Arcanaville

True, although that would take enough work in the general case that those guys could just farm the stuff up on the new server (where do you think all my stuff comes from).

Wait. That's Bob the Biohazard's character description? I can't believe all this time I never looked. Its like City of Heroes turned into Metroid.

Hmm, I wasn't aware there was a map editor in the I8 build. I wonder if I even have an Issue 8 build somewhere.

That's the face-turned-90 bug I mentioned above, but I couldn't find a cap of it. It was really bizarre.

Quite so. So lets say a 747 dropped on your house.

Bah.

Ah, so you're the person she got to do that. She asked me about it once a long time ago, but I didn't have time to look at it then. By the time I did, I think she said someone else had figured out something for her.

Somewhere, and I really don't know where, I have a python script that does something similar: it will generate camera paths for circular, hyperbolic, and bezier curves based on control points. It might be faster to rewrite it than look for it at this point honestly.

The Titan hackers might be able to do one better one day. They know enough, I believe, in theory to be able to adjust the memory that the demorecords are stored in on the fly, and with that be able to alter the camera positions on the fly.

Editing camera positions on the fly for a demorecord that's being played is, in effect, a free form navigation system without the need for a server. That's currently beyond my knowledge base and time availability, but it might be within theirs.

But they are currently quite busy with another more critical project at the moment.

Yes, Aeon got me with the last one also, the shmuck. But still, LUA scripting. The devs wouldn't have been able to keep me out of that if they deployed Hercules Titans at their front doors.

Oh my god they killed the moon base!

You bastards!

The programmers at Titan are smart cookies. If it was me, I would add a hash signature to the end of all exports so it could be verified the export information was not hacked after export. There is no reason to attempt to alter your stats in the export if its only going to be an archive for the character, but if it eventually gets uploaded into a game server one day, the verification hash could be used to ensure that only unaltered exports are put back into the game.

I'm sure they either have something like that in mind, or will steal the idea the first chance they get. But I suspect their first priority is the export code: we should not presume that its a matter of cosmic law that we will in fact have until November 30th. No one has officially made that promise to us. All I've read is the intent is to sunset by the end of November.

The clock is ticking, but none of us can see the hands on the clock.

I'm certain that's the reason: what I haven't investigated is how to put them there correctly.

They killed the Beta server already!?!?!?!?!?




Seriously, WTF NCSoft.

I just assumed when he came in for the job he raised his arms, slammed his fists through the table, and said "Nate smash puny devs!" and you just started handing him some keys and a parking pass.

Although, I found an interview with Nate for a previous game, and I have to say he photographs well:




I've always said that the AE, for all its flaws, was a system with enormous untapped potential. But one bit of potential that wasn't untapped was finding talent, and it was obvious from early beta that you "got" the AE, and you could leverage its strengths and sidestep its weaknesses to make great content. You showed what the potential of the Architect was, and the Architect showed the potential you had. And I believe Paragon Studios gained a great writer when they brought you on board. I have always liked your writing, and I think you brought a unique sensibility to the stories of the game.

From one person that loved the Architect to another, I regret we didn't eventually get to work on something together. I know it would have been great. Thanks, and take care.

[Oh, and my mailbox is open to you as well as all the other Paragon devs. Drop me a line if you feel like chatting.]

It says something interesting about this game that the players thought anyone and everyone could have been part of the dev team. The line between developer and player was blurrier here than anywhere else. Except for the part where Positron and War Witch outvoted all of us all the time and none of us got paid (mostly) and sometimes the devs kinda ignored us and marketing always kept the best information from us, this was very much a community supported game.

Oh, and the ban stick. Except for that.

I finally did.

/em Cartman dance

City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.

Make a demorecord of the models you want to save. That captures the information for all time. If we get there fast enough, even if the servers shut down you'll still be able to use the information to get the models in a form someone else can do something with.

And I'm not one to be paranoid, but I disabled client updates in NCLauncher and backed up my test, beta, and live clients. I'm not pushing anything into the clients until I know what it is first, and with backups of the clients I will always have the ability to run a demorecord. Which means I will always have the ability to make videos of anything in a demorecord. And it means I will be able to print anything captured in a demorecord, if the technology becomes available to do so.

DEMORECORD, DEMORECORD, DEMORECORD. Its one of the best ways we have to retain some memories of the game if and when it ends, and it was always one of our fairly unique features.

Trivia fact: that's what Steel Canyon exploding buildings do: they hit you for 107x your own health in unresistable damage. I believe that this first happened as a bug introduced into the game long ago, possibly back in beta, and a dev liked the behavior so much he did it deliberately for the Steel Canyon buildings. Then it was forgotten until The ToLG bug.

Also: this is a case of tagging damage Cur instead of Abs - multiples of current rather than absolute points. That's the difference between dealing 100 damage and 100xTargetHealth damage. The Indominable Will bug mentioned above was a case of tagging a resistance power Cur instead of Res. Buff Psionic Res and you get psionic resistance. Buff Psionic Cur and you deal Psionic Cur damage. Except that number is positive and not negative, which means in dealing a positive value instead of negative it actually delivers a Psionic typed heal.

*And then* resistance buffs like all buffs normally have a duration. But damage doesn't. And now we know what happens when you give damage a duration, but no activation period. The game tries to apply the heal as fast as possible, constantly during the duration. Which is about eight times per second.

For those who have never seen it before, this video probably shows the delivery of the highest amount of damage the game could deliver reproducibly in a non-bugged situation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTAcSMg6gp0

That's the Protector server, doing what I suggested on the forums would be generating the most damage in a single attack: pulling Kronos onto a Steel Canyon building, and watching the detonation hit for about 24 million points of damage (unfortunately, no floating text).

We are crazy, crazy players.


While I'm posting videos, here's some that fall into a miscellany of "probably not working as intended"

The strangest death animation ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4S_Nhq2E4o

The most determined Tsoo of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr-ClKBPvEM

The silliest thing I did testing the Architect during beta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RT_fnT_qnaI
(And yes, one does eventually kill the other in that video)

My memory of this is extremely solid. Jack never said anything about power customization per se. You did: you never said it was impossible either; what you said was that as the animator for the game it would take a ton of work and you didn't think the engine could support it, so you didn't see it ever happening with this engine.

Other players starting quoting you as saying it was impossible, and *I* said, repeatedly, that a) you did not say it was impossible and b) you were probably wrong about the engine not being able to support it (it would still take a ton of work). And somewhere I have a copy of the post where you said that in fact, as you were not a programmer, your guess as to what the engine could support was just that: a guess.

People invent the narrative they want regardless of the facts. Its a subject I discussed with BaBs during his time here, in fact.


And I cannot stress this enough. Jack had his failings as a game designer, but without his vision, there would be no City of Heroes. Jack's vision is why we have a game at all, and not distant memories of a vaporware superhero game from 2003.

Every design lead and every designer has a vision: an internal compass that tells them that within the parameters they are allowed to work in, this is what they think the game should be. Every developer at Paragon Studios I've talked to from Jack to Positron to Castle to even BaB has shared with me their creative vision. Without that creative vision, you're a monkey with an accordion.

And while we're at it, however angry players are at NCSoft, and there is probably very good reason to be, the other thing that just doesn't fit into easy narratives is that it wasn't the design team turning over that allowed us to get all the things Jack "refused" to give us. It was NCSoft, and more importantly NCSoft's money that did that. NCSoft was willing to invest more in the game than Cryptic could afford to, and that's why there's an explosion of development after the buyout.

The real world does not have many villains that twirl mustaches. Without Jack, there would be no game. But Jack was not the best details guy, and he frankly was less interested in supporting games than launching them. In the short run, CoH needed his vision and focus. In the long run, we needed people like Positron to guide the game over the long haul. Without Cryptic's ability to support the game on a shoestring, the game might have died soon after launch. We needed that Spartan mentality, when only a Spartan mentality would have worked. But the game flourished in terms of development when a company like NCSoft gained the opportunity to take it and run with it, while Cryptic went off and did what it was better suited to do: design, create, and launch smaller MMO titles (I'm the singular originator of the Jack seeing himself as Johnny Appleseed theory as far as I know anywhere in print). Without NCSoft, we would not have much of the game we're now cursing them for destroying. If they had decided to pass on buying us, where do you think we'd be now?

The truth is nothing and no one was perfectly good for the game or perfectly bad for the game. The truth is complicated and messy and full of different people with different agendas and different viewpoints. The truth is hard to determine and appreciate.

Which is no excuse for replacing it with an easy fiction.


Companies are bad at keeping secrets for long. If Perfect World decided to sink City of Heroes, that story would come out. Hell, there would be no reason for NCSoft not to deflect blame from themselves by trumpeting that fact. The fact that they are not doing so strongly suggests to me that theory is a hallucination. In the meantime, there may be good reason to hate NCSoft as a corporate entity, bearing in mind 99.99% of its employees had nothing to do with this decision. But if you have to alter or ignore the facts just to create a comfortable narrative, then you're no longer fighting the good fight. You're just this guy:




I doubt Cryptic wants you saying metric ****-ton on other MMO boards, but then again at this point who gives a ****. I certainly don't give a ****. Last I checked, I was all out of ****. I had to borrow **** just to give the last ****.

Still, that's one reason why I don't have a red name either.

Yeah, but somebody forgot to grab a copy of a stand alone instance for me before they locked the doors. Also, it seems less problematic now that 15% of the playerbase seems to be coming forward to admit having been on the payroll.

You are most welcome.