Samuel_Tow
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:No, someone does care - I care. I have no use for holsters unless they're dynamic. Champions Online let me have a holster that had a permanent gun in it so that when I drew, my character had four guns, and the guns in the holsters didn't even match the ones she pulled out. That character didn't last long, and I have no interest in using those if they're perpetually empty or perpetually full.Originally Posted by Winterminal
-No one cares if sheaths and holsters static.
Quivers I can see, since they're less of a weapon container and more of an ammo container. It makes sense those would never run out since we never run out of ammo. Holsters that hold handguns, however, NEED to be animated.
Hell, I don't even want holsters per se. I'd be perfectly happy to be able to attach my Titan Sword to my back and run around with it. I'd be perfectly happy to attach my dual handguns to my thighs and run around with them. I don't specifically need holsters. I need persistent weapons.
Revamping content is only new content when it doesn't backspace over old content. The new Atlas Park was exactly this, leading to me hating the low levels these days when I used to love them. Dark Astoria is less so, just because it had no content to speak of, only mission redirections. Circle of Thorns is a mixed bag - I enjoy the set for my own, but I like the look of the old CoT far better when they looked like wizards in robes as opposed to coral reefs on legs.Quote:Originally Posted by Winterminal
-Revamping old content IS new content. Plain and simple. You proved this with the Circle of Thorns, Galaxy City, Dark Astoria (and its enemies).
David Nakayama made the right call when he decided against "upgrading" old costume pieces and completely dumping the old ones. I know the Techbot is gung ho about "fix the old stuff" but I seem to recall him being one of the most vocal opponents of more reflective metal pieces to replace the old matte ones. I wouldn't mind seeing up-rezzed versions of old costume pieces, but I WOULD NOT want to, say, lose Tech Wired to something that's called Tech Wired but is shiny and reflective and completely different.
Add, don't replace. We even have a toggle now that hides costume pieces that match a certain criteria. If clutter or ungainliness is a problem, add a toggle to hide "old stuff." However, I will never agree that something I like be taken out of the game because someone else things it makes the game uglier. It's my call. -
Quote:I am, yes. That's why I wouldn't use the system. I like to play in a little bubble of my own dreams and imagination where character power levels, as well as their personalities and dignity, don't always correspond to reality. So long as I'm in control of everything, I can maintain the illusion. As soon as I let these characters loose outside where they'll be measured on an objective scale, though, they simply don't hold up.Originally Posted by Leo_G
You worried I'd do naughty things to your characters? Because you should be
I mean, you know I was trying to make a literal goddess up until recently. You know what I mean
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Animations are not the problem. It's simple enough to just drop the draw animation and move straight onto the attack in terms of visuals. You'd think it'd look odd, but it doesn't. A menagerie of different bugs over the years have shown that it looks pretty good.
The problem is in the animation rigging. Each animation requires its own "activation sequence," which is a term that describes the package of basic run and jump animations. This ensures you actually grip the sword and that the fire around your hands doesn't get left behind (this happens when it turns off). According to BABs, the engine expects "something" to happen when entering a non-standard activation sequence, and that just removing the animation doesn't work.
You can see this problem at work right now if you play Titan Weapons - the "with Momentum" animations are not rigged rigged well with their activation sequences and draw animations. If you have Momentum but don't have your Titan Weapon out and use a power with a Momentum-specific animation, the power's actual effect will be delayed for the duration of the weapon draw. The animation will play, but the effects will show up late. I don't know what causes this, but it demonstrates it's not something that's simple to mess with. You could also see this with the new Stalker Assassin's Strike, where using Assassin's Strike out of combat without your weapon drawn would start the power, but its animation will be overridden by the draw and would neither play nor actually root you. I believe this is because most Assassin's Strikes actual animation time is shorter than the draw, but that's just conjecture.
Basically, it's a question of wrestling with the quirks of the system. Unless you know them - and I'm pretty sure no player really does - suggesting changes just runs into Standard Code Rant. We simply don't know what it takes. BABs started doing some work which would remove redraw in such a way that it only ever plays if you can't actually start the attack you clicked to draw with, but ran into problems with this and Shield Defence, then he left the company and we have no contact with an animator willing to explain these things at this time. -
Quote:It's faster and easier to skip it and street-hunt to level 2 and you can send all ATs to all sides when you skip it. "Speed" is no a benefit of the Galaxy City tutorial, especially if you catch the Giant Shivan off-phase.Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master
I do like the new tutorial in the fact that it is much faster and easy way to get to lvl 2 AND that i can send both hero and villain ATs to redside from the tutorial
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This seems to come up every week recently, and I really don't want to re-write my reply on the subject. Instead, I'd like to direct you to the thread where I talked about weapon redraw and explained why it's not a simple matter of "make it so." It seems simple intuitively, but the City of Heroes animation system is not entirely intuitive.
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While I have no real argument as to why such a system shouldn't be made (it's not a bad idea), this is still something I would never, ever use in a million years. I want to have full control of my characters in everything they do. I wouldn't mind putting them in antagonist positions for a player to fight, provided that player is myself.
Again, I'm not against the idea, I just don't really feel good about sending my character out there to interact with other people when I'm not around. -
Personally, I feel the game needs FEWER congregation spots, not more of them. It's a basic fact of psychology that being forced into the company of others makes some people resent the people they are forced to be with more than if they'd simply run across them. Forcing socialisation is pretty much the fastest way to ruin it for people like me.
Socialisation needs to happen by choice, when I want it, IF I want it. If I want to socialise with perfect strangers, I have a zillion chat channels I can turn to. As there is literally zero reason for me to chat in those channels other than to socialise (I run hardly any forced team content), I go into them with a much more positive attitude knowing that I made the choice to be there.
Wentworth's has always been irritating to me. People bring their loud pets, people put their auras on auto, people surround the vendors so I can't find a free spot, and all of this for the sake of having an animated background I won't look at underneath the menu I went there to use.
If I want to socialise with people, I'll go socialise with people. Tripping over them on my way to the store is just irritating and unproductive. -
This has been rolling around in my head like a ball bearing in an empty salad bowl, so I figure I might as well suggest it. This is an idea for a large man-portable single-shot cannon, very likely as a Blast set. Here's how I foresee it working:
1. Solid Shot: You fire a single solid round out of your cannon. This deforms on contact, delivering most of its energy as blunt force, potentially knocking enemies down.
2. Sabot Shot: You fire a single thin armour-piercing round out of your cannon. This penetrates targets it hits, possibly dealing internal damage, causing enemies to "bleed" and take additional damage over time.
3. Grape Shot: You fire a bundle several large solid ball projectiles out of your cannon. These spread out upon leaving the barrel, pummelling a conical area in front of you and potentially knocking enemies down.
4.a) Double-Charge: You take time to reload you cannon manually, inserting double the standard propellant charge, causing the very next shot to deal considerably more damage. This power is only usable up to 10 seconds after a shot has been fired.
4.b) Double-Charge: You take time to reload you cannon manually, inserting double the standard propellant charge, causing subsequent shots to be slightly more powerful for the next 30 seconds. This power is only usable up to 10 seconds after a shot has been fired and can stack with itself up to five times.
5. Heavy Shot: You fire a kinetic penetrator round made of a special experimental material out of your cannon. This round is hard and heavy enough to penetrate any armour and cause significant damage. The material the round is made of also seems to be unstable, infecting any target hit with debilitating effects.
6. Canister Shot: You fire a canister of small ball bearings out of your cannon. These spread out upon leaving the barrel, peppering enemies in a wide arc in front of you. The pellets cause minor bleeding damage and wound targets, imparting a debilitating debuff.
7. Incendiary Shot: You fire an incendiary bomb out of your cannon. Upon contact, this explodes, coating a single target in thick, sticky fuel, causing significant damage over time. The flames are so intense that anyone standing within the vicinity of the burning target will also take damage unless they move away.
8. Fragmentation Shot: You fire a high-explosive round out of your cannon. This explodes upon impact, dealing damage to the target and showering all targets nearby in deadly shrapnel.
9. Semi-Auto Fire: For a short time, you are able to fire your cannon in rapid succession using basic ammunition, covering a thin, long arc in front of you. This attack continues until your barrel overheats, delivering extreme damage to all targets.
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A few footnotes:
I don't really have any secondary effects planned. Experience has proven I'm terrible at balancing numbers because my judgement is not objective. I just want the powers I've talked about "debilitating effects" to have some kind of debuff, but I can't say what kind and how much.
I also don't have a final idea on what I want to make the "Double-Charge" power. The idea for it is to be a "reload" type power which causes the cannon model to snap open at the breech, eject a shell casing and have the character ram a new generic-looking shell in. I don't want to force this to happen every time lest I slow the set to a crawl, which is why I want to present it as a buff of some sort that people will want to use as often as possible. Ideally, I want to design the set such that people want to reload after every shot, but can skip it if kiting is necessary.
That's all I have for now. -
I have a better solution, really, and it comes in the form of a forum tool.
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Quote:You don't like the style. I get it. I still like Kings Row considerably more than new Atlas. I like the darker feel of it, I like the apartment buildings, I like the old factories and so forth. New Atlas looks like I fell over backwards in Praetoria, and for as high as the graphics settings are in that place, I never enjoyed the aesthetic.Originally Posted by Bright
King's Row, on the other hand? It's the only zone in the game I like LESS than Skyway. Aside from being one of the ugliest zones in the game (Sky and Bricks are also way up there on the "drab attempt at urban blight that really doesn't look much like a real city"-scale, but King's is the worst of the lot to my eye-), it's just BORING. The contacts, the missions, the goons... 'Dull as endless brown blocks and dish-water. Like Skyway, I actively avoid taking characters there if I can.
Except what I ask isn't taking anything away from you. What you suggest IS taking something away from me - pretty much the last city zone in the game that's yet to be ruined by improvement. I DO NOT WANT to see what happened with Atlas Park happen to Kings Row, because right now, Kings Row is my only alternative to Atlas Park. Take that away and I'm simply going to join the people asking for a "skip to 20" button because you're essentially ruining my early game.Quote:Originally Posted by Bright
So, have at it I say. Knock down those boring brick boxes and replace them with something that looks more like a bad neighborhood. Give it new content arcs and updated enemies. Having seen Lambda, I know our location artists can do "run down" in a way that looks right. The place doesn't have to be gentrified to get a make-over.
The zone is fine. Add to it if you must, add new contacts, extend its level range, but please stop taking away. -
Quote:Whether it's good or not is irrelevant. The new Atlas Park is that bad that ANYTHING is better. It has ONE contact chain with a small handful of missions, they're all "fancy" and the zone lags like hell on every machine I have access to aside from my main rig. I'm not that picky about my missions being REMARKABLE in some way. I'm perfectly fine with the rather bland narrative of Kings Row. What bugs me is when missions start trying too hard and failing just as hard at it, and that's Atlas Park in a nutshell, pretty much - mostly outdoor stuff, mostly a theme park ride intended to wow and impress, mostly the kind of stuff I don't care to run more than once.Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Sam, I think you are pretty firmly in a minority that thinks Old Atlas/Kings/Legacy content is actually good, and not a godawfully boring and repetitive mess with all vestige of story buried beneath terribad mechanics, or lack thereof
Besides, I'm sick and tired of content I like being "improved" into oblivion. It's already made my starting experience a lot less compelling. I'd rather it didn't make my 5-10 experience just as bad. -
Just for the record - simply using Print Screen on Windows 7 does not work under normal circumstances. I've not tried this with the "moving windows" workaround, but under normal circumstances, this produces a blank screen. It's why I use FRAPS.
I have a question, though - we had anti-alising active in costume creation for a while. Why is this no longer the case? I mean, I have anti-alising turned on my graphics options, I see it in the game world, but NOT in the costume creator. -
Someone will undoubtedly come by to tell you about a feature Windows seems to have.
Personally, I like to use FRAPS to grab screenshots of things that can't be screenshotted. Generally speaking, FRAPS can be used to display framerate information, capture video and capture screenshots. It has a fully functional free version when it comes to screenshots, and the only limitation you'll face is for capturing videos - you're limited to 30-second clips with a FRAPS watermark on them. -
Quote:I don't want to take away from your point because I do agree with them, but Zombie Masterminds CAN be heroes depending on how you tell their story and how "true blue" you want to make them. You can argue that "heroes don't kill," and I can respect that for your own, but most of mine do, and without too much compunction. I don't try to pretend my swords don't hack off limbs, I don't try to explain how my guns only aim to kill, I don't pretend my super strength can't snap people in half. Those are simply the heroes I prefer to make. I don't try to excuse it, like "oh, he had to shoot that guy in the head because he was in danger." No, not really. I just tell my stories in a less idealistic world where killing others is to be avoided at all costs.Originally Posted by khorak_EU
You're reminding me of the people who argued entirely seriously that heroic Zombies masterminds are totally ok. Not people who figured that the zombie was a construct of pure magic or something, or some sort of summoned ghost or spirit that didn't claim an existing physical body, they thought it was perfectly fine for heroes to be reanimating the bodies of anyone to use as expendable cannon fodder in the name of heroism. The relativism is disturbing, where obviously wretched acts are kinda ok because they're not visceral enough for you to give a damn (like brainwashing), or you just don't care what other people think (like raising them and their friends and their family from the dead as disposable toxin spewing horrors).
When it comes to Zombie Masterminds, it's really a question of presentation. A Necromancer who commits the souls of the dead to eternal slavery is kind of hard to sympathise with, but a sorcerer who simply reanimates the bodies of the dead to move them about like puppets really isn't that bad. They're already dead, what do they care what happens to their bodies? If they had souls, those souls have moved on and they don't need the bodies any more. You can also argue that those aren't the bones of actual dead, but rather demons from the Netherworld, considering how they come to be.
You can argue morality, which is precisely why I'm against painting Longbow as "villains" when there's so much about their morality that can be argued and so much apparent intent in the way their original appearances were written.
5th Column, not Council. The one very positive thing about the switch from Column to Council is that the human Council soldiers became a LOT more diverse than the old Column ones. The Council start armed only with pistols and occasionally SMGs, with only lieutenants getting rifles and shotguns, and they don't really start getting miniguns and flamethrowers until the 20s. Later, they start developing martial arts as they start receiving super soldier serum. The 5th Column soldiers are exactly the same from level 1 to level 5, they just have different models.Quote:Originally Posted by AzureSkyCiel
On the note of the longbow and jurisdictions, those are fair points, and as far as them being a reskin of the council, I do agree and hate that terribly, I would personally LOVE to have chance to remake longbow from the ground up, missions included. -
I'm completely AGAINST touching Kings Row. It's not that zone that's in a pinch, it's Atlas Park. The new Atlas Park is horrendous and a place I run out of as son as I can, so I can run Kings Row as soon as I can. I'll usually street-sweep until level 5 because the LFG queue does not work, and then ship off to KR to run Scanner missions and get a contact that way. Atlas Park is bad enough, I seriously do not want to lose one of my last few viable options.
I firmly believe that the developers need to stop "fixing" zones that are already just fine and they need to stop removing content I like and replacing it with the kind of stuff that pollutes Atlas Park. If they want to revamp zones, let them revamp hazard zones that have no content in them. -
Quote:Isn't that SIX teams?Originally Posted by GadgetDon
Trial for 48 members (four teams).
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Quote:This is something I've wanted for a long time. Pretty much all of our footwear in this game is knee-high boots, with the exception of one or two shoes. The only way to approximate shoes is to use boots under long pants, but that's limited. I'd really like to see a whole collection of "Shoes With Skin" where we have a low shoe, possibly with a low sock, and then a section of the lower leg's skin showing. This could even be a brand new body type so we can pick the skin texture inside the shoe. That way, I can be a rock monster wearing trainers.Originally Posted by Zyphoid
I would like to have some sport shoes where the socks do not go all the way to the knee.
I don't think this would need new technology, just work making new parts. -
Quote:Ah, gotcha! I'm glad you enjoy the feature, thenOriginally Posted by Steele_Magnolia
I find click-to-move very helpful. Sorry, I was expanding from there on my train of thought of just how convenient that and the other ease of movement and targeting features are.
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Quote:Exactly. For years, there were running jokes about how we, as super heroes, seem to have no qualms about throwing incendiary grenades at people whose worst apparent crime is loitering, how we "arrest" people by spearing them through the chests with oversized spines or shooting them full of lead and so on... And we're chastising Longbow for doing it?Originally Posted by khorak_EU
The 'Longbow use flamethrowers' argument is even more stupid than the idea that the sovereignty of the Rogue Isles should be sacrosanct. The things we do to villains go so far beyond what Longbow does by utilising 'a flamethrower' it isn't even funny.
Yeah, you know how Aaron Thiery chastises player heroes for ignoring civilians in danger when the enemies in a zone turn grey and offer no reward, even though that's how the system is designed? Yeah, same thing here. People using grenades and flamethrowers and mindwiping each other is commonplace in our combat system. Everybody's doing it. The PPD have acid mortars and psychics and the game's apparently newest greatest premier hero's entire repertoire consists entirely of infecting people with nuclear radiation. Thing being set on fire is a nasty death? Yeah, it is, but at least it's quick. Getting blasted with high radiation causes the soft tissues of your intestines to break down and leads to a very nasty, protracted death. And he's the hero!
Besides, please look past that jaded preconception and you'll quickly realise that Longbow are not much more than a reskin of the 5th Column. They have riflemen with the same rifles, miningun soldiers with the same miniguns and flamethrower soldiers with the same flamethrowers. Sure, they have a few more units than that, but it's clear the 5th Column was used as the base for the faction.
Like that, yeah. TVtropes calls it Flanderization, which is little more than taking one or a handful of minor aspects of a character, then twisting the character to be ABOUT those characteristics as though he has no others. The Freakshow were always somewhat goofy, though in a sinister way, for example. It's in their name - they're the "Freakshow" because they're a bunch of freaks. They're the Raiders in Fallout and any other post-apocalyptic setting, they're the people with the bad clothes and bad hair and bad breath that you DO NOT want to be captured by. They're "goofy" in the sense that they enjoy doing horrible things because they're twisted, demented and evil. They're the punks who surround you in a dark alley and start shouting obscenities at you and cackling like maniacs. They're the bad guys from every cyberpunk anime ever. But they are not funny. At least, they shouldn't have been, because seeing them as cute and adorable takes away from their menace.Quote:Originally Posted by AzureSkyCiel
Like Nemesis Plots for everything, Statesman is a jerk (and should die), Freakshow are silly, overall harmless, and speak only in l33t, Azuria's tendency to lose things (which, admittedly, only got it's last nod about issue 10), Fusionette as a brainless idiot who gets captured even into her later levels (admittedly, its the only way they could have her join the player since the devs could not grasp "no mob" option around allied PCs at the time), stuff like that.
And that's exactly what I don't want to see happen to City of Heroes. That kind of "funny" Flanderization just makes impossible to take any of the factions in question seriously, either because they're presented as comically inept buffoons or because they're presented like comic relief. -
Yeah, it's essentially the very worst parts of the old Rikti invasions combined with easily the worst parts of fighting the Nemesis army AND by far the worst part of sidekicking too high up for lowbie characters.
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I genuinely appreciate the sentiment, but I can't really see how it relates to my post that you quoted, which mostly just discusses when click to move was introduced and whether it was at the same time as free camera movement.
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Quote:Well, yeah, at least our enemies eventually wander back to their spawn points so they CAN be killed. And at least when our enemies run away, they aren't constantly chasing me and lobbing Blood Bolts into my back. It's irritating on kill-all missions, but aside from those, you can just let a running enemy run and move on with your life. It's irritating, but it doesn't get me killed.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Right now the dumb AI causes the critter to run, and run, and run, and run, and run, and run. And when you chase them, they don't turn, fire, and then run. They run some more.
Are you saying you prefer that?
My solution, of course, is to simply remove the enemy AI's ability to run away without being afflicted with an Afraid or Avoid effect. Under my rule, EVERY enemy would fight to the death to save me a trip. -
Quote:Personally, I don't mind ret-cons, myself. Not the concept of them, anyway. However, that's only under two conditions: They make for a better story, and they are comprehensive. If you want to ret-con that we've always been at war with Eastasia, then that's fine. But do a thorough job and don't leave Angus McQueen behind still giving me an arc about stopping a potential war with Eastasia from happening.Originally Posted by BrandX
You bring upa good point, Sam. If the devs have changed how they view the isles, they need to let the players know.
I really don't mind a few retcons in the story to fix/clear up the story.
And don't try to re-write history when you can make the changes you need through current events. For instance, the Council took out the 5th Column and absorbed all their personnel. OK, fine, we can't have more 5th Column missions because the Column no longer exist. But don't remove their NAME from everywhere so contacts have to awkwardly talk about "the group that was superseded by the Council" like it doesn't have a name. And DEFINITELY don't try to tell me Atlas died beating back an alien armada when he could still have died fighting a 5th Column invasion like he always did and not alter the present or the future.
Ret-cons are not evil. Ret-cons are a power tool. They're great for finishing a very hard job in a very easy way, but they're also great for slicing off your fingers if you grab them by the wrong end.
This is another big potential pitfall. I get that players want to feel superior to their enemies. I want it more than most. But at the same time, those enemies have to feel like legitimate threats for this superiority to have a meaning. "That's not saying much" is a phrase that should never be uttered in relation to defeating an enemy's plot. I should never end a mission and feel that "Yeah, I thwarted a Freakshow plot, but that's not saying much since these guys are idiots." or "Yeah, I'm a bigger hero than Doc Quantum but that's not saying much since he's a villain now."Quote:Originally Posted by BrandX
Now, admittedly, I do that with some of the lower level enemies, that I see more as street gangs (Hellions/Skulls/Outcasts/Trolls) the type which Spidey swings in, stops and is quickly gone, but the enemies seen in the 40+ range, even if simple are suppossed to be real threats, even if the characters sweep right through them.
This goes double for iconic heroes, as well. We need those popular, powerful icons to serve as benchmarks for our own greatness. Being greater than Fusionette? That's not saying much, since she sucks. Being greater than the Statesman, though? That actually IS saying much since the man is so powerful, famous and praised that being greater than him must mean a lot! As such, diminishing the signature heroes does not make our achievements greater by comparison. Our achievements are still the same. It just makes the comparison less useful and thus we have less reason to claim our achievements are great. I don't want to be the one-eyed king in the kingdom of the blind.
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Giving writers free reign to ignore canon and defile established characters is the WORST thing an editor can do, because it's becoming increasingly clear that writers cannot be trusted to not abuse this free reign irresponsibly. There's a reason that I tend to refuse to write for other people's characters when the opportunity is presented to me, because I'm not confident I can get them right. My desire to "reimagine" is too great. That's why the studio NEEDS an editor - to ensure that the stories that get proposed make sense in the broader universe of the game. Well, and to make sure someone proofreads this stuff before it's published... -
Quote:Counter-intuitively, that's how Hotmail handles its reply stacking. Each new e-mail is typed up at the top of the stack, with all of the rest of the conversation being below so you have to start reading from the bottom if you want to get the full continuity. Well, you have to start reading from the bottom of the stack of messages, but you still have to keep going to the top of the actual message since English texts write top-down.Originally Posted by Tenzhi
Okay, I gotta ask: in what kind of bizarro world does it make sense to put the reply in front of the quote it's replying to? It creates a moment of "What the heck are you talking about... OH! I see. It would've made more sense had I saw that first."
That said, I don't disagree with you, just because that's how these forums are structured, and that's what the system suggests by default. It's what we're used to seeing.
And that's my esoteric comment for the thread. -
Quote:This is what Diablo did, and it's also why I NEVER EVER EVER want to see smart AI ever again. Diablo had an enemy called a Succubus. All these winged women had was one blast - Blood Bolt, I think - that they spammed over and over again. If you tried to approach them, they would run in the opposite direction, and they ran exactly as fast as the player does, meaning they could keep a constant distance between you. As soon as you stopped chasing them, they'd stop running and shoot you. As soon as you tried to move away, they'd chase you and keep shooting as soon as you stopped. The ONLY way I found to kill them was to exploit their AI which only ever ran diametrically away from me, by forcing them to run into a corner where they couldn't back away. That, or take Fireball and sink a crapton of points into Magic.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
It makes more sense to run thirty feet and then turn and start shooting again.
I know we're not supposed to come down on other people's ideas - offering these is the point of the thread - but I just had to say something about this. One of the primary reasons I enjoy City of Heroes combat as much as I do is exactly because the enemies are stupid. I don't enjoy PvP because people aren't stupid and they won't stand in my damage aura patches and they won't clump together and they won't keep at a slugging match they obviously can't win. But the thing is that the smarter an enemy is, the less fun I have fighting that enemy because many of my tools simply don't work.