Arcanaville

NCSoft store can't tell you everything you already bought so they moved to the Paragon Store that can't tell you what you already bought but added the new feature that it can't always tell you what you can't buy either.

It seems one area Paragon Studios had issues with was contract programming. Since apparently one of the type-R programmers they contracted to update the physics engine had a questionable understanding of gravity. My guess is that Paragon couldn't ask him to fix it because he tried to fly off his roof one day.

The irony is that if Paragon Studios contracted someone to write their accounting software, the game would probably still be live. Because I don't think NCSoft would terminate a title that was earning them sixty-eight trillion dollars a month.

I didn't say it would be unobvious. I only said it would be the truth.

Not immediately because the base system was written in COBOL by two chimpanzees and an IT grad student, but eventually if the resources became available to redo the base system from scratch, it could have made incredibly interesting base functionality.

The notion that they could have one day opened a limited subset of the scripting to us for the AE - and possibly bases one day - is another one of those what-if things that will haunt me.

How weird is it that the devs created a critter group that predicted I'd be pissed right now: the Animus Arcana.

Ask him about it while passing him in the hallway, just for old time's sake. Then say I said to do it.

Hell, he's not going to remember that, but I'm going to be giggling my *** off anyway.

Second Measure once told directly and under confidence that it was ...













... extremely fun to work on. Seriously he seemed to be smiling through the email so much Golden Girl would have blushed.

Well, he still works at Cryptic, so I'm going to guess they ripped out the internet from his house and only let him browse the internal Perfect World wiki.

Well, in that case, damn skippy I'm going to at least pretend to have enjoyed it.

BECAUSE THEN WE WOULD ALL BE ABLE TO SPEAK LIKE WE WERE A DISCWORLD DEATH.

Given that City of Heroes is the home of the decimal point error, I have to conclude you're 11% behind Swellguy.

Actually, I can't think of anything that specifically points to the two engines sharing a lot of direct code. You hire the same programmer to do the same thing twice, without restrictions, and a lot of the algorithms and code practices will be similar both times, but I believe every line of code in the CO engine was written for it, and not copied from the CoH engine.

Calling it the Cryptic Engine 2.0 doesn't suggest anything about whether the code was significantly reused. But based on information regarding CE2 that I remember reading, CE2 uses a different runtime database system and different zone and instance code at least. Its power mechanics are completely different. The animation and sequencing system is completely different. So I'm not sure what is even left to be the same.

These aren't superficial differences by the way. Many of the power mechanics in CO involve effects that simply don't exist within the tech of the current engine (for example, non-proportional damage resistance), and curiously there are some things here that don't exist there in the same form (like defense and the CoH tohit algorithm, for example).

The pigg thing is not really a thing. The pigg/hogg format is more of an unformat. Its really just a serial dump of binary data. That style of virtual drive data format actually predates City of Heroes.

One day, I'm going to test inner loop combat processing on CO. In other words, I'm going to test for the presence of Arcanatime. If it doesn't exist, that would put a final nail in the coffin of the theory the two engines share a common design or codebase. Arcanatime is fundamental to how the servers process events, and it cannot be trivially obscured. No game that uses the Cryptic CoH engine is likely to be able to hide arcanatime lag from the players, not to mention why would anyone spend time trying?

I might have stumbled into doing something like that, without the whole "understanding what I'm doing" part, because back in 2010 I posted this image as a work in progress regarding my experiments in this area, where I attempted to take a model and generate a smoother version:



Man those spatula hands are something. I believe she's praying to the 3D gods to give me eight years of 3D modeling experience overnight.

By the way, smoother models would be useful for certain 3D printers like fused deposition technology based printers. But extrusion printers are in effect auto-smoothing given the way the technology works, and such steps are less important for that technology.

It would also, of course, be more interesting for creating stand alone renders of the models in different software.

I can't, I had to fudge slightly to fit in the avatar size limit. If you give the forums a bigger avatar than 100x100, it scales it to fit and that made it look funny.

Gee, EK's avatar seems pretty straight forward.


You're welcome.

I prefer free range cows I can see live stress free peaceful lives, so I can walk up to them and pet them and say "he's cute, lets eat him."

Oh hush, person who can't play the best blapper set without making the hospital their own personal base. My first fire controller didn't get past 32 until Issue seven.

True story: when I first saw this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtyDC_F1tVo (incidentally, still my favorite CoH video) when it was first released sometime maybe in July 2004, I thought the Imps that showed up at 1:52 were actually a weird critter ambush chasing someone.

Yes, in July of 2004 Arcanaville was completely retarded.

Why is it when you do it looking for a job its called persistence, and when I do it looking for a buff to Super Reflexes its called "criminal harassment in the second degree?" That seems like a double standard to me.



Happy Anniversary Zwill.

I was thinking of making an avatar for a while, and wondering what unique thing about me the avatar should represent. And then Zwillinger put that into focus quite well: I'm a unique class of poster.

Note: I didn't say I was a better class of poster. Just in a unique class.

Since they were terminated immediately, I assume they received, or will receive, severances. And the difference between laid off and terminated for cause is that the latter cannot file for unemployment benefits. Whether that distinction can be made retroactively in the event of a violation of a work contract is a murky part of the law to me, and one I personally would not chance. I don't expect the devs to do so just for fun.

I'm not explicitly talking about any one player here, but the truth is I hated players pretending to be insiders. But I rarely could out them without sounding like a coy-insider myself. Except when its obviously for humorous purposes, claiming insider knowledge and just making things up seems so counter-productive, because it simultaneously seems to make an enemy of players and developers alike.

For the record, I have never manufactured or exaggerated the level of knowledge and communication I had with the devs. If anything I downplayed it significantly. In fact, somewhat humorously I've dropped so many hints on the forums that the devs sometimes literally groaned out loud. The only reason I wasn't perma-banned for it is that for some weird reason no one ever seemed to take me seriously when I did, which sometimes completely bewildered some devs.

No one ever stopped to ask me why I suddenly shifted from talking about the dearth of in-game documentation to asking hypothetical questions about what sorts of power data players would be interested in seeing (because Real Numbers would be announced two months later). No one ever asked why I started making jokes about when players would ever need to know how long it took an NPC to eat a doughnut (because the devs were working on this secret project to allow players to create their own missions). No one asked me why I started talking out of the blue about weapon redraw, and the specific impact it had on weapon sets (because BaB was about to eliminate weapon redraw buffering).

I *tried* to simultaneously keep my promise not to release information before the devs were ready, and steer player conversations in the right direction so that when that information was released players had already been thinking about it without even knowing it. That I succeeded so often is actually a bit of a mystery, considering how paranoid the playerbase is when it comes to that sort of thing.


Oh yeah, and to come clean: when I said I was guessing, I was guessing. Whenever I said I was "guessing" that meant I knew something about it first hand. Whenever I said I was guessing that meant a dev told me point blank. It was a surprisingly effective code.

Not if they don't want to convert their layoff into a termination for cause.

I on the other hand cannot be terminated for cause by NCSoft, so if a little birdy wants me to tell everyone what it was, they can slip a note under my door.

Don't worry, NC Legal can't make me talk. Actually, they can make me talk, but they will quickly regret asking me to talk. I can do that continuously for months without running out of topics.

I thought the Imps always spawned in threes.

The PA spawned probabilistically. Between two and four, before pets were adjusted. Pre_I5 Illusion was the king of pets: you could theoretically have eight PA, three Spookies, three Phantasms, and three Phantasm decoys out simultaneously. That's impressive even compared to Thugs with Gang War out.

But it just wouldn't have been right if it wasn't you.

City of Heroes players: crazy until the end. When the beta server comes back up, I'm going to submit bug reports on Bio Armor now.