Arcanaville

It was a non-credible theory from the moment it was posted.

1. That's not how licensing agreements normally work in these situations. It would be the incredibly stupid exception to a very boringly universal rule.

2. It would be a publicity nightmare for Perfect World, and these things cannot remain a secret forever.

3. You'd have to count on NCSoft not explicitly stating this as the excuse to shut down CoH, which they have every reason to do to make themselves look better.

4. They would have known this was coming because nobody renegotiates licenses a couple weeks before expiration.

5. Perfect World has no motive: the competition between CO and CoH was not fierce, and explicitly not critical to PW.

Means, motive, and opportunity all looked extremely shaky with this theory from day one. The only shred of "evidence" for this theory appears to be "I hate Jack, so its probably true." Which links Jack to the Kennedy assassination and Hurricane Andrew just as well.

Its strange this would be unfamiliar to you if you deal with IP.

A perpetual license to use is not the same thing as ownership. If Cryptic had sold the rights to the engine, Cryptic itself would no longer have the rights to it. NCSoft could have sold it to someone else. That is what owners are allowed to do. Perpetual right to use is actually the right we as authors grant to NCSoft when we make characters: US copyright law forbids transfer of ownership through blanket agreements like an EULA except in the case of work for hire. NCSoft cannot assert ownership of our characters in that way because at least in the US that is illegal. They *can* demand we grant to them a perpetual right to use the content, which means we can never sue them for using it in any context they wish. But we still own our creations. We don't own the game textures, the powers, the 3D models, and other aspects of our characters, so "using" them without those rights is more theoretical than anything else. But I could sell a book about the adventures of Lady Arcana, energy blaster and NCSoft could not touch me. Unless I mention the Crey, or the Freakshow, or use a screencap on the cover...

Digression. Why didn't Cryptic just sell the engine outright, particularly because they had every intention of writing a new one anyway? Because had they sold, and thus lost the rights to the old engine, NCSoft could theoretically sue them if Cryptic's own programmers accidentally reused code from the old engine. They don't own that anymore. But how do you ensure none of your programmers ever reproduces something they might have written five years ago and just forgot? Had Cryptic sold the engine and all its rights to NCSoft, they would have had to create their next engine under clean-room conditions: using outside programmers who had no prior knowledge of the previous engine. Otherwise, they would be exposing themselves to huge risk of IP violation.

Retaining authorship rights but extending a perpetual right to use the engine to NCSoft allows Cryptic to retain the right to the engine and all its copyrightable IP, which means its entirely harmless if one of their programmers reuses an algorithm or a subroutine. It means they don't have to worry about violating anyone's rights, because they still own everything (in the code). Meanwhile, NCSoft is safe because they can add their own stuff to the code which they will own, and they have the right to use what was left behind in the first place forever, so City of Heroes is safe from IP issues forever as well.

These kind of perpetual use licenses are actually very common in intellectual property circles. They allow one party to gain a guarantee they can use something forever, while guaranteeing another party they can continue to reuse the IP forever without worry of IP entanglement. Its what I always assumed NCSoft was granted, because that's the only thing that makes sense in this situation (that, or a perpetual right to license forever at pre-agreed terms). And that's why I thought the whole theory of license renegotiation was completely bonkers.

It was suggested to me that it was far enough along that had we made it into 2013, there's a pretty good chance we might have started getting teasers about it. That could still be years away from full launch though.

As far as I'm aware, CO is essentially an entire new engine, and STO runs on it. As far as I'm aware, its design aesthetic has more in common with the aborted MUO engine than the CoH engine, although I don't know if they were allowed to simply reuse the code from that project either (they couldn't really reuse art assets).

How is that even remotely relevant to what I said?

Yeah, Energize was the bomb on test. Although I still think I could min/max Frigid Protection into a monster.

/Energy was awesome as a blapper until Castle nerfed the mez on Total Focus. I accepted that decision, but I didn't really agree with it. In the Synapse-Hawkward era, I think I could have gotten that decision eventually reversed.

We would have gotten around to fixing your Energy/Elec. Eventually.


Edit: FPARN!

Those games are all supported by different people. They're *all* evil?

Remember when the ban script happened here for the AE stuff, and everyone blamed Positron because it was so obvious Positron was all upset and decided to take it out on the players? Yeah: I actually know the backstory on that one, but I couldn't say it. I still shouldn't, but: Positron had nothing to do with the details of which characters got hit. Castle wrote the script that did that. And it wasn't Castle's fault either, because the developers can't directly touch the servers like that. An operations person had to execute Castle's script. Castle was worried the script might be too aggressive, so he added safeguard caveats, such as for level-pacted characters. But that got lost in translation, and someone pushed the big red button without double checking what was supposed to be double checked.

In other words, it wasn't malfeasance, it was an error. A really, really, bad error that is not supposed to happen, but error nonetheless. Both Positron and Castle could have said that, but that would mean throwing some poor admin guy under the bus, and neither of them wanted to do that. As the design lead, Positron took the full blame for that one without saying a word.

They probably still don't want me saying this because that's just not who they are, but its water over the bridge now and at this point there's no one that can get hurt over it anymore. And while I'm not going to spill all of their secrets, I think this one is worth it, because I know that so much of what happens, happens for complex reasons and not the simple narratives players like to create. And sometimes, things happen because the developers are human, and they make mistakes. And sometimes everyone isn't privy to everything that happens, nor will they ever be.

Everyone was so certain about what happened there. And so wrong.


And I do play other NCSoft games actually, so just because its obvious, doesn't mean its true.

Aha! You're saying the subsurface subdivision filter that increases tessellation has problems because the models are composed of triangles and not general surfaces, so you need to take the triangles and properly assign edges to appropriate polygons so that subsurface can then extrapolate surfaces and then retessellate them.

And I didn't even need wikipedia either. Still, that took an hour longer than it should have; I only figured it out in the drive to work.

I understand #2 (I figured that one out when I did the prints in the OP), #1 sounds like I need to reverse the polarity on the warp drive. I'm not fishing for an explanation: I can look it up. I'm more pointing out why this thread needs more people like you guys that have a clue what they are doing. My expertise ends with figuring out how to yank the models, and to an extent how to get an extrusion printer to deal with them. In between, I'm going to need help.

Demorecord creates a text file that captures most of the information necessary for the client to reproduce what's happening on the screen. It does not include information about the user interface for the most part, but using the right command line switches you can take a demorecord file and feed it back to the client, and the client will basically play back what you saw while you were recording it. On its own, its just a bunch of ascii text, and players have figured out how to edit that text to alter the playback and create new scenes with it.

This information is NOT, I repeat NOT what the Titan team is trying to extract. This only captures the visuals of a window of time. It does not capture your character bio, your build, your badges, you stats. It only captures what you look like, what the scenery looks like, what the other NPCs look like, what other players you come across look like, and what the various powers that are activated that you can see look like. It is a purely visual only tool, for the most part.

To use it, you just type /demorecord filename and to stop recording just type /demostop. Warning: zoning automatically terminates demorecords. If you zone, you have to start a new one. Warning 2: the game does not warn you if you type the same filename twice: it just quietly overwrites old files.

Once I found myself under the world in Talos, and for several hours I freaked out players by waiting for them to start engaging a spawn and then shot their spawn from below with explosive blast as they attacked. I could see them but they could not see me: the wonders of one-way textures.

Either Black Pebble meant Electricity Manipulation, or Positron really liked to screw with Black Pebble.

OGLE? It can do multiple frames but I never really experimented with that much because it takes so long to do a frame that I was worried the client would time out and die.

But it occurs to me that problem wouldn't exist for demorecords, I would think.

If someone is attempting to import the models into another 3D program for the purposes of rendering, and particularly animation, that might be the best way to do it. You'd have a neutral pose to start with, and obviously, that's basically what the devs were doing if those are the model object subgroups that actually exist for the characters.

THERE ARE ALSO WAYS TO CHEAT AT TIMES

Sometimes after a hard day of superheroing, you just gotta go home, lie back, and soak, uh, your feet, and, uh, 80% of your butt, while wearing pasties made out of suds.

I think you have to special order it from IKEA.

I can't help with how to make their tool work without being able to log in, but the best I can do on the posterity front is suggest two things:

1. From within the game client, FRAPS video record your character in the character selection window, and spin the character around so you can see it from all angles.

2. Consider a 3D capture of the character using the information we're assembling here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=296033

Its still in the rough stages, but we can export 3D models from the game, even from the character select screen. We don't have the full details of how to take the capture and reconstruct exactly what the character looks like, but its the only thing I can currently think of for capturing the appearance of a character that cannot be logged in.

3. If you have demorecords that include those characters, demorecords will still be playable when the server goes down.

Hey Snipe. If you just want the text, the quickest way to do that would be to use the Thread Tools menu and select Show Printable Version. Then when that comes up select the "Show 500" link on the right side. The entire thread is less than 500 posts so it will all show up on one long page. Then you can just save it with your browser. No pictures though.

For threads with pictures, short of saving each page with your browser the only other way I know of to do that is to use some sort of web site sucker.

If you are going to save short threads with pictures by just saving each page one at a time I would recommend, if you have not done it yet, to go into your USER CP for the forums, select Edit Options, scroll all the way to the bottom and select at least Show 100 posts per page. It would be unnecessarily tedious to attempt to save longer threads with a lower setting than that.

While I'm at it, thanks for all you did for blaster morale in the past. You should know that I had you partially in mind when I aggressively pushed for Blaster improvements to be made to the archetype in I24.

Yeah, no hard feelings. By the way, planning any trips to Hawaii soon?


More like permanently unrooting myself and having some powers have no cast time.

My version:

When the game was new and shiny, and we players ignorant and retarded, a lot of players would ask silly questions like "why can't they subclass Absorb Pain and add a new feature to it that is different for Defenders than Controllers?" And we'd have to take these people aside and say that first, we were not doing their college homework for them, and second the game is not constructed out of C++ classes. It was surprising how many people just couldn't, or wouldn't accept that. Games don't work that way: games have engines written in code, and data written in whatever - Excel in this case for the most part. Most of the devs, including the powers people, the mission designers, the map designers, even the animators, created data that was fed into the engine. They did not write code.

The game engine originally supported surprisingly little procedural capability in all areas. You couldn't tell the game "if this then do that." Even in the powers engine that was and is very clumsy in many respects. Until recently we could design an effect of a power to do X if the target was Y, else do nothing. In that way we could have powers do different things to different kinds of targets - Scrapper criticals work that way. But we couldn't say "burn less endurance if the target is a boss." We couldn't change the attributes of the power itself, only its effects. Only recently the code became available to do that, and its still kind of ugly. The Insta-Snipe that was being developed for I24 uses the same code that Titan Weapons uses. Based on a mode flag, a power would actually be an indirect pointer to two different powers, each with its own totally independent definition. In that way, we could change things like cast time. But not by saying "if this then cast time equals that." Rather, we had to build two totally different fully complete powers and jump between them.

In the game at large, the same thing was true. In theory the programmers could hard code the engine to do anything. But what was exposed to the mission designers was far less powerful. It was basically, in many respects, only a slightly more sophisticated Mad-Libs version of the AE: fill in the blank design. It was more complex than that because they could feed the system certain kinds of scripts, but they were clumsy to use.

The implication here is that LUA was integrated widely throughout the game engine sometime back in I23ish. LUA is a non-proprietary scripting language optimized for embedded applications. Its actually the language Angry Birds is coded in (and fascinating to me professionally, its embedded in the "Flame" malware toolkit). And it has a reputation for being very fast.

Our game engine might be limited, but there's an enormous amount of things it could do, but it doesn't for the simple reason the devs have no way to tell it to do that. If the player has this badge and kills that target, award this reward. Really easy to say. Really hard for the game to do, because the code doesn't offer that as a direct option. But with an integrated embedded scripting language, almost any behavior you can describe you can get the game engine to do, provided the LUA scripts didn't take up too much computational time.

LUA would have made this a whole different game. It would have been a larger leap in functionality than Ultra Mode was in graphical fidelity, than Power Customization was to the character creator, than the invention system was to build meta-gaming. The difference between the I24 engine with LUA and the I22 engine without LUA is like the difference between a giant crate of LEGOs and a giant castle made out of LEGOs that is glued together.

1. EM for Blasters is Energy Manipulation. Electricity Manipulation is /Elec.

2. By Issue 2, the consensus was that /Electric was a better Blapper set than /EM. I was one of the early hold-outs, being an /Energy blapper for a while by then, but after some discussion and testing over time, I converted to that opinion as well. /Elec was great for blapping.


You ... you did know how to blap, right? The Imps didn't make you soft, did they?

I'm kicking Tim's *** the next time I see him for keeping that one to himself.

Edit: wait, Tim's a designer. Wouldn't Matt have been the one to add that to the engine? I need to make sure I kill the right guy.