Zloth

[ QUOTE ]
If anyone has ever played Star Wars Galaxies, they know how really great this game is. The devs here are amazing.

[/ QUOTE ]
The devs there were great, too. Until the dark times. Until the bean counters. But that was a long time ago, in a company far, far away.

Back to normal boss difficulty..... OK, if you want. I'll just ratchet up the difficulty a little more.

Up teaming bonus.... errrr? Why? To encourage us to team up? <shrug> Well, if ya want.

[ QUOTE ]
Players normally receive story arcs only after they’ve leveled their Contact up to the highest level.

[/ QUOTE ]
Where did THAT come from!? Right now we can get an arc any time. Having to max out a contact to get an arc means a lot of missions. With high difficulty and the bigger team bonus, it's going to be very difficult to max out contacts and get an arc before we out-level it.

Please tell me this is just a mistake. I know we aren't meant to see every arc with our first character but I think two characters should be able to cover it. I'm afraid that, with this requirement plus all the xp rolling in, I'll have to keep my characters in constant debt or running solo a ton to get the needed missions for the stories.

I'm forced to group, too, but only because this game (just like every other MMO game) gets rather dull solo.

Honestly, if I hadn't read on the boards about the bosses being stronger, I wouldn't have known it. Our super-group is still munching through the missions just fine, for the most part. We did have an awful time with a team of just four blasters but I think an unbalanced team like that deserves the debt.

Solo, my 42nd level grav/storm is still having no problems. My other characters haven't solo'd in awhile or are sub-25.

I haven't had problems with the round-a-corner-and-BOOM in a long time. But then, there isn't a hall or room in any mission where I haven't died dozens of times. I don't round corners - I sidestep with my back to the farthest wall. Preferably with stealth on and even more preferably after a melee has gone first. Even then I still get surprised, but getting one-shot'ed by a boss right at the start of a battle is very rare for me.

[ QUOTE ]
There's devs playing RIGHT NOW, in fact...

[/ QUOTE ]

Please, it isn't like you guys are hard to single out. Just ask a player to go attack a boss solo while you take out the minions/lts. Anyone who is afraid of that or suddenly chokes down every inspire in the tray is a Dev. <G R I N>

Issue 3 is not saving characters correctly in demo files. Instead of having a costume line like:

0 3124 COSTUME 4 ffffff 23.945047 0.863297

You get several lines like:

0 3124 COSTUME 4 ffffff
0 3124 23.945047
0 3124 0.742435
0 3124 0.000000
0 3124 0.000000
0 3124 0.448914
0 3124 0.319420
0 3124 0.000000
0 3124 0.000000

When read back, the extra lines are ignored so you can still see all the action and your character will mostly look right, but they won't be the right height or weight.

My demo edit program will have no clue what to do with all this. I wouldn't use it on these sorts of demos until I get a fix in.

Demos are not recording quite right currently. They play back fine but your character doesn't look quite right. (Your height and width aren't being recorded correctly.)

Nope, I don't think that will work. This is team teleport, not fold space. The Sings have to be close to get teleported with you. I would expect it to apply to all pets that can be targetted.

You can actually do recall friend to get your pets to follow you up elevators right now. Click on the elevator door then click on your pet as you move through. Then do the recall. Repeat as needed. (Naturally, the first pet you recall will happen to be the oldest one and it will disentigrate 3 seconds after you bring it up. A pity we can't summon those things with different colors or little numbers on them.)

Well, I don't see ANY guides to the Shadow Shard at all. I've been having a ball in this place for the past few days so I might as well share what I've learned.....

1. Open up some hard drive space because you are going to be taking a LOT of screenshots.

2. To get to the Shadow Shard you have to be level 40. Go into the center Portal building in Per Island and take a right when you exit the elevators. (This is past some sandbags, but those sandbangs seem to be gone on the test server right now.) You don't need a mission there to enter this portal.

3. As soon as you walk into the Shard, you'll see a military general. Talk to him. Do his nice little mission and practice on that gravity geyser. Once you earn his trust (which comes pretty fast), General Hammond will also let you buy and sell high level enhancements.

4. Deaths in the Shadow Shard drop you into Firebase Zulu's medical station. You won't be sent clear back to PI.

5. If you fall off an island in a zone, you will be sent back to the starting point of that zone, near the gateway to the previous zone. So in the first zone you will be dropped into Firebase Zulu not too far from the gate back to PI. Thus, if you want to go from a zone deep in the Shadow Shard back home again, all you need to do is jump off the edge, use the gateway to the previous zone, jump off again, and repeat until you're back at Paragon City.

6. It won't be long before you get a mission from Dr. Boyd to see Dr. Huxley in the Cascade Shadow Shard. Do this!! You'll have to do a lot of travel in the two zones but it isn't too bad, especially on the Zulu side. Once you finish, you are given access to Mole Point Charlie's gateway. This lets you pop back and forth from the middle of the Cascade zone to Firebase Zulu! I expect there are a bunch of these gates that will make travelling forward in the Shadow Zone pretty fast.

7. Huxley also becomes a contact, giving you missions to gather fruit. The first is a real bear to get to but, once you get her first mission done, she'll continue to give you fruit farming missions. These fruits, when picked, turn into max size inspirations. I've got one right now that's close to Firebase Zulu and has fifteen or so max-heal inspirations!

8. On Geysers: when you use these, you are meant to have all movement affecting powers off. That means powers that speed you up AND slow you down. When you are on your trajectory, you can use the forward and back keys to make you go forward faster or slower. If you have powers on, that effect gets magnified or muted - both of which will make it harder to do.

9. Geysers in Firebase Zulu are mostly pretty good but do not count on any geyser to just drop you in some nice, safe spot. If you just walk onto geysers and don't try to control your trajectory, they will sometimes come up short or will drop you into a spawn of nasty things. Watch where you are going and try to steer! (And, if you're going straight up, that means use the camera to pan up!)

10. Geysers have a direction. It's not really explained in the general's tutorial but each geyser has a little slot in the rock near it. You are meant to walk up that slot. If you hit a geyer from the side.... well..... the results are undocumented.

11. You can use teleport friend to drop an alley right on a geyser. Players with aura trails are particularly fun to watch getting shot off into the stormy sky. (Not that you would ever do such a thing - that's just an observation. )

12. Fliers don't need gravity geysers at all. They might want to use them at times to speed up travel (or just because it's fun to get shot around a zone) but they can always just point their nose at the target and go. I haven't seen the teleport travel power at work in the Shadow Zone but I would think it would do just fine, too.

13. Recall Friend is incredibly handy in the Shadow Shard. Flying/Teleporting heroes with Recall Friend can make travel a snap. (Just be sure to take the time to enjoy the gravity geysers on occasion!)

14. Superjump can be used between some of the closer islands. Good luck gauging the distance.

15. Contacts seem to repeat missions constantly. At least so far, there have been no story arcs or mini arcs.

16. Each zone has had a person with a Task Force that requires eight heroes. I haven't been able to start any of them yet. (Heck, there's rarely more than four people in the entire Cascade zone at any one time!)


I'm really having a ball in this zone. If you're one of those people who isn't happy unless they are earning at least 1000xp per minute (or whatever) then you probably won't like the place much. However, if you've got a lot of explorer in you, this place is fantastic! I haven't seen much of the story yet but anyplace with funky fruits and transdimensional vines can't be bad.

Yep, it works all right! One group teleport and you're hovering in the center of your singularities! Assuming you have the stamina, this will make Teleporters able to move long (or at least medium) distances without leaving their pets behind, too. For teleporters, that will put an end to the outdoor hunting problem where you skip a few spawns and your pets go and train the skipped spawns right into you.

Can people turn on the prompt-for-teleport option so they can refuse team teleports? I don't have Kinetics so our squishies will not appreciate popping into the middle of things.

This could work very nicely with the Hibernate epic power, btw. Pop in, maybe toss up a lightning storm, then hunker down under the ice. When you're ready to go, start a personal teleport then turn off the hibernate.

I'm almost tempted to give up the leaping pool to take it!

<shrug> same as the rest. I don't think order matters but my program does it as the last flag before the final -demoplay command. So something like:

C:\Wherever\CityOfHeroes.exe -fullscreen 0 -disable2d -demoplay WayCool.cohdemo

Happy to help!

Actually I was just thinking about your post today, StabbinPayne. It seems to me that you could make several shortcuts, each one with different options, then drag to the shortcut the mathes the options. Make a demodump one, a disable2D one, a normal one, one with the fps turned down so it plays fast.... {switching to Young Franenstein voice} It could work!!! {cue lightning crashes - which should be pretty easy around here ;}

Oh, I forgot something in the above. If you want to take a picture of your character in the character creation screen you can do so with the standard printscreen key. However, you'll only get the clipboard image - nothing will be saved. (You don't want those nasty screens anyway. Too low rez!)

Huh, hadn't thought of that. Good thinking StabbinPayne! I bet the -demoplay will have the be last, though.

P.S. NEW Screenshot & Demo Guide topic!

For those of you who DO know how to send command lines to a program, here are the commands (mostly quoting a dev from way back in the beta days):

In game commands:
/demorecord <demoname>
/demostop
Saves your demo to cityofheroes/client_demos/<demoname.cohdemo>
Quitting the game or changing maps will force demostop to get run.

Playback commands:
These commands all run from the command line when you start the game. So you would (for instance) make a shortcut to cityofheroes.exe and add these to the ‘target’

-demoplay <demoname>
plays back the demo. Loops forever, writing performance data to cityofheroes/client_demos/results/demo_name. (It has min,max,avg and time for each frame)
-demopause <msecs>
This is for videocard performance debug. Runs until it gets the the frame given (in milliseconds) then redraws that frame forever.
-demodump
Dumps a .jpg file of each frame rendered to client_demos/screens/<demoname>/*.jpg
-demodumptga
Same as demodump but uses targa format
-demofps <frames per second>
Forces the player to simulate a fixed frame per second. This works well with demodump to get a smooth movie.
-fullscreen 1
Put game in fullscreen mode (overrides the registry key)
-fullscreen 0
Put game in windowed mode (overrides the registry key)
-screen <xsize> <ysize>
Set the screensize. Ex: -screen 1024 768
-disable2d
Don't display character names, damage numbers, or any other text. Makes the demo look just like screenshots with user interface disabled.


Note that, as of this writing, the -demodumptga has the same problem as saving a TGA screenshot. If the directory the file is supposed to go to does not exist, the screenshot file will not be saved! (My demo player makes the directory for you if you save to TGA. Plug Plug. )

In honor of my name getting switched back (BIG thanks Cuppa!), I've updated my screenshot/demo guide to version 2! Now info on /screenshotui and the new JPG format are in the FAQ itself instead of hiding deep in the topic thread.

HOW TO MAKE A SCREENSHOT
In the upper right area of your keyboard there should be a key called "Print Screen" (or PrntScreen or some such). When you press that, you should get not one, but two screenshots.

The first shot made has exactly what you see on the screen, including your chat window. This screenshot is not really saved, though, it is just put in your copy & paste (aka Clipboard) buffer. To see it, you need to open a compatible program (IrfanView works extremely well and is free, though Microsoft Paint should also work fine) and paste it in, probably with control-V.

The second shot is saved for you in .JPG format. It does not have the user interface (nav window, chat window, chat bubbles, and so on) on them. Unless I'm taking a shot of a bug, that's the one I normally use. The files are saved in your City of Heroes directory under Screenshots.

The second screenshot is taken a split second after the first so they will not quite look the same even if you ignore the user interface. It does take a second to save the JPG file so you'll know you made a screenshot when you do one.

Note for users of the newer Microsoft keyboards: If you are using function keys and the little light under "F" is turned on, you can not take a screenshot. You will have to hit the F-Lock button, then hit the PrtScreen. Or change the keybinding.

If you don’t like using the printscreen key for some reason, you can go into your Options menu in game and change the key there. You’ll also notice an option to use the TGA (targa) format to save your picture. Those of you who are really into screenshots will probably want to use the TGA format because these pictures are not compressed at all. Windows can’t view these files but the free IrfanView program (found at http://www.irfanview.com/) can view them just fine.

Bug Alert: when you take a JPG screenshot, the screenshot directory is created for you. However, the TGA screenshots will NOT create this directory. No biggy, right? Just don’t delete the directory. Well, there’s another issue – if the screenshot directory is empty, the Updater program will delete it! So, if you are taking TGA screenshots, do NOT delete all the files out of the directory!

If you like to record the user interface but don’t want to mess with the clipboard, you can use the “/screenshotui 1” command. This will cause all following screenshots to record the interface as well as the graphics. (The clipboard screenshot always records the interface.) “/Screenshotui 0” will revert back to the normal mode. If you do this a lot, there is an option to bind a key to toggle saving the UI on and off in the options menu.


HOW TO MAKE A DEMO
A demo is a recording of your game session. These are not MPG's or AVI's or any of those, these are simply text files that the game engine reads to repeat what happened in the game while you recorded. The feature is not supported and there are glitches but, I'll tell ya, they leave screenshots in the dust. They are small, too - a recording of a good battle typically takes about one megabyte. Far smaller than a real movie file would be!

Recording one is really simple - just enter the command:
/demorecord Whatever
where 'Whatever' is the file name you want to use. Then play the game just like normal. When you want to stop recording, use the /demostop command. Recording will automatically stop if you zone to another area or quit the game.

Watching them is not so simple. You do it by creating a shortcut to the CityOfHeroes.Exe and pass in a command parameter like "-demoplay YourDemoName.cohdemo" to play the demo. Honestly, it's a lot easier to use a program like my demo player (see my signature). The demo must be in your City of Heroes client_demos directory or a subdirectory in that directory to play it back. The game automatically creates demos in that folder when you record them.

When the demo is playing back, you can hit the escape key to exit. (Otherwise it will just keep looping through the demo.)

A particularly handy thing with demos is the Demo Dump feature. This lets you save the whole demo as a series of screenshots. LOTS of screenshots! If you've got the drive space, you can pick out some really great screenshots by doing a demodump! Those of you interested in making movies might be able to use these shots to build a movie file, too.

That about wraps it up. You are now ready to make your own scrapbook and home movies! Share and enjoy.

And now the adventures of Slab the First! Watch as he pitch, yaws, and rolls his way around Paragon City! W00t!!

[ QUOTE ]
This is counter-intuitive to what we learned in school, but Cryptic designed it this way for their convenience.

[/ QUOTE ]
I think the same system gets used in-game with the /loc command. Chances are good that Lord Recluse corrupted the coordinate system in order to confuse heroes trying to use this command. He's quite the naughty spider person.

So that's the secret of Yaw! Gotta go put that in my FAQ now.

Neat idea for the sounds, too! You might make the player you use super small just to keep it out of the way.

Yeah, I'm sure the game engine uses fewer polygons for distant objects. You can go into the game and max your settings out, but I wouldn't bet on it helping much.

P.S. Demos made in the current version of the Test Server don't save character models right. There's a known issue with character models and I'm betting this is a symptom of that bug. Until that's fixed, I wouldn't try putting one of those demos into the demo edittor. It's liable to freak out and hurt somebody.

Yep. Including the bit where the looser took over 7000 damage! What, you think I'm going to hush just because that guy tells me to? HA!

ROFL! Get'm Liberty! Smack him upside the head!

You're certainly welcome Master Marbles!

The Rock wall was horrible death for us, even though we took out the Quarry. Another Quarry fell from the sky and the boulders just kept spawning and spawning. A few cairns got dropped near the wall and it got hopeless fast.

After some rezzing, the second Quarry was pulled off by himself (well, more or less) and offed. Then our three blasters floated high above rock-throwing range and blasted the rock wall to nothing.

(For some fun, stand on the top of the rock wall. When the wall comes tumbling down, you won't. You'll be left hanging in mid-air with a great view!)

Wow, what a task force! More more more, Cryptic!

To answer my questions..... the 39-41 level range is pretty solid. It's a task force so no invites after the fact. 38th level can't get in, even sidekicked. Exemplar can get in. (The message the Woodsman gives is cryptic, too. 'You do not satisfy the requirements' or some such. It'd help if he said what the requirements were!)

Definitely see this trial, folks! Even if you can't find time, it's worth the trouble to get four folks together and waste 200 DE just to get in the door and have a look around. This ain't no warehouse!!

Oh, and before I forget. The heroes you save can not be teleported with teleport ally or wormhole. They mostly just stand around.

We were finding powers that give you those circle location targets very hard to use, particularly in the first wall room. Freezing rain, teleport spells.... they all were refusing to target the ground so you had to shoot in the air and hope.

A feature and a bug are causing some screenshots to not be saved.

1. Empty folders (like your screenshot directory if you've cleaned it out) are deleted now.

2. TGA screenshots will not automatically create a folder for your shots. (There's a similar problem doing a demodump in TGA format.)

The upshot is that, if you save your screenshots in TGA format and you keep your screenshot directory clean, then your screenshots won't save. There's no problem if you use JPG format which is the default. Or you can make a screenshot directory and leave a dummy file in there.

Singularities already fly. I don't know if group fly would help them or maybe slow you enough to keep you back with them. <shrug> Teleport Friend might be the better way to do this, especially when (if?) we get pets in our team windows.

Honestly, the slow singularities really do not bother me much at all. It's only a factor when you are hunting outdoors for particular enemies. Singularity speed almost never matters in indoor missions or outdoors when you are going after every spawn.

If they make a change to singularities (and pets in general) then I think I would rather have a dismiss option. I wouldn't use that much but I do want it at times and it sure seems silly that I can summon them up but can't get them to go away!

Singularities kinda follow you but not exactly. Plus sometimes they get a burr up their...ummm... well, whatever they have and go rushing off after an enemy. Getting them to make a wall takes some doing. It might even be easier to move the battle to the wall than to get the singularities to line up where you like them. (Again, though, teleport friend can be a help there.)


By the way, some of you may have seen the sheets of ice in certain missions lately. Wouldn't it be great if there was a large, slanted sheet of ice in a valley somewhere? We could strategically place singularities on the ice (with controller hovering above), put a few force blasters who have invested heavily in knockback SO's at the bottom, then drop a big tank smasher at the top of the ice and play pinball with him!!!

Hmmm.... or maybe it's just getting too far past my bedtime...

Really? I knew that you would get instantly booted in TF's but not trials. The one trial I've done (the sewer one) seemed a lot more like a mission than a Task Force.