Samuel_Tow

What's an SDCC?

The thing with grappling is it only works if you have a VERY limited subset of body sizes and body shapes that you can create custom animations around. And even then, things like The Klub 17 mod prove that even if you go out of your way to IK the crap out of your character rigs, all that does is have them do weird things, like bend their hands backwards or fold their waists in half.

Then you have the problem of body shape. You can grapple with humans, but not so much with legless robots, balls of fire, spiders and so forth. Some games like Revenant and Blades of Time get around this by having exactly ONE animation per enemy model and having about five enemy models total.

City of Heroes is far, FAR too variable to coordinate grappling like this. The most you can do is the goofy Champions Online thing where you just heft an enemy over your head and toss it like a long, but that REALLY looks silly with a lot of things you can throw. Especially with people.

Around Issue 20, the development team "fixed" the game's physics to make ragdolls get stuck less, causing them to get stuck considerably more. In the process, they also completely destroyed the physics of particles, causing leaves, shell casings, fireball cinders and such to either hover in the air where they spawned, sink slowly down and through the ground with no interaction, or even float slowly up and into the sky, straight through the ceiling.

It's true that the system used to work, and then the development team broke it. We're probably coming on a year since this happened, and it's still broken. I'm with the Techbot - fix this, please. Physics did more to make the game look pretty than all of Ultra Mode combined.

I think it's high time "suppress player effects" actually started suppressing player effects. You know, as opposed to doing nothing as it is now. Give it a few options:

1. Suppress effects from players not on my team and not affecting me or my team-mates.

2. Suppress effects from players not on my team and not affecting me.

3. Suppress effects from players not on my team.

4. Suppress effects from other players not affecting me.

5. Suppress effects from other players entirely.

Problem solved.

I personally feel that Icon/Facemaker stores need a trying room where you're allowed to see your costume from the game's perspective, and where you can control the lighting colour and direction, as well as use power in practice, even powers you may not yet have access to. Not so much for screenshots, though, as for knowing what you're paying for since the preview in the costume creator interface is not very good.

A shapeshifter, to me, would only work as a whole other AT. I assume it would use the Titan Weapons mechanic of swapping to entirely different versions of its powers based on one of several transformations, each of which would also come with its own stat modifiers.

Say, for instance, that you have a basic druid shapeshifter. You could change into a wolf, gain speed and some regeneration and have all your attacks change into bites. Or you could change into a ram, gain resistances to damage and status effects and have your attacks turn into headbutts. Or you could turn into a bear, gain more health and have your attacks turn into paw swipes and bites.

What I DO NOT WANT to see is the situation Kheldians are in, where they have a zillion powers because each form comes with its own subset that need a million billion slots to kit out. Have one set of powers built for one thing that just change their appearance and stats with the different forms.

You're running into a couple of problems here. One is the interaction between different models. We're not ALL big burly men in this game, so size difference comes into play. A large Tanker might be able to swing a man on his shoulder and trod for the door. A four-foot-tall little girl just can't do that as she doesn't have a shoulder big enough to do this, hence why she'd need a different type of animation. I suppose using the "bride carry" animation might solve some of those problems, but you're still running into serious collision problems.

Secondly, the reason hostages can't see through stealth is an intentional balance mechanic. Non-combat hostages are not targetable by enemy NPCs, so they never aggro on them, meaning an invisible hostage-leader can lead the hostage right past all the enemy soldiers and they won't bat an eye. This is not good, you need to clear a path for the hostage out, not just rely on meta-game quirks, hence why you're forced to fight enemies instead of running past them. It's a disappointing side effect of the system.

Secondly, being able to grab a hostage and super-speed to the door defeats the purpose of having that hostage be escortable to begin with. If you're going to go that route, just axe hostage escorts altogether and go back to the Launch mechanic of having the hostages take off running and escape on their own, with the explanation that if you got to them already, you probably cleared a path for them to leave, or maybe they'll hide until either you do or the police come to mop up.

I actually wasn't at all surprised that the Dagger/Quills of Jocas were brought up. I'd have expected them to be brought up in relation to Rularuu or the Shadow Shard or the Shadow Realm, of course, and this rewriting of them as being some kind of Incarnate mcguffin doesn't sit well with me, but bringing them up is not a surprise. They're talked about as background lore of the Midnight Club, they show up in a mission about Black Swan and the Dream Doctor talks about them in his own personal story mission. For them to NOT come up would have been disappointing.

In a sense, though, ret-conning them into an Incarnate-related artefact, disappointing as it may be, is in-line with the Well of the Furries being cast as the major and almost sole source of above-divine power. This in itself is a problem, and you see the consequences of that problem in instances like this, where previously unrelated artefacts are now all of a sudden tied to the Well. This is the central problem behind giving everything and anything in your fictional universe a singular backstory explanation. You create a plot bottleneck that every story has to squeeze through, thus causing many stories to be twisted together when they would otherwise have had nothing to do with each other.

I'm hoping that the story team's work on phasing in the concept of "ascension" will lighten the load on the Well of the Furies and open up an infinite number of possible paths to ascension and possible sources of power, with the Well serving more as the catalyst than the literal source. Once we start seeing Ascendants drawing power from their own personal being, be it through divine knowledge, absurd technology or powerful magic, we'll start seeing storylines open up quite a bit more, and problems like this - the needless cramming of divergent stories into the same plot point - ought to be less frequent, or at least less grating.

In a sense (and provided anything actually comes of Ascendants), I think our story writers have learned their lesson and listened to popular feedback regarding the Well. A little more like that, and a few more stories like SSA2.1, and I might actually start being optimistic again.

No. Never in a million years. Games are both the best source of inspiration and the best outlet of the stuff my brain requires to function - weird, crazy stories that paint the world in ways I can more easily understand and deal with in a positive manner. Because of games, I've all but eliminated stress from my life, and I couldn't be happier for it.

As a point of fact, a couple of days ago I dealt with probably my lowest of lows in quite a while, when I had literally no desire to do anything - work, play, eat, anything. What solved it? A new character concept, the revitalisation of an old character concept (my 42 Ice/Ice Blaster is finally gone, replaced by a brand new Dark/Dark Stalker) and the opportunity to discuss character concepts, stories and motivations with a few of my friends. Problem solved, and now I can't wait to get back to my pink darkness, which means I can't wait to get my regular job done so I can get to it.

As soon as that woman started listing the things people were most often regretting at their death bed, I could already see where she was going since as far as I'm concerned, games can solve all of those problems.

Giving out your stuff when you leave is generally a mistake, just because I've heard enough tales of people doing this, then kicking themselves when they come back and have to start over to fill a book. I know a person who was so sure he'd never come back he sold his account... Only to come back and have to do it all over again.

As for friends that have left, I lost count. I've been in this game for eight years, and that's a heck of a long time, so that's pretty much inevitable. I've made friends with "groups" of people three or four times over the years now, and the inevitable always happens - they leave one by one and move on to other things. Yeah, when people ask me why I don't go out and find a SG, that's why - because I'll outlive them and the process of going out and finding new friends gets harder and harder with each cycle.

A notable forum personality I used to team with and chat with in-game was ICF_Zombra from, wow... Four years ago or something like that? I forget what he moved on to play, probably Champions Online since he was a big fan of the Champions P&P game.

Well, just so you guys know I'm not just talking of idle musings, I did actually dive into the editor and produce this:



It's not a great costume, but it gets the basic point across, I think. The skin is bio-organic, which I tried to make like a sort of plant texture but it didn't work very well. The rest is a yellow-and-white sort of outfit that I hoped to at least slightly resemble Shao Lin monks. The hair was originally green, but I wanted some more contrast and a friend of mine mentioned using blooming flowers in such a motif, so I decided to go with a flower red sort of hair. And, yeah, I know I picked the most trendy one, but amusingly enough, it's one of the least hair-like hairstyles we have

I decided to ditch the "technological" look entirely and just focus on the "monk" and "scholar" angles a bit more so, plus Staff Fighting lacked a decent technological option, disappointingly enough. I don't think I'm going to do anything to Regeneration... Or possibly I might alter it to be more green and less yellow to match the eye aura. We'll see.

As with everything else, just about anything in this costume is up for debate, since nothing is really final.

First of all, the CoT need to start using their Hordelings hero-side. If Nerva Spectral Demons are showing up in Paragon City, there's no reason why these Bat'Zul lookalikes shouldn't.

I feel Dr. Vahzilok needs to make a return in the 40s with a brand new cadre of fast running zombies and mutant Resident Evil type monsters. Maybe even as Incarnate content, if his new techniques are powerful enough.

I feel a lot of factions can use tanks that only spawn on outdoor maps, myself. Council, Malta, Vanguard, the 5th Column, the PPD and so forth. Helicopters, too, for that matter.

It's 3 AM so that's all I can think of at the moment.

Here are a couple of more points I want to address:

On intelligence: It occurs to me that I'm still not explaining this as well as it sounds in my head, so let me try for an example. When I say this race is "stupid," I don't mean to imply they're somehow mentally impaired or subhuman or anything. I say this since it seems we're all heading there. So let's shoot for an example - the Freakshow. These guys are, for all intents and purposes relevant to their intelligence, completely human. They are still complete idiots above and beyond being insane and hopped up on Excelsior. They're the kind of people who thought it was a good idea to replace their arms with clawed prosthetics so they can't wipe their own *****, which puts them in that butter zone of intelligence where they're still higher-intelligence beings and at the same time complete idiots still.

The dynamic I was looking for with this character was less like Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels (yes, I watched as a kid) and more what you see between the Freakshow students and the Freakshow hardliners that have come to wreck their school. Specifically, what impressed me about that situation where that one student says to a Freakshow "You guys think you're fighting the status quo but you've BECOME the status quo!" to which the Freak spews out some garbage in leet about "smashing nerds" or some such. Granted, the Freakshow are not superstitious, I don't think, but it's that kind of care-about-nothing mentality that looks at intelligence with disdain that I was looking for. And the level and type of intelligence I was looking for is somewhere on the level of the Freakshow student, at the very least - someone who realises he knows nothing and is willing to learn, as opposed to being adamant in his belief he knows everything.

Arcana was actually the closest to the social dynamic I was after for the species of "this character" by describing them as Internet trolls. That's what they are, more or less - a violent, ignorant race more concerned with posturing and infighting than with civil discourse and cooperating towards the greater good. In fact, when they receive this incredible power, "this character" is the only one to not immediately rush off and try to conquer new lands and take slaves or some nonsense like this. The others got this power and they saw strength and conquest. This character, instead, saw enlightenment and a brighter future.

Arcana also brings up a good point with the question of what kind of knowledge. Now, I teach computer science in the university, and I teach it to people who barely know what a computer is and don't own or have access to one. As you can imagine, this is not a positive proposition, and it makes my job quite difficult. I know my students will never remember the exact details of what I'm teaching them, so what I try to have them learn is how to teach themselves. You know, how to approach a computer system, how to go about figuring it out, what to try and what not to try, where to look for certain things. This has given me a rather different view on what "knowledge" constitutes, and I like to call this the knowledge of problem-solving unfamiliar problems.

The reason self-determination features so heavily in so many of my stories is more or less based around this simple truth: Oftentimes, learning how to solve problems is more important than solving a particular current problem. THIS is the sort of knowledge I would want "this character" to want to teach others. No specific field of science or philosophy so much as the habit of approaching the world around them intelligently and openly and thinking for themselves. The great irony here is that a character who went from complete uneducated savage to a well-spoken intellectual would be better qualified to talk about intelligence and how to go about acquiring it than the people who are ostensibly born with it and then proceed to never use it.

Again, maybe that's just me, but my teaching profession puts me in contact with so, SO many otherwise bright, intelligent people who nevertheless completely refuse to use their brains for anything but camping out Facebook. As a computer tech, in addition to this, I've had the misfortune of trying to explain to people from the "previous generation" about how their computers work and be repeatedly told that they can't do this despite them clearly not even wanting to have a look.

To turn this slightly around, THAT is the kind of low intelligence I'm talking about - not people who are physically prevented from being smart, but people who could have been smart, but intentionally chose not to because they didn't feel like bothering to think. These are people who could do better, but instead choose to do worse because it's easier and because... Well, why bother with social structure and science and philosophy when I can bonk my neighbour over the head and take his stuff for my own, right? This character comes from a race of lazy self-entitled ******** whose first instinct upon receiving great power is to go beat other people up with it and take their stuff. And this character simply wants to be better than this, even though no-one will take it seriously.

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Onto more practical concerns - going with Staff Fighting writes a lot of the character for me. Staff Fighting's animations are quite quick and agile, so "big and burly" is more or less out of the question. Not that it can't happen, but I wouldn't want to be the one doing it, and I think I can do better with a nimble character. That really doesn't solve the question of gender, but it does bias the situation towards a female one. As I said, I'll go with cliché conventions on this since I feel I'm defying them in other ways and trying to break all conventions at once is about as bad as trying to break none at all. I could also still go towards a fast agile dude, of course, kind of like Ben 10's Spider Moneky, but this is... Let's just say that one convention I WILL break is remaking the Monkey King, because I got sick of seeing him remade over and over again.

I've actually been looking for an excuse to reuse the Monk lady from Diablo 3, and this seems like a good opportunity. Killing two birds with one stone it is.

This still doesn't settle AT or secondary powerset, but... Well, I kind of want to make a Regeneration Brute. All three ATs I listed make sense, but Brutes are the only one with physical-looking secondaries that I have never used. None, I have no Regen brutes. I do have a few Regen Scrappers and one Stalker, though. Why a Brute if this character will be fast? Eh, nothing says a Brute has to be slow and lumbering, just hard to kill. I said these creatures were survivors, and that could well be because they heal fast. It'd also keep them from ageing, so that's bonus points in tying things together.

I wanted to go with a more tech-looking type of style, but sadly Staph Fighting doesn't offer any decent tech weapons. There's that one Tech Staff, of course, but it looks like it has a blade that it doesn't cut with, which is disappointing. I guess staff choice will inform the rest of the look. If I can go tech, I'll probably shoot for tech gear over a bare skin body, though I'm still not sure what that skin might be. If I have to use a more basic staff, like the pure metal one, I might go for more contemporary street clothes. Like those robots from the Animatrix that dressed up like humans (and the ******* humans proceeded to mock), I imagine this character trying to fit into human society and meeting with only limited success.

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So... Welcome to my head. That's more or less how my brain works. I'm still not ready to go forward with this, but I think I now have something less abstract to work with. Mind you, at this point anything but Staff Fighting and the general concept are up for grabs. I'm making arguments for these, but nothing is set in stone.