Arcanaville

Only one of those takes scattered foes and potentially brings them closer together (taunt) and not always. You're assuming they'd start in a huddle and slowly drift apart, forcing players to lock them down. If I was going to add scattering effects to the AI, I wouldn't leave such an exploitable hole in the process. The critter spawning code would be adjusted to mesh with the AI movement code so that they did not spawn completely within the footprint of most AoEs.

In other words, TSMC has absolutely no idea what is messing up their 40nm process. If true, we can toss that "chamber matching issue" out the window. That never had the ring of truth to me anyway.

Looks like Positron was playing with his mind-control ray around the office again. I wonder if we're getting an underwater zone next.

Lets review. You said:

That *is* conspiratorial. It suggests that NCSoft dictates what Paragon Studios is allowed to do to improve the game, and more importantly what its not allowed to do. The notion that there actually exists some person (or persons) in Korea that looks at requests for resources from Paragon Studios and then looks at Aion, and decides which Paragon Studios requests get approved based on what is best for Aion, because that's the favorite son, is ludicrous. That is *not*, as you imply, simply good business sense. That is the worst form of micromanagement, and very uncommon.


In any case, you're running around in ever tighter circles. You started off by saying that you wanted game advances to come out for CoX before Aion, and you followed that up by saying that the reason why those game advances were not coming out for CoX before Aion is because NCSoft corporate *dictated* that they come out for Aion first. And now you're saying that *of course* NCSoft is diverting resources to Aion from CoX, because its only good business that they would be. And through all of this you're saying that of course its obvious that resources are being stolen from CoX, because quadrupling the staff and funding a technology update to the game client is proof that NCSoft held back from writing a sequel to the game?

I think I'm having a BaB moment.

I don't think that is your problem. I just fired up CoH on my laptop, which is a Core2 Duo T9400 (2.53Ghz) and set affinity to one core. At a windowed resolution of 1352 x 860 and "recommended" settings, 3D sound disabled, and surrounded by the aggro limit of things swinging away, I am getting between 20 and 30 frames per second and the core I'm running on is averaging about 60% utilization. Even granting that one core of the T9400 is probably faster than your P4 regardless of clock speed, it strongly suggests that CPU performance isn't going to bottleneck you down into the single digits (the video reports as an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M). My guess is that there is probably some other problem that is causing the catastrophic frame rate reduction on your system.


As an aside, in modern terms no P4 (short of a liquid cooled overclocked rig) is likely to be considered "fast" even core for core. Fast enough for an MMO like City of Heroes, probably. But not fast relative to most recent games.

You're wrong for suggesting there's a high-level conspiracy at NCSoft to prevent CoX from implementing those things. I have never heard even the *slightest* hint that CoX was prevented from doing something because it might show up another NCSoft title. The reason we aren't ported to consoles is because Matt Miller and Brian Clayton want to spend their budget on other things. The reason we don't have an underwater zone is because Matt Miller and Brian Clayton want to spend their budget on other things (and because BaB would flip out). The reason we don't have apartments is probably because Matt Miller and Brian Clayton want to spend their employees' time on other things.

It is *not* because NCSoft said "we only have enough techno-juice to port one game to consoles, and we're not letting City of Heroes use it." The Paragon Studios dev team have their own plans for the future of City of Heroes, and it doesn't involve anything Aion is doing.


If you want to claim that aliens are stealing the trees in the Amazon, its not a defense to claim you're only trying to protect the rainforests. Its ok to want to protect the rainforests. Its not ok to want to protect the rainforests from intergalactic tree-nappers. By all means ask for underwater zones and personal apartments if that's what you want. Just don't claim Aion stole them from you. There is no underwater zone fund that NCSoft has locked Paragon Studios out of.

I dislike the fact the critters are too stupid not to scatter themselves. If I could change this, I would.

I'm not sure that sequence is quite correct. I think you might be conflating three separate things that were going on at the time: animation speed ups and adjustments, cast time/root time realignment, and cast time buffer reductions (this one is what most people associate with "removing weapon draw penalty").

Basically, at around the same time BaB was speeding up some attacks that were slower than desirable, and working to correct powers whose cast time was much longer than their rooted time (or vice versa), *and* working on the issue of weapon redraw buffering. Only one of those actually affected the weapon redraw "penalty" and I think it occured very quickly, from dual blades as the first real experiment to everything else soon after. Although I can't say with certainty that Claws wasn't fiddled with before that (in terms of weapon redraw - Claws was fiddled with in many ways some of which might have affected weapon redraw buffering coincidentally: the hyperfast pylon edition on test, for example, I believe had no cast time buffers).

Note: "ArcanaTime" is only relevant when it comes to the game servers queuing player commands and actions. The animation sequencers operate under a 30 tick per second clock synchronized (presumably) with the game client, have no tailgating, and appear to be immune to aliasing issues. In other words, they are immune to ArcanaTime or any other similar analogous problem. If BaB designs a set of animations to play one after the other, they will play one after the other frame by frame without delay.

Actually, although BaB did some trimming here, the real problem was cast time. When you use a power like, say, Slash, there are two possibilities:

1. The weapon is not yet drawn, so the act of using the power plays the weapon draw animation and then the Slash attack animation

2. The weapon is already drawn, so the act of using the power plays the Slash attack animation only.

Lets say that Slash's animation takes 1.33 seconds, and the weapon draw takes 0.33 seconds (I'm actually just making up numbers here, I don't actually know these numbers off the top of my head and its not worth looking up). In that case, because the weapon draw and the weapon attack animation are both "Rooted" (meaning you can't act during them) if you already have the weapon drawn Slash takes 1.33 seconds, and if you don't Slash takes 1.66 seconds.

In the old days, Slash's cast time would have been set to 1.66 seconds, which is as long as the worst case scenario. And what if your weapon was already drawn? Well, then Slash would play for 1.33 seconds, and probably play some sort of filler animation for 0.33 seconds while you were locked out of doing anything else, until the cast time expired**. What the devs did between BaB and Castle was tightened up the animations a bit, and then set the cast times to be the *best case* scenario rather than the worst case scenario.

Now, if your weapon isn't drawn you are forced to play a 0.33 draw animation, then a 1.33 attack animation, and in effect the attack takes 1.66 seconds. But if your weapon is already drawn, you are only forced to play the attack animation which is 1.33 seconds, and then because the cast time is also 1.33 seconds (not 1.66 seconds) you are free to act.

This is actually interesting, because in the old days there was no weapon draw penalty. Whether you drew your weapons or not, you were just as fast - or just as slow. The cast times were covering the weapon draw. Ironically, by trying to help out the players by removing the pervasive weapon draw buffer Castle and BaB exposed the weapon draw penalty, so that there now *is* a penalty.

Which the players immediately turned around and started pleading to have removed. Because no good deed goes unpunished. My prediction: if the devs ever figure out a way to remove the penalty associated with weapon draw but keep weapon draw itself in the game the players will start to ask the devs why it takes just as long to use an attack when you don't have to draw the weapons as it does when you do, and BaB will do a face palm so hard that gives him a concussion.



** Attacks then and now sometimes have non-rooted and interruptible animations that play after the core attack animation. Its what happens if you attack someone with a particular power and then immediately take your hands off the keyboard. Its what you do if you are done with the attack animation but haven't been told to do anything else yet. The extreme case of this is jump kick, which has a complete animation which you can see if you execute jump kick and do nothing else, but only the first half is rooted and uninterruptible so if you queue an attack it will interrupt the jump kick animation in the middle and begin playing the new attack. Its how the devs created a compromise between having a nice full somersault kick and not having jump kick take so long to execute it was not worth taking as an attack.

Anything is possible, but this is incredibly unlikely because perspective correction is application-specific. Not all 3D applications are games, and not all games have a first-person or third-person viewpoint where this would even make sense. Its is a million times more likely that if CoX *wanted* perspective correction that it wouldn't be able to enable it, than the reverse.

Are you actually suggesting that one way to eliminate the weapon redraw problem is to ask BaB to make all of the psionic powers that could be paired with a weapon set have animations that do nothing but make you glare at the target?

You're on your own on that one: I'm definitely not asking BaB to do that, whether he's on his meds or not.

But that's not a vision, that's a guess. What I meant (not seriously, but still) was that of all the things Branford saw, one of the things he didn't see was us opening the time capsule after everything else happened.


In City of Heroes, seers tend to see multiple futures and have to sometimes decide which are the most probable. Being uncertain about whether the event will happen doesn't mean the vision itself wasn't clear. Probably the thing that throws off seers the most is when they tell people their predictions, which causes the prophesy to influence the future it describes. However, Branford doesn't get a pass on that one because none of us read his prophesies and tried to alter the future based on them (so far as we know).

As an aside, The Minority Report (the short story, not to be confused with Minority Report the Tom Cruise movie loosely based on the short story) deals with this probably as well as anyone else. In the PKD story, the three precogs generate reports, and the system compares them. They are never 100% the same, so the system generates a majority report which includes all the facts they have in common. A minority report is generated with the extra information. The head of Precrime, Anderton (the character played by Tom Cruise in the movie), doesn't originally know this: this aspect about the design of the system is classifed. When the system generates a report that he will kill someone, he eventually discovers that this report is only the majority report, and decides to find his minority report to see if there is information that could clear him. However, he discovers that actually, the majority report is a system error: the precogs actually generate three minority reports on him, all different.

Normally, the reason for a majority report and a minority report is that the precogs see the future where someone is a murderer, but because precrime goes and arrests that person, the future is changed. Often, because the precogs are not perfectly "in sync" one of them will see the future that occurs *after* the other two change it with their majority report. But Atherton is special because he works for precrime and sees the reports: in his case there are *three* possible futures: the future the first precog sees, the future the second precog sees because of the first precog's report, and the future the *third* one sees because Anderton sees the precog's reports. In the first report, Anderton kills Kaplan. In the second report, Anderton learns of the majority report and deliberately tries to save Kaplan, changing the future. In the third report he realizes that not killing Kaplan would prove precrime was wrong (his majority report would be false), and ends up killing him to prevent precrime from being discredited (which is itself an interesting plotline handled well by the story).

The precrime computer gets confused because it thinks the three reports form a majority report (two precogs detect the murder) and a minority report (one doesn't) but they are actually three minority reports reporting on three futures, due to the effect of learning the future from the precogs. This situation was never accounted for because it could only happen if the head of precrime was himself seen to commit a murder by the precogs and saw his own majority report.

The interesting thing about the story is the peculiar thing it says about free will (a common PKD theme). You could argue that the precogs prove there is no free will, because they are always right. And yet, Anderton, apparently of his own free will, has to take action to ensure that they are right, because without that choice they would have been wrong. But since the precogs forsaw that Anderton would have to make that choice, was it really a choice of free will?

Or to put it in a more mind-bending way: the first precog predicts a future. The second precog predicts the first precog will be wrong. The third precog predicts that the second one will be wrong, and someone will come along to make the first precog right.

There are a lot of potential problems. I'll give BaB a clean shot at a smack-down by suggesting what I think is the critical issue, and letting him correct me with a big fat FAIL if I get it wrong.

The reason weapon draw animations are played in the first place is to provide a relatively "neutral" starting point for all the other attack animations. Theoretically speaking, they could simply forgo the weapon draw animation and jump straight from the end of one attack to suddenly materializing the weapon *and* instantly relocating your limbs and body to the correct position. But BaB, as an animator, would probably rather smother you in your sleep to prevent you from ever suggesting it again than actually do that.

The problem isn't how easy or difficult it is to remove the animations themselves: the game would run along just fine with *no* animations and our characters just translocating around like static figurines while power effects randomly go off around us. So the literal answer to the question "how easy is it to remove weapon draw" is "easy: just cut the weapon draw animation to zero frames, and you're done." But to make it actually animation-sane would require massive work to figure out how to, in essence, replace what weapon draw does with something that doesn't require burning rooted frames.

I believe this is what BaB is referencing in his post: every attack (well, most of them) would have to have alternate "quickdraw" versions of their animations that was specific to each possible mode you could be in.

(The way this works now, every power has an "activate" sequence and an "initial" sequence. If the power requires a mode that you aren't in yet, the game executes "initial." If you are already in that mode, the game executes "activate." Its "initial" that plays the weapon draw animation, then transitions to playing the actual attack animation. In this way, BaB can make one weapon draw animation and nine attack animations for dual blades, and have the game figure out what to do under all eighteen possibilities for draw, or rather all 49 possible combinations of mode transition. Even *this* is somewhat of a hack, really, at least in my opinion).

Now, separate from all of that, there's the issue that modes are somewhat "hard-coded" into the game engine. They do things beyond what the "data" of the game instructs the game to do. Without switching modes in the normal way you'd get cases where you'd try to do Air Superiority while the Claws are still drawn, which might stab you in the face. Or you might come out of Air Superiority and attempt to slash someone with nothing but your fingernails.

So, keeping modes exactly as they are, you'd have an animation nightmare. Mess with the modes to try to simplify the animation headache, and you might be performing complex mode-surgery on the game engine. Either way, my guess is that the animations sequencers get either a little bit more complex or a lot more complex.

I believe that is irrelevant to CoX because as previously mentioned CoX will not allow increased angular perspective. The only thing larger monitors (or composite displays) can do is make the picture bigger, not more panoramic.

Only if UltraMode eliminates that restriction is there any chance for panoramic distortion, and the lack of accounting for it won't make Eyefinity "incompatible" with UltraMode. It might just fail to remove some of the distortion that most games have when played ultrawide screen (and its questionable if removing the distortion is even the "correct" thing to do in all cases).

Until the NCSoft buyout, that technical advice *was* correct; it was the buyout and the additional resources injected into the dev team that changed that. And for the record, to the best of my knowledge BaB *stopped* saying anything about the feasibility of power customization shortly after that, and I starting advising people to back away from prior statements about feasibility (I had no knowledge at the time that the animation resources became available to do power customization, but I *did* know that resources seemed to become suddenly available to do other "impossible" things. Like Real Numbers, which is also why I terminated my participation in any thread regarding the lack of documentation in this game in November of 2007.)


As to what "we" know and don't know, what *I* know** is that it used to be a simple case of lack of resources that made eliminating things like weapon draw basically impossible. Today, its not a literal lack of resources but a matter of priority: it would take about as much work to eliminate weapon draw from all the sets as it would take to make several new powersets (I think BaB is underestimating above).

And it should now be common knowledge (because I did my best to explain this several times and BaB I think has done so a couple times as well) that there's no "special brawl technique." Brawl is basically just a case of using brute force to make animations for every possible special case and adjusting the bits and sequencers to line up correctly. As BaB references above, that's possible to do for every weapon power but would make the animation sequencers extremely unwieldy. I'm honestly not sure how BaB keeps it all working correctly as it is: it would drive me batty (and every once in a while he makes a mistake, and Elude starts playing the whirlwind animation when you're falling - which is an example of the massive number of corner cases the animation system has, and why its not a good idea to make even more of them without some method of managing them).



** I kid BaB a lot (and not planning on stopping now) but he's graciously helped me understand the animation system and what goes into it to a sufficiently high degree that I could probably rewrite most of it. Probably not the best tactical move for him because he can no longer dump the standard code rant on me anymore. In fact I've done it a couple times on him

Unfortunately, when the dev that actually literally makes them disagrees, his opinion is generally going to prevail.

Sure: Positron could order Jay and BaB and every other artist on the team to do whatever he wants overriding their intrinsic artistic judgement, but unless such commands are issued extremely sparingly, you'd be creating a hostile environment for your artists. Soon, you'd have no artists.

Delegation isn't just about workload. Its also about allowing your employees to take ownership of their area of responsibility.



On the subject of dresses, and flowing garb in general. I'm all for it. I have a probably foolish hope that Ultra Mode technology introduces better support for such things (which would degrade gracefully in non-ultramode). But as a user of the short skirts I have to object to calling them "tasteless" and "slutty." I think the short skirts are perfectly acceptable: even my MA/SR has a costume with the short skirt. Its not like I crime-fight commando or anything.

On that subject I configured my XPS 8000 with the ATI 4350, which is basically good for playing minesweeper, but with the intent of getting a 5850 when someone finally manages to breed them in captivity. With the 4350, I'm already Catalyst-loaded so it'll be slightly easier to just swap and go, and the 4350 becomes my backup card.


(Actually, the 4350 seems to be significantly faster than the Radeon X850 that was in my old system, which cost then nearly as much as the 5850 was supposed to cost at release. Moore's law strikes again.)

Its considered sport on Amazon to target such products. I've mentioned several times Denon's other entry into the high quality cable market, the $500 digital audio cable also known as the world's most expensive ethernet patch cable, and the laptop steering wheel desk which, while not directly expensive, could ultimately be the most costly product of the bunch.

Edit: even better is that the Denon AKDL1 shows only three left, and even better yet are the two weisenheimers selling a used and refurbished version.

If you want to build your own, FatherXmas' systems are excellent starting points: I have no real argument with any of his current system recommendations. On the other hand, if you aren't interested in building your own, a comparable system that gets close would be something like the Dell XPS 8000 which starts off around $849 for the base system. The advantage of the Dell: you don't have to assemble it, you can use their configurator to move the price point up and down, and it comes with a Windows 7 Home Premium license (which is not cheap if you want to be legit on the Windows license). The disadvantage: the Dell seems to top out videocard-wise at the 260, while with a do-it-yourself system the sky's the limit. Positron suggests a 260 will likely be able to run Ultra Mode only at its medium quality settings, while something like a 285 will run it at max settings. FatherXmas' recommended 275 is much closer in performance to a 285 than a 260, and probably has a shot at running near max settings in Ultra Mode.

I would presume yes, but with a caveat. I don't know if CoX will properly detect the Eyefinity single view resolution, but I do know that CoX works fine even on non-Eyefinity multiple monitor setups in Windowed mode. I can make a windowed (circa) 3840 x 1200 (1920x1200 x 2) CoX window. You just need the horsepower to drive resolutions that high. So if CoX doesn't properly handle the ultralarge eyefinity display, it almost certainly will allow for a windowed client across the eyefinity display.


This is true. Ultra-wide screens don't get you any better visibility. You can't do better than about 1.33 to 1 width to height. Any less and the client clips horizontally. Any more and the client clips vertically. At 1.33 to 1 at maximum camdistance (about 62) you end up with your character in the center of the screen with maximum vertical and horizontal field of view.

This means your best bet with an eyefinity rig would be three-across portrait, or three by two portrait set up, and you'd want portrait or pivot monitors.

I used to be an advocate of unique powersets, but I've shifted my stance slightly so that I now advocate having powersets be forced to adapt to each archetype they are proliferated to in a unique way. Its a middle ground position of saying let every archetype have the character of every powerset (to try to leverage the work put into it in terms of graphics, animation and effects) but still ensure that the different archetypes are, in fact, different.

Stalkers get assassin's strikes, scrappers don't. That sort of thing. I'd like to see everyone get access to everyone else's powerset concepts but without literal replication of all the powers. Some can be, where it makes sense, but there should be strong distinctions everywhere the opportunity arises.

The canonical example (at least in my opinion) of a proliferation error that should have taken archetypes into consideration but did not is Power Surge. Power Surge makes a lot more sense for Brutes than Scrappers, and proliferation should have taken that into account (scrapper resistance caps interfere with the probable intent of Power Surge).


As to what I would like to see in 2010, relative to the kinds of things being discussed in this thread I'd like to see a complete revamp of the tutorial. I have this mind's eye version of the tutorial where the tutorial is divided into sections, each section being optional. There would be the initial tutorial something like what we have now that introduces the basics of movement and attacks. There would be a section that talks about training and respecification. There would be a section where you could earn a temporary travel power that was perhaps a weaker version of the main travel types: flight, run, jump, port - with ways to try each one out to see which one you liked. There'd be a section on enhancements and inventions. And there'd be a section on teaming. I picture them like a pie chart where we start in the center, pick which slices we want to run, and ignore the rest. New players could run them all, the vets could just run what they want (veteran or not they might want to leave the tutorial with a minor travel power). The concept is expandable to whatever we want to include in the tutorial: it could even have a "mini zone event" that demonstrates what those are, exclusive to the tutorial zone (maybe something like the Steel Canyon fires). The sky is the limit on this kind of thing.

Basically, my thought is to add depth to the tutorial like other games have (CO comes to mind) while retaining the optional nature of the tutorial that we have now. And I'll admit this would be a lot easier to retrofit into the blue-side tutorial than the red-side, but I don't think its really all that difficult on either side.

Until I see what GR has in store for new players and starting characters, though, its hard to say if this idea is competely incompatible or significantly redundant.

People will pay six thousand dollars for eight feet of speaker cable.

Astronomically wrong, at least in my case.

1. I picked a side before you knew there were sides.
2. The side I picked was not to implement the proposed changes without a way to opt-out in the arena.
3. There's no side in this case, because the suggestion won't be implemented.
4. It won't be implemented because there's no problem it solves that the devs perceive to be a problem. Players envious or annoyed at the levels of performance achievable with the invention system are not a problem. Even when I've *directly* suggested to the devs that they might want to dial back some of the invention system buffs *a little* I've been told directly that a) those are the buffs they've determined the playerbase wants and they can provide in a non-game breaking way and b) the invention system was specifically intended to provide a way to earn those buffs.
5. The only problem Castle wants to solve, without completely overhauling the entire powers system, is to moderate buff super-stacking for high-end encounters, so he doesn't have to play the same game they first used in the LRSF: namely jack the levels up (initially it was +5) and use massive counter-buffing. That *might* cause him to try to get a limited form of DR implemented for those encounters, but PvE-wide that is dead as a doornail internally.

I'll start "crying" when Castle tells me they've suddenly changed their minds and are implementing DR PvE-wide. Until then, I don't feel remotely threatened by suggestions to do so posted on the forums, because the subject was already shot down internally. Its extremely unlikely to even be *revisited* much less reversed until well past Going Rogue, and if they consider it then it'll probably be at least two issues from that point before we see it. In other words, PvE is essentially safe from DR until winter 2010, with the possible exception of ultra-high end encounters in GR, and that's probably a less than 5% chance.

As to whether there's anything "inherently bad" about the idea, lets just say I consider it slightly worse of an idea than charging people extra to play scrappers because they keep posting AV-soloing videos.