or so depending on size and complexity, they would have sold like hotcakes. Once we had volume, we could think about making smaller and simpler models more affordable.

That would be for something like a fused deposition figurine. If Paragon popped for a couple of Replicators and used extrusion printing, we might have been able to eventually get the price down to about $40-$60. The big problem would be making them fast enough to meet demand at that price.