airhead

Seeyas diaspora! And I will, I promise myself and you. Meanwhile I'll miss even the crazy ones.

I always loved your posts Arcanaville.

I rarely understood them. I couldn't fault them (probably for the same reason). But those times I made the effort to understand it was eye-opening for my enjoyment of the game. Or else it was just delicious to see how thoroughly and committedly the game was studied, always trying to improve it, or improve someone else's understanding of it. Developing from without. I pictured you to look like Marvel's "Leader", big brained and all, but I don't mean that unkindly

I do hope to come across you again, when we all find that friendly place for heroes to be as much of themselves as technology permits. More than a forum, perhaps not an MMO, and maybe it'll take a decade. Whatever it is I suspect you'll be developing from within .You'd make an awesome game soul.

Milan Dare

Posting because I still can!

I will be here at the end. Sadly work has been overwhelming so I have not been here as much as I'd have liked. Earlier I also looked around for another home. Airhead seemed like a natural fit to the Trek universe. His schtick is everyone getting along, his costume wouldn't take too much to mould to Trek, and the backstory involves inspirations of humanity.

So now he's found a place where everyone else wears armour and carries massive firepower indoors. Most of his time is spent murdering people in space. And the comms resembles a kindergarten, only more bigoted and misogynist, worse spelling and completely chewed up by the profanity filter.

Anyway, he does his own thing (space is lonely), flies a bubble-headed space ship despite its limitations (bubbles are cool), and looks forward to future stories written by Sean McCann.

Lemons are tart. To suck lemons is to smile in a rather twisted way. Maybe it's English, not Physics.

Pixies are made of pixels. They do pix. one of which would be pi. Pixels are integer, pi is not. So I'd go with the African pixie that swallowed the Coconut. Rounding upwards.

(crawls back under his workload)

Those are some beautiful screenshots houtex!

A couple of shots of high-jinks in Atlas Park 33 from perhaps a week ago. Unfortunately this forum won't let me login from home so they're a little out of date.

Love the picture! I imagine a Mako-like shark attack that instead launched gleeful otters.

Oh okay! Will do for sure now. Mostly I just get off the tram and go into What The... shock.

Nice logo Zekiran. Complex colouring for a Chest Detail, but it might still work, hope to try this weekend.

Loved the Panzersoldat bits especially. The prawn... still figurin' it out.

Cool! Nice one gec72. Added to my sig.

Here's a quick logo, in case it provides inspiration. Based on a screen shot. Feel free to hack it into something better if you think it's going in a good direction.

You sure can. Just be sure to copy in the costume lines (COSTUME, PARTSNAME), plus the location (POS), orientation(PYR), health (HP, HPMAX) and emote (MOV) of the toon you're adding. You can actually do this without needing a group at all, using an existing group was (for me) just a quicker way to learn.

Now, the location and orientation may be completely different (off-camera) when copying from another .cohdemo (demo record) file. So simply copy-paste the location of one of the existing toons instead, and move it (say) 3 meters. That is, add or subtract 3 from the first or third parameter of the "POS" (example below):


0 132 NEW Airhead
0 132 COSTUME 0 00575757 -5.967551 -0.074101 0 -0.537006 0.128799 -0.380599 -0.537006 0.000835 0 0.44 0.96 0.97 -0.03 0.96 0.97 -0.25 -0.61 0.97 -0.38 0.19 -0.71 -1 0.12 -1 -1 -1 -1 0.97 -1 -0.71
0 132 PARTSNAME V_MALE_Pants.GEO/GEO_Hips_Monstrous_01 !X_Hips_V_Animal_01_Mask !Hips_Blend 00575757 001f0b00
...
[some info removed, there's about 29 lines of PARTSNAME to a toon]
...
0 132 PARTSNAME none none none 00000000 00000000
0 132 PARTSNAME none none none 007eeef1 00ffffff 00000000 00000000 Costumes/AnimatedTails/AnimatedTail_Wolf02_Male.fx
0 132 MOV READY 0
0 132 POS 54.463161 -768 -636
0 132 PYR 0 1.406125 0
0 132 HP 1427.40
0 132 HPMAX 1427.40

The middle parameter is the height, changing that might put your toon in the floor Also make sure the object number ("132" above) is the same for all lines of a single character, and is unique to that character. This is better explained in the guides I linked. After some experimenting you'll find the best place to put the toon. Holler if you have any trouble playing back your demo.

Hi there,

The raw data is a demorecord file created for each character. Login as the character, type:
/demorecord <filename>
Then cycle through your costumes. Then type:
/demostop
Then quit to another toon and repeat, using a different <filename> each time (use the same and you'll overwrite your work!). Then at least you have all the raw data you need for any of those costumes in any future demo editing.

Now, to assemble the toons: Similar. Use
/demorecord <anotherfilename>
To record a bunch of people in a group. They could be NPCs for all you care. Then using a text editor, change the existing character's data to your costume file. There's a few guides on how to do this on the web. The one I learned from was Scuzz's. There's also a Wiki page that is more comprehensive. - the part in bold will take the most time, but will teach you the most too!

Zloth's Demoedit program might be useful for editing, I haven't figured it out. But that link also leads to his demo launcher, which I do find extremely easy to use. There's some instruction there too.

If you've not done programming the learning curve can be pretty steep, just keep asking questions. There's other recent threads on this too. And then there's the people who REALLY know what they're doing (not me) who can correct me and offer even better advice

Ooh now that sounds like something for... THE LEANDROSCRIPT!

Look! Up on the plain! Is it absurd? ...

EDIT: had a thought. A logo could be created as a costume part for Under and Over chest details, and put that on everyone in a demo-played screen shot. I did learn how to implant my own images in the game but I'll have to relearn it, maybe someone else finds this amusing and has quicker talent than me It would need to be maximum two colours. And folks might not want their toons messed with like this. So it's just me brainstorming messily. Gonna try anyway.

My god.

Thank you Leandro! Incredible results, and very cool to release the scripts. I'll be playing with this on the weekend. Time to learn a programming language!

Soo cool! This was the first time I ever meet the very famous Thor's Assassin in game, and it was captured! I recently moved toons to Virtue from Exalted in case it develops ex-VIP login issues. After holding the torch in Atlas Park 33 all night (it was night in Singapore) that's a lovely bonus. I'm the Cadbury-coloured one-legged Cossack standing next to TA

I'm gathering demorecords at odd times, hope to put together a demoedit screenie combining the players who've perhaps struggled to be available for the official vigil schedule. Anyone in my demofiles near City Hall holding a torch... I don't have Leandro's processing talents so it'll take a while longer for me to create.

Voted. Passing the message around. Over 88% positive, seems the haters moved quickly but aren't growing. I imagine a troll personality makes a person act like a bot.

I guess another possible reason for thinking it's time, in the case of someone who doesn't play, might be the "8 years". That's a herring. Try the game, try other games, it's ahead of the curve because it does what we dream of doing (bringing out the hero in our heads, not a hero written by someone else). For others, that might be Angry Birds. Using a "latest engine" is only a minor fraction of the experience. It's been brilliantly explained so many times in the last few days: it's what the developers do with the engine.

I agree absolutely with TonyV above, the game can live on. It might develop slower with the team having been hit over the head, but I don't mind if it develops slower. It's where I like it to be already.

Hi again! And thanks Amerikatt. Hopefully I25 will include a real cat with a real cape. And branded crabs. And that there'll be an I25.

Those of you watching the CoH deviantart group will have already seen this posted by taghuso, but for completeness (adding to the pyre) here is... Kenning! The um, Scotsman. And mad scientist. And (in CoH) warshade. Carrying a pregnant Nictus. Taghuso did a fantastic job improving on the screenie and imbuing Kenning with just the right personality.



I hear Champions can do an actual pom-pom. Unfortunately both types of server login time out for me every single time so that's moot.

Giving CO another try. Almost.

After downloading the 3Gbyte installation, but then the 1.2 Gbyte patch, I finally get it running. I have two screens but the cursor is limited to one, unlike CoH. Anyway, I have a lifetime sub on Cryptic, but I have to create a "PWE" login, I do, i login, but it doesn't link to Cryptic, so then I try to link it to the Cryptic login, but it says my email address is already being used (yes, the two accounts use that email address).

I sent an email to support and they got back to me just two days later (that's the good bit) giving me instructions to do what I'd already done. But in case they did something I'll give it another shot when I get home tonight.

Meanwhile, I tried to play. I got in once with my PWE account, when I realised it wasn't connected to my Cryptic account, but since then every attempt to connect to either server gives me "server timed out" after quite a while. It appears to be unplayable.

Hi Dalgrhyn, Coulomb, Mr Captainman, Gypsy Rose, FredrikSvanberg, Clave-Dark, Cantankerous Venture and so many more people who made the AE community into something incredible! I will miss you all too.

I did keep playing AE, even though I stopped posting. Someone would find one my arcs every couple of months and send me a complimentary tell, it really meant a lot every time I saw one of those. Unfortunately not even the award nominated ones were included in the stickied list because Policewoman felt they were not to her taste, but people found them nonetheless. Work got very busy for me this year but I always planned to go back and write more arcs, my sig said so. There were some great game mechanics added since I filled my three slots, and I've tried them out unpublished. So much potential!

Demorecord is VERY highly recommended, watch yourself play your arc as a movie later on (needs only the client, not the servers). Take your friends through with you. You can even switch your recorded costume with another by editing the file, add in some beta costume elements... okay so I am obviously not working that hard

Hope to see y'all in December, against all probability.

Good luck from me too, Airhead's in the mail if it's not too late.

Cheers, Airhead

Sneakin' in from the office...

1: Tartyrsauce - so much expression, so few lines
2: Leaf-nin - was always impressed by your art, so glad you were able to keep it up all year!
3: SyrusB - (because I already voted for Liz on dA )

Ooh. VirtualDub is deceptively easy to use. I couldn't figure out the manual, so I just opened the first frame (jpeg) and it knew the rest. I added the latest cameos and shot the video at 800x600, 10 fps. The VirtualDub result was a crystal clear, 200 Mbyte AVI file (full-screen, 30 fps it was 2 Gbytes). Converting to WMV at the same scale was under 3MB! It is very smudgy so I'll keep experimenting for better parameters. For AVI to WMV I used "Any Video Converter" off the CNET site. The thumbnail below links to Youtube; the Youtube can be made a bit bigger than its default size.