Arcanaville

That sounds like a lot of work for the art team. But I wonder if it would be a more reasonable amount of work to make three models: the existing one we already have which is presumed to be at the middle slider value, and one for the lowest level and one for the highest level, and let the system interpolate all other values by simply interpolating all the vertices. Hmm, that still sounds like a lot of work, though, and its not backward compatible with the existing way the sliders works, so it might be an all or nothing solution, which is not good.

There's also the separate question: what about the players that like the way it looks now? Unfortunately, we don't have "costume sliders" just literal body sliders, and the costume parts come along for the ride. If we could add a slider, maybe we could add a "fitted" slider for clothes that would universally change the locations of a set of control points selected around the costume all at once, such as the bridge point on a chest piece along the centerline. Its "neutral" position would be in line with where the tops of the breasts extend out to, and the fitted slider would allow you to move that point downward towards the chest to some maximum. Hmm, but that would require more than one set of control points I would think, to prevent weird angles.

That's rather a lot of work just to add fidelity to female chests, I think. We could probably have customizable power emanation points for less work than that.

Difficult to tell in the screenshot, but the concept art shows it to be a kind of trenchcoat.

In this case we are, in general, talking about the constrained by clothing (and unconstrained by gravity) situation.

The reason we have the skin-tight or pseudo-skin tight options in general is probably that its simply easier to make them, and thus it was easier at the beginning of time to allow for lots of options in that area. Clothing that requires extra geometry takes longer to make regardless of the visual intent.

I have a feeling, though, that properly functioning garment constraints would exceed the limitations of the current geometry scalers to hard code and the polygon count of the characters to model.


Not exactly true. The shirts and vests are actual geometry that "skin" across the chest in a non-conformal way (I use them specifically for that purpose). But the problem is that the part across the center of the chest doesn't scale with the chest scalers, so the breasts get larger but the shirts stay "pinned" at the same distance above the cleavage.

But amazingly (although not surprisingly given how the sliders are likely implemented) the Armored sets suffer the exact same problem, just to a less obvious degree. Because the center point of the armor is so much higher than the chest, its less obvious that it also doesn't move when you change the chest sliders: the armor actually flexes outward on both sides while the center point stays in place: your armor actually goes from being convex to being concave at high values of the chest slider.

It isn't just more geometry that we need to address this one specific issue, its a change to how the sliders actually work to move this control point (or points) in a more realistic fashion. But I don't know if that causes other potential problems. But I think solving this issue is likely to make other issues more obvious, which I think can only be solved by better tessellation of the player models.


To be honest, the chest sliders mess up all the non-decal chest symbols already. Try making, say, a female model with the stealth chest detail and a skin tight top. Set the top (or skin) to a color with a high contrast to the stealth detail. Now move the chest slider from absolute minimum to absolute maximum. Yeah, that's really odd.

Anything is possible, but I think that if that were true "portals" would more likely be rooms you entered and then had some process applied to you while you waited, as opposed to gateways you passed through. The portal mechanism itself suggests that the process of traveling from one universe to another is an actual traversal, and not a transformation.

Actually, while some are debatable, two of your examples in particular:





are essentially identical in fundamental style to the way CoH renders tights or "skin" tops on female chests. The first one has the same contour-following top that can only be achieved in real life by having it painted on. It also has almost the same amount of "separation" that seems to bother you so much (which is also not proper to call "unrealistic" given the wide variety of breast shapes).

Stargirl's top is literally painted on. Except for the small creases and rolled up edge at the bottom, its actually even more unrealistically contour-following than CoH tops are. Her breasts jut out in a manner entirely inconsistent with spandex, and more consistent with latex body paint.

Really, I think this is a matter of being primed to find fault and not being disappointed. Especially because while the two above are unambiguously flawed in the same way you think most tops with skin are flawed, a third (ms marvel) is questionable, because the way its drawn the shadows clearly show that the material is not stretched across the chest in a typical ("realistic") manner, but follows substantial cleavage. The Batgirl image has the same problem: the *bat* seems to be stretched across in a relatively flat surface, but the shadows don't follow that contour, suggesting that the *costume* is following her cleavage and the yellow bat is essentially pasted on top. That's almost half of the examples you offered to show the correct way of doing it, doing it exactly the way CoH's models do it.

In any case, of rather more importance to this type of thing is that until the game engine implements some serious tessellation, there are not enough polygons in the models to make realistic shapes, and that creates some really, *really* bad silhouettes at certain viewing angles. Especially at chest slider values above one third of maximum.

It gives 71.25% defense to all but psi and 71.25% resistance to defense debuffs. If you intend on fighting things with gigantic amounts of defense debuffs, slot one def and two recharge (the extra defense won't mean much but the extra debuff resistance will). Otherwise, recharge, recharge, recharge.

I don't think the dimensional names are actually specific location information for the dimension they refer to. Contacts often mention the names as something somewhat arbitrary: "...a dimension we designate..." or "...a dimension called..." I've always assumed that the names were probably derived somehow from more specific technical information about the dimension, like a "nickname."

Consider that dimensions are "discovered." If there is a coordinate or frequency system of some kind that tells a dimensional portal what dimension to connect to, its clear not all combinations of settings actually lead somewhere interesting. Some - most - may not lead anywhere at all. If that's the case, its entirely possible that "Epsilon Tau 27-2" is like the last four elements of the dimensional "signature" and Portal researchers have gotten in the habit of naming dimensions after those four which tend to be unique among all discovered dimensions, like a credit card receipt printing the last four digits of your credit card number as verification (by the way, if you see your entire credit card number printed on a receipt or bill, that's generally a no-no these days).

At least, that is how I've always pictured those names: as "dimensional nicknames" of the dimensions derived from their actual Portal settings or coordinates.


Initially, when I first starting running Tina, I had an alternate fanciful theory in my head. I thought it was possible that the dimensional name referred to a pair of exploratory teams and a serial number. In other words, "Epsilon Tau 27-2" was first explored or discovered by team Epsilon and then confirmed by team Tau as a double-check. The 27-2 was a serial number initially assigned to the dimension by the Epsilon team. And it wasn't a totally crazy theory: some dimensions don't have that nomenclature, like the Hydra dimension, and that dimension was not apparently explored by any portal exploration teams: in the multidimensional mission you're tasked with being the first to explore it. But I'm not sure if all of the portal dimensions and missions hold up to this theory really: I kinda forgot about it after a while..

Its really hard to tell because the screen shot has her arms crossed and the other shot is from directly straight on. The witch top is also just a texture but it doesn't look like it from straight on and I could see modifying it to look basically like Mayhem's top. Don't get me wrong: if its an actual geometric top I'd love to be able to use it, but I'm just not sure from the visual evidence we have if it really is a radical change in geometry yet.

And on the subject of new costume parts, the hair style is also new and I wouldn't mind having access to that, and there's also a hint of a new headpiece I don't recognize. There is a flash of white on both sides of Mayhem's head that is too high to be ears or anything like that. It almost looks like it could be some sort of silver band running behind her head, perhaps some sort of psionic doodad, something like what the Seers wear.

Hmm. I seem to recall that it was said Praetorian Earth doesn't have a Clockwork King. I wonder if that is because Mayhem is the Praetorian equivalent of both the Clockwork King and Vanessa Devore, and actually in some way both control and feed on the Seers. That could explain their short lifespans. And why there is no Clockwork King: on Praetorian Earth Mayhem has basically either destroyed or taken over most of the psionic minds powerful enough to either be a psionic master or a psionic servant.

Tights and Tops with Skin are, in fact, painted on. Literally. Shirts, Robes, Jackets, and such are actual geometry. But tights and tops with skin are basically body paint.

Have you looked at the Witch tops or some others like the tank top? Its more shading than geometry, but they look closer to Mother Mayhem's chest than most of the other tops do. From the screenshot, I can't tell if Mother Mayhem has any really distinct geometry, or if her chest appearance isn't mostly just clever shading as well.

So what you're saying is you want Going Rogue to add a "push-up" slider?

One way to potentially exploit the system would be to make a critter with two different attack sets, and pick a huge amount of weak attacks that collectively add up to a large score, but don't actually make the critter more dangerous because even if they live long enough, a critter can't make use of more than a certain number of attacks (because their attack chain, including the time the AI takes to make decisions, gets full). So the system places a limit on the number of powers that count towards your overall score: only the top five highest value powers with *Alpha only* scores count (there's no limit on the number of Alpha/Beta powers that count).

Power customization: maybe one day, not a high priority now, deliberately not included due to the complexity and time requirements.

NPC Costumes: never say never, but probably not any time in the forseeable future.

Picking random powers that exist from anywhere, including critter, temp, and other powers: never. Just never going to happen. Too many issues to overcome, and too far outside the current purpose to the customization options that exist now.

Ah, I see the problem now. The rule of five is negating the damage aura if you put a lot of melee attacks into the system. Hmm. The two ways I would have addressed this problem can't be done with the current system. But there might be a way around this problem using the existing system properties. Let me think about it and get back to you.

I spot checked some damage auras, and they seem to have valid alpha values as they should:

Death Shroud: 36
Blazing Aura: 39
Mud Pots: 35
Icicles: 36
Lightning Field: 36

Do you have a specific example?


By a factor of ten, definitely.


They should, but in some cases do not. I'll look into it. Mez protection "toggles" should be about 0.100/3, but in some cases they are 0.067/3.

This is tricky in the case of sets which spread their protection across multiple powers, though, like Fiery Aura. Can't give every single one of the powers with partial mez protection a high score for obvious reasons.


By design. The current system has to give a specific value that is the same regardless of the rank of the critter. This is one of the reasons defensive powers tend to be underweighted: they are valued based on their worst case scenario which is when they are given to minions. Tier 9s have a dual problem: not only are they not that strong most of the time when given to minions, they also sometimes aren't triggered at all because tier 9 powers are normally triggered by a critter when they reach 25% health or lower. For a minion, or often even an Lt, by the time they get that low, they die before they decide to use the tier 9. So the system is acting conservatively in those cases. If the system improves one day to allow for better rank-based scoring, those powers' scores could improve. I don't think anyone will mind much if that patched is ever added into the game.


Stacked up, endurance drain can be very devastating, and it can also be situationally devastating at lower player combat levels. But in a one v one fight, critters don't use it smartly and can't slot it, which makes those powers much weaker than in the hands of players. Endurance drain should probably be worth more than it is now, but its unclear how much more, given its situationality. In your opinion, what should a power like Power Sink be worth in principle: a whole attack (circa 100 points, or the alpha/beta equivalent)? Half an attack? Somewhere in between?


I'm not sure if Dark Regeneration should really be given a much higher score. Soul Transfer is also problematic because its trivially easy to bypass: just get out of range (or attack from range). Soul Transfer, by the way, is I think worth Alpha=55, which is more than half of one standard attack (100). Dark Regen is worth about 30, which is high for a defensive power (and it gets that score partially because it does damage: if the power doesn't do damage, it isn't allowed to have a pure alpha score at all by rule).


The system attempts to partially parallel the current design rules for normal standard critters, which obey a comparable rule. In general, adding defenses to a critter does not make it worth more. In fact, defenses are generally under the full discretion of the critter designer, within certain limits. Making a critter *weaker* generally reduces its XP, but making it defensives stronger does not generally increase its XP.

*Should* defenses count more? In my opinion, only under three conditions:

1. System factors rank into values so defensive values can scale with rank

2. System calculates true difficulty from collection of defensive powers, and doesn't have to simply sum the values.

3. System gives value based on weakest aspect of critter.

Rule 3 is the one most applicable to exploitability. Consider what would happen if you were to make critters with all of the SR set except for lucky and evasion. They would be AoE farm-fodder in spite of having very strong (for critters) melee and ranged protection. But an exploit-aware system would have to value those critters as essentially defenseless, or near so. The current system compromises here: you can make such a critter and you will get credit for those defenses, but defense itself cannot make a critter especially valuable on its own so while defenses are sometimes worth more than they should be, they are never (hopefully) worth enough to be worth exploiting.

No power should give literally zero. I'll look into it.

As to the examples, it seems the commonality so far are melee bosses; bosses with melee offensive sets and defensive secondaries. Melee powers are significantly reduced in value due to them being potentially exploitable by ranged characters (that's why you have to have at least one ranged attack or XP caps at 40% no matter what you do). The "penalty" for being a melee attack is 40%, which is to say that given two attacks one of which is melee and the other ranged, if all other aspects are identical and the ranged attack is worth 100, the melee attack should be worth 60. That does make it hard to make a melee boss worth full XP, since even with the one ranged attack in the melee sets you still have to make up a lot of ground.


Question: what do you think would be more fair: try to increase the value of melee attacks in melee sets (which honestly might be difficult without opening other exploitability doors) or simply adding a second ranged attack in the melee sets which would allow players to add another higher value ranged attack on the boss while still avoiding the strongest melee attacks in the melee powersets if desired?

Here's the worry on melee/def bosses: players aren't required to take mez protection powers, so you could just immobilize them and hit them from range. So the system was designed to be conservative with melee powers, so they would not need to be constantly tweaked to adjust to players attempting to create exploitable bosses. But maybe its possible the numbers are slightly too conservative as a result.


The charged armor thing is a typo. Going to have to double check for those: let me know if any others turn up.

I don't think that is true. My impression is that Nemesis works through so many fronts and intermediaries (these days) that a lot of people *think* everyone is ultimately working for him. But the 5th (Kahn) task force seems to contradict the notion that everyone is ultimately working (consciouosly) for Nemesis.

I don't personally view Nemesis as either a Mary Sue (Marty Stu) or Anti Sue. I see him as more of a failed Xanatos. He makes highly complex and elaborate plans that ultimately fail, with the exception that the one thing he's good at is planning back doors for himself to escape with. Its like Nemesis started off as Cobra Commander and is working his way up to being Dr. Doom, and we caught him in the middle of his evolution.

Could you illustrate with a specific example? Say, the specific powersets you want the boss to have, the powers you think would bring the boss to the "correct" difficulty for about 100% XP, and what options are left that would make it problematic to cross the gap. Also: does this happen at all levels, or just a particular range of them (especially higher ones)? The system probably is a bit conservative at higher ranks and higher levels, but I'm curious to know if its conservative to the point of excess.

I think "publishing" refers to the production issues surrounding actually getting a game build to the point where it can be pushed to a server for all of us to enjoy, or in a box for us to buy. Its fairly broad and can include things like product sales, patch notes, certain elements of quality control, deadlines, feature schedules, and things of that nature.



Hmm.


Mmm.


Scratch that. My mistake. "Publishing" means Skippy is in charge of printing kitten calendars on glossy paper for the office. Ask Skippy about those.

I call it a myth because the statement isn't "its really hard to find developers capable of constraining exploiters" but rather "its impossible because exploiters will always overwhelm the devs." I cannot prove its a myth, but I'm very certain its related to that other game balance myth: its impossible to make a balanced game that isn't trivially homogenized or requires endless disruptive patching. Its difficult but not impossible, and there I'm absolutely certain because I can point to counter-examples. My two favorite examples are this and this. If they could do it, that means it can be done. And you can't argue that MMOs are more heavily bombarded by exploiters: Starcraft is played competitively for money.


The most recent major addition to the Architect is the new custom critter XP weight system. Its designed to curtail exploitive custom critter design while not imposing a particularly harsh penalty on authors that do not specifically attempt to make exploitive critters. It hasn't been tweaked much since it was released yet, and I haven't seen too many bug reports on it. Do you think it does accomplish those twin goals of curtailing exploit while leaving non-exploitive authors alone? If not, I would be curious to know in what way you think its flawed, and whether that flaw could be corrected or if you feel its an irreconcilable problem within the system that cannot be corrected. Is it simply impossible to build a custom critter construction system that doesn't either allow for exploitive critters or forces heavy penalties and disruptions on authors? Is it being exploited even as we speak and I'm just not aware of the particular ways in which it is being exploited?

If its not, and its possible to make small but complex powers and rewards systems that are at least reasonably balanced and do not require incessant tweaking and disruptive changes to the game to maintain, then it suggests that is possible to do on much larger scales with much larger game systems. Its just a matter of extending the methodology in the right way.

Originally MoG had a much shorter recharge and could be made trivially perma. If you ran it perma you could defer the crash indefinitely and when you activated MoG it healed you to full (before doing the goofy health drop + cap res thing).

Ironically, when they *increased* the duration (and recharge) of MoG the devs inadvertently weakened it substantially, because one of the strengths of MoG was its heal to full. Cycling slower meant less healing, and having to sustain damage without regeneration within MoG for longer. And when it became non-perma it also magnified the penalties of the power substantially.

The MAST team is, as they have publicly stated, working on all aspects of the AE, not just specifically exploits.


The whole "no dev team can beat the playerbase at the exploit game" is something that one day, I would really like to put to the test. The notion that in effect the farm exploiters are using the AE authors as human shields, and the devs can't get to them without going through the authors first, is a myth I would love to obliterate.

No, they didn't. Actually they bought those arguments completely at the time. I didn't apply them to the highest priority context. I won the wrong argument.


Plus, you know the devs actually read the forums, right?


In any case, they didn't have a coherent plan to support the AE beyond simple technical improvements beyond beta, so they didn't have the allocated resources to deal with the problems that existed at the time. There's now an actual team within the development group now that is tasked with finding solutions to the problems with the AE: both Dr. Aeon and Black Scorpion have publicly self-identified with this group (its called the MAST team, actually: don't think I'm giving away any big secret there). They are actually, in fact, taking a more author-centric perspective on the AE and one of the meta-problems they are looking at is the issue of the disruptive nature of reactive patching to address exploits. Beyond that I can't comment on what specifically they are doing or when it might appear.

As a matter of fact, I do. But that's between me and the devs. All I can say is that I was not unaware of the exploit potential of the AE, and I fully believed in what I was doing at the time during closed beta, but in retrospect I made a serious miscalculation of deployment priorities. I will say that those in closed beta will know that the go-live date came as a complete surprise to all of us, because we all knew it wasn't ready to go live. Those with a really good memory will know that go-live seemed at one point imminent, and then suddenly got pushed back about two weeks.

I know why (one of the reasons why, specifically), and that's all I'm prepared to say. As to the rest of your silly tirade attempting to portray me as being unaware of the "big picture" regarding the AE, that too is a joke that only I and the devs I worked with during I14 beta (or afterwards) have the context to laugh at. Your entire point of view, encapsulated in this thread, is only a tiny, tiny part of the big picture, a part I had factored in already long ago.

Somewhere, there is a PM I sent to one of the devs on the subject of the AE. It specifically states, among other things, that one of the things they need to be aware of is players like you, using language like "its not yours, its ours." And I was telling them that players like you would be mostly right, and they would have to be prepared for that and honor that in some way. MMO game systems have a culture, and that culture cannot be trivially manipulated without destroying it, or having it rebel against you, I said. The AE was going to have one, or a fragmented set of them, depending on how they launched it and how the nurtured it, and they would have only one chance to set a course for it. They could change the AE, but they wouldn't get a mulligan on the players surrounding the AE.

Sorry to say, but your big revelation speech was trivially predictable (and you are not the first one to make it by a long shot).

I haven't investigated this yet, but there is something I might be able to contribute here. When I start the game client, after the login screen appears the game client seems to freeze for a few seconds. Freeze as in goes totally unresponsive and the window greys out (under Windows 7). Maybe five to ten seconds later, the game client comes back and lets me log in. Still trying to figure out why this is happening, but for me this only happens at initial startup: the problem doesn't recur during normal game play (not usually as far as I can tell).

It might be related to external drives I have connected. At one time, long long ago the CoH game client used to do a funny probe on all drive letters active on my desktop, which included drive letters I had that were associated with a media card 6-1 reader. This would cause the game client to often crash or do other bizarre things. Disconnecting the 6-1 made the problems go away. That was a while ago and two computers ago. But not long ago I had a "D drive" error pop up on me, but I didn't have the presence of mind to capture it. D: is my CDROM: no idea why the game would even be looking at it, and the error hasn't returned.

I'll try to make it a point to figure out what my client is doing on start up. Might be totally unrelated, or not. Hard to tell until you look.