Arcanaville
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Quote:Are you sure the Well is truly sentient? The Well never actually speaks to us, the Well speaks to us through others. But so does LSD.Originally Posted by Xaphan
The explanation in the Lore AMA doesn't really explain the sentient bit of the Well (which speaks to us a couple of times), which I think is an important missing piece of the puzzle. The Well can grant great power to individuals, whether it be a normal power up (the "easy way" we were told about, though we never actually got to explore). Or as we saw in Tyrant, an attempt to create a champion. So obviously the Well can control WHERE the power goes, to an extent.
So, with that in mind, the process of absorbing a Well could be the Battalion taking over or replacing the sentient part of the Well and making it serve them. The excess energy is no longer re-invested in humanity. So while there may still be the base potential of humanity, even if there might still be "simple" metahumans, there would be no more incarnates. No more gods, spirits or titans. No more great leaders of civilization, generals, or tyrants. All the excess power created by humanity that they drew from now goes to the Battalion.
And in that way, the race could become a hollow shell of it's former self. They would be just normal people, maybe with a few truly exceptional individuals here and there. But the true greatness of the species would be gone.
In any case, you're talking about co-opting the Well as opposed to destroying it, which makes more sense in this context but is not what I believe the in-game fiction suggests the Battalion does. Then again, I've always believed Prometheus to be an unreliable narrator, and the loregasm also suggests that this would likely be confirmed down the road as well. -
Quote:Its a silly movie really, but it has the coolest laser gun sound effects of all time in my opinion. A silly thing to remember, but yeah.Originally Posted by Starsman
Does not ring me a bell but it for some reason got me thinking about The Black Hole
Have not seen that movie in ages... just remember it used to scare the hell out of me as a kid... would wake up in fear that the entire planet would be swallowed by a black hole... -
Quote:Not necessarily. From the point of view of the player, *if* a player is having fun they have no obligation to logically prove it. But from the point of view of the game designer, games don't target individuals, they target audiences and that means counter-balancing lots of different priorities for lots of different people, no one of which is objectively more important. We don't say performance is quantifiable but customization is not, so customization is unimportant.Originally Posted by Another_Fan
If you follow this to it's logical conclusion you get blasters never needed to be fixed and balance is of zero importance. Seeing as they were the most abandoned AT there is a contradiction here. There are certain levels of performance that just weren't acceptable and people were concerned about overall power.
The point being made, I believe, is that a preference isn't prioritized because its quantitative in nature, not that quantitative preferences are unimportant. They are just no more important for being capable of being put into Excel. Bella was not saying all players should be like her, but rather all players that are like her have equally valid reasons for enjoying the game than all players like THB. And I'm pretty sure all game dev teams would agree, or they wouldn't spend so much time on intangibles. -
Quote:It was basically Gil Gerard and Erin Grey: eyecandy in the 25th century, but that doesn't mean they didn't try to throw in a whole bunch of memorable 80s crazy:Originally Posted by Another_Fan
LOL that series had Wilma Deering and Princess Ardala
Supporting players got drowned out.
I don't even know how you can unsee that last one. I think the writers of CO should have written Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Online instead: the sensibilities are almost perfectly spot on. -
Quote:Hmm, I guess that works. Although I suppose this also works a little:Originally Posted by Another_Fan
who was Positron ? Doctor Theopolis* ?
- You are ALL grey to me. -
Quote:I'm sure that's why you remember that episode:Originally Posted by Snow Globe
Is it bad that I remember & liked that episode of Buck Rogers?
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Quote:Originally Posted by The_Larker
FPARN huzzah!
C'mon leak alil plz!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Black Pebble overseeing Zwillinger's weekly broadcast for unauthorized information releases. -
Quote:Actually, the document suggested that were the game to continue, that might have been eventually retconned a bit, since Tim (Black Scorpion) seems to be saying the intent was never for the Wells to represent *all* potential. At least as he saw it, the Well(s) is more of an accumulation of energy that derives from all life: "exceptional" individuals can become conduits for that accumulated energy, like static electricity can build up from motion, that then discharges from a metal object. That the story led in the direction of the Well being the *source* of power rather than just a focal point of power is something at least he claims to have been an error. That error might have been eventually retconned if we had lasted long enough to reach past the Batallion to Ascension.Originally Posted by Agent White
The Well of the Furies for humans, we dunno what the other Wells are call. They're basically the physical embodiment of a race's potential. When you have one, your race can grow all awesome and become Incarnates. When you don't, you're kind of hollowed out and listless.
The Battalion, the big threat that was coming, were dangerous because they -consumed- other races' wells.
And as I mentioned above, Tim's version of the Well of the Furies strongly contradicts the notion that Wells can be "consumed" at least permanently. Temporarily perhaps, but not permanently. Not without killing all life that generates it at the same time. -
Quote:When people have accused me in the past of sounding like this, my argument has tended to be that its completely ludicrous to believe anyone would actually intend to sound like this. That a counter-example would volunteer itself is fascinating.Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
The difference is that whereas your approach to finding enjoyment in the game is entirely subjective and unprovable by logic and reason, thus making it unreasonable and pointless by nature, my approach to the game can be understood and explained in a sensible fashion. I think logic is fun, you think it's fun to be illogical. I have to say that if we're attempting to establish which of our approaches makes sense and which doesn't, it has to be advantage: me. But then you have fun by making no sense, as we've demonstrated, so I won't hold it against you.
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Quote:Its difficult to say with certainty, but I believe the reason why Absorb shields expire is not because Absorb Cur buffs expire, but rather because Absorb MaxMax buffs expire. While all entities (generally) have non-zero base health, everyone starts off with zero Absorb. To get an absorb shield, the game first buffs Absorb MaxMax so your maximum absorb increases above zero, and then it fills that Absorb shield with a buff which, to the best of my knowledge, remains there until the MaxMax buff expires dropping the entire Absorb attribute back down to zero.Originally Posted by Mister_Bison
Interesting, I would have said that absorb is not permanent, but that's because I didn't read the description enough.
The only attributes that can host permanent Cur or Abs buffs are I believe the ones connected to meters: Hitpoints, Endurance, Rage, Absorb. I don't believe there's anywhere for a permanent Abs or Cur buff to "go" for the other attributes. Whether any of those four or their related attributes can have temporary Cur buffs applied to them is a question I don't know, but I would guess not; that is in fact the logic I was hinting at earlier with regard to handling Cur buffs: attributes with meters are affected permanently, those without meters are not.Quote:Now, considering only the 'Cur' and 'Abs' attribmods out there, in the game, but completely ignoring which of the two aspects it is, what are the attribmods in the game, that in the end (that is considering the code that gets executed on them), temporarily affect Endurance, Health, Meter or maybe knocks/repel ? What are the attribmods that permanently affect the other attributes ? (I'm thinking def, other status, recov/regen, perception and stealth, others may still fall in this category or the one of health/end etc)
Technically speaking its possible the engine could support a temporary Cur buff on Hitpoints, but there's circumstantial evidence to support the notion that even if it can, the dev tools prohibited such usage. The IWill bug where Castle accidentally set a Res to a Cur supports the notion that in the absence of any other changes, Hitpoints-based Cur buffs are always permanent.
Aside: zero progress tonight. I got caught up in thinking about the question of server-side event overflow, aka server-side lag. On the plus-side, I now have an integrated load monitor. -
Quote:Yes, unequivocal, from the latin un-equi-vocal meaning to speak from back end of horse.Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
See? I told you guys. She meant that metaphorically. I am now the unequivocal champion of the forums.
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Quote:Yes there is. In fact, there is only one possible group that "we" references in that passage, and its not Paragon Studios:Originally Posted by Chops
Am I reading this correctly? Paragon Studios made the final decision? There is no other 'we' who could be referred to the way you phrased that sentence.
Zwillinger, in his official capacity as an NCSoft employee and City of Heroes community manager, was speaking for NCSoft in conjunction with information provided to him by NCSoft.Quote:But before we get into the details, we want to personally share with you NCsofts sincere thanks to all of our fans that have spent time with us during the past eight years. We cannot reiterate how tough it was to make the final decision to close this wonderful chapter in our history.
Zwillinger isn't speaking for Paragon Studios officially. There is no Paragon Studios to speak for officially.
I can assure you no one at Paragon Studios made this decision. -
Quote:As far as I'm aware, besides the ones you've named the only other attribute for which I believe Cur modifiers are (theoretically) permanent is Absorb. I would not be at all surprised to learn that the dev macros are hard-coded to flag Cur as permanent for the first twenty five attribmods.Originally Posted by Mister_Bison
Concerning the whole Cur vs Abs and defense case, I think there is something fishy here, and blatantly, I could go with the curious Cur + Abs implementation we seem to have in the game right now.
I still have two assumptions I would like to have verified, which if they were true, make me differ permanently from your point of view, Arcanaville. So please (anybody) debunk:
There are permanent mods (to cur or abs) only for Health, Endurance, Meter, Damage (which redirect to health) and maybe to knockup/back/repel status effects values (which could get degraded to the current protection value as soon as the movement engine has applied the effect, or by itself after a duration).
There is no permanent mod (to cur or abs) to Defense nor any of the attributes not cited in the first assumption.
Please, shoot counterexamples at me, as I have the feeling we are missing something here (or maybe just me missing to learn to shut the ficus up ^^) I'm willing to get over it and have cur and abs being two scalar values and percent-based effects being handled otherwise, but if my assumptions are true, computationally, you only need abs or cur in any attrib mod, and their meaning changes according to the very Attribute they are in. So if both exist where only one field could be sufficient, there must be a reason.
Cur and Abs never show up simultaneously in a single attribmod normally. Every attribmod has an Aspect value which is either Cur, Abs, Str, Res, MaxMax, or a few other rarer values.
To be very precise, because I know there are some internals that say otherwise, the devs are only capable of setting an attribmod's Aspect Cur or Abs (or one of the others) and not both. I'm unaware of a method the devs have for setting an attribmod to make both a Cur and an Abs modification simultaneously. I'm not sure why you believe I thought this was possible, if that is what you are implying. -
Quote:Today I would just dump everything into sqllite and write a separate comparison engine, and if it was too slow I'd go buy a faster computer. In retrospect, execution efficiency was the wrong target: me efficiency should have been the target.Originally Posted by Codewalker
The other reason I went with C++ was actually very similar to yours; I wanted it to support every build with only one code base, so that I could write a comparison engine to see exactly what changed with each patch. So having the various versions of the schema derive from each other made sense at the time. All in all I'd say it ended up like most programming projects, not perfect by any means, but functional and useful despite any small warts that might bother me.
Although just to show you how crazy I am, the thought had crossed my mind to stop writing parsers, and write an expert system that could perform parsing as well as I could. Because tracing the client code was just too easy I guess. -
Quote:It doesn't tell me anything in particular.Originally Posted by Rubberlad
I *think* they're trying to legally uncouple the studio and all its assets from NCsoft/NCwest so it becomes it's own separate legal business entity (assuming NCsoft agree to relinquish "ownership" over several pieces of... "stuff." The negotiations would require a hard separation date between companies (for a variety of reasons) but that August 24th cutoff date for refunds is *very* telling.
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Quote:For what I was doing, it wasn't that slow. psycho helped, and even though a raw run took like twenty minutes, I was doing a lot more than just spitting out CSVs. I did things like build sequence trees looking for unreferenced animations, calculate a power/root cross table, checked for powers with combat text that mismatched damage types, etc. The code is so unreadable at this point if I used a python to C converter it could probably be an OCCC entry.Originally Posted by Codewalker
Ooh, Python. I wrote my first bin file parser in Python. Love it for quick prototyping. It worked, but was painfully slow.
Oh, and in a moment of sheer brain-dead I decided to make one parser that could read all builds rather than multiple parsers that could read one build each, so I could have two different builds in memory simultaneously for cross-build computation. Forty build differences later, that's a 9.2 on the stupid-o-meter. -
Quote:Custom critter valuation. pohsyb did the code, I did basically the everything else.Originally Posted by Codewalker
Did you ever say which system you were consulted on, or is that covered under NDA?
If I had to guess, I'd say Archvillain scaling by league size. I can't think of any other mechanics introduced around then that would require heavy mathematical analysis to get right.
The NDA on that work expired long ago, beyond the permanent non-disclose on things like internal data, but I didn't mention it prior to now by mutual agreement that harping on it served no useful purpose to the game (it was actually my idea to not discuss it; the devs did not initially ask me to do that although they concurred with the reasoning). It can't hurt anymore to discuss it, and if the game is saved I doubt anyone's going to care. -
Quote:And then there are the named tables.Originally Posted by Codewalker
MaxMax, et al aren't attributes in the same sense of the word. They aren't maintained on a per-entity basis like the 5 aspects are (possibly 4 if Abs is a pseudo-aspect). Those are defined in the class tables and are static data that never changes. There's no such thing as a MaxMax buff.
Things that are defined there apply to every entity that belongs to its class, whether it's a player archetype or a NPC class. They are.
Per-class attribute info
(these exist once and are static across all levels)
AttribMin
AttribBase -- the starting value for the attribute
StrengthMin
ResistanceMin
AttribDimin[Str|Cur|Res][In|Out] (PvP diminishing returns)
Per-level attribute info
(these are still per-class, but come in a table form that defines values for levels 1-50 for players and 1-55 for NPCs)
AttribMax -- the starting value for the attribute's Max aspect
AttribMaxMax
StrengthMax
ResistanceMax
That's really where all my time last night went: digging up that info and writing the import code, plus structuring it:
I was thinking of keeping .Cur, .CurStr, .CurRes, and .CurMax arrays for dynamic attribute values, but I figure I have some time to think about that: CoHBlaster.Cur is just a reminder to me not to copy by reference when I get there, because that would be baaaad.Code:# entity class class CoHBlaster: name = '' attribmodStack = [] def applyAttribmod(attribmodId, powerId, entityId, triggerTime, trueScale): expireTime = triggerTime + AttribmodDB[attribmodId][kduration] nextAct = triggerTime attribmodStack.append([attribmodId, powerId, entityId, triggerTime, trueScale, expireTime, nextAct]) # stub to read in one archetype of data f = open("C:/coh/analyses/engine/Class_Blaster.csv",'r') archetype_data = f.readlines() f.close() archetype_data = map(lambda x: x.strip(),archetype_data) CoHBlaster.name = archetype_data[0] attribute_names = archetype_data[1].split(',') attribute_count = len(attribute_names) # min, base, strmin, resmin, strdimA, strdimB, curdimA, curdimB, resdima, resdimb CoHBlaster.min = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[3].split(',')) CoHBlaster.base = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[5].split(',')) CoHBlaster.strmin = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[7].split(',')) CoHBlaster.resmin = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[9].split(',')) CoHBlaster.strdimA = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[11].split(',')) CoHBlaster.strdimB = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[13].split(',')) CoHBlaster.curdimA = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[15].split(',')) CoHBlaster.curdimB = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[17].split(',')) CoHBlaster.resminA = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[19].split(',')) CoHBlaster.resminB = map(lambda x: float(x), archetype_data[21].split(',')) CoHBlaster.max = [0] * attribute_count CoHBlaster.maxmax = [0] * attribute_count CoHBlaster.strmax = [0] * attribute_count CoHBlaster.resmax = [0] * attribute_count # max, maxmax, strmax, resmax for loop in xrange(0,attribute_count): CoHBlaster.max[loop] = archetype_data[23+loop].split(',') CoHBlaster.maxmax[loop] = archetype_data[139+loop].split(',') CoHBlaster.strmax[loop] = archetype_data[255+loop].split(',') CoHBlaster.resmax[loop] = archetype_data[371+loop].split(',') CoHBlaster.named = {} # named tables for loop in xrange(0,(len(archetype_data)-486)/2): CoHBlaster.named[archetype_data[486+loop*2]] = archetype_data[487+loop*2].split(',') CoHBlaster.Cur = copy.copy(CoHBlaster.base) -
Quote:Courtesy of Matt Miller's twitter: http://twitter.com/MMODesigner/statu...361857/photo/1Originally Posted by Siolfir
Begone with your insider knowledge and logic! Pics or it didn't happen!
(my hand was shaking more than I remember) -
Quote:Although some people found Elusivity pretty quick after it was added.Originally Posted by Codewalker
Um... somewhere reliable.
So much attention has been focused on the data tables in the piggs that not many people have looked elsewhere, to find those elusive missing bits of info that are compiled in through auto-generated headers. -
Quote:You want to be a venereal disease?Originally Posted by DarkCurrent
It's not about a knockout blow. It's about persistently haunting every place they look. Be a constant itch that they'll never forget.
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Quote:Originally Posted by Ozmosis
BUT WE ARE STILL HERE, AND WE ARE STILL FIGHTING!!!
"PARAGON HEAR ME! It is true what many of you have heard. The publishers have set a shutdown date and as I speak that shutdown date is drawing nearer to our home. Believe me when I SAY we have a difficult time ahead of us but if we are to be PREPARED for it we must FIRST shed our FEEER of it.
I stand hear before you now truly UNAFRAID! WHY?! Because I believe something you do not? NOOO! I stand here without fear because I remember. I remember that I am HEEEER not because of the path that lay before me, but because of the path that lies BEHIND me! I remember that for eight and a half YEEEERS we have played this game! I remember that for eight and a half YEEEERS trolls have tried to dishearten us and after a decade of gameplay I remember that which matters most!
WE ARE STILL HERE!
Let us send a message to NCSoft! Let us shake this game! Let us tremble the warwalls of earth, steel and forcefield! Let us be heard from weatherless sky to weird moon! Tonight let us make them remember
THIS IS PARAGON AND WE ARE NOT AFRAAAAID! -
Quote:Ah, that's the catch isn't it. Everyone thinks they can do better than the computer and for that matter everyone else on the road.Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
In the event of an accident, which would you RATHER be in charge of a 1-2 ton chunk of steel, aluminum and plastic? A computer or you?
I would rather be in control than a computer, but I would rather a computer be in control than you. The question is would you cede control over your car, if that allowed you to upgrade the drivers of all other cars to computer control. -
Quote:Implementation-wise, that would be my guess as well. Duration-based resistance is probably just multiplying the duration counter decrementer.Originally Posted by Starsman
Correct me if I'm wrong in this, but that's just a player front conceptualization on what Mez Resistance ends up doing.
My guestimation is that Mez Resistance is instead just accelerating the mez-wear-out timer while it's active.
In fact, I can think of no other reasonable way to manage resistable duration than with decrementers. -
Quote:I have absolute confirmation Cur is used for most defense buffs: the dived data everyone who is capable of diving attribmod data can see, and I should point out that I did contract powers work for the dev team for I18, which should draw the logical conclusion there.Originally Posted by Mister_Bison
Also, you didn't answer my question about whether you did have evidence Cur is used for time-limited attribmods, or Cur is the time-limited attribmods-dedicated storage value because it is.