BackAlleyBrawler

Another quick post to bookmark the thread. I'm happy to report that most of the issues brought up will be addressed in Issue 16. So once again, thanks for taking the time to report bugs and give us the information we need to fix them.

Yes, welcome all. It's been difficult enough keeping up with the US forums, much less trying to stay involved with you guys across the pond. So it's great to have you here with us where you can be more directly involved in the community.

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Some particulars are left out of certain sets (no yellow ice patch, no bloody ice...). People will whine but then that's better than the alternative

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I can see why no yellow ice, but what's wrong with red ice?

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We want ice to look like 'ice' and because of how the FX were created when you apply a very saturated, non-cool hue to them they no longer look like ice and instead look like a cartoonish jewel.

Even saturated greens turn ice FX into emeralds, so we've had to desaturate the hues as they move away from the cool cyans/blues.

There's still reds, oranges, yellows, etc...but they're desaturated tints.

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Gotta give some major props to Babs and the animations crew. i16 as far as the new animation and color customization is all about him. And of course Castle and his cronies for the power proliferation. However, Earth assault is NOT a proliferated power set, by definition any "assault"power set is unique to Dominators, a combination of "blast" and "melee" powers.

Anyway great job guy can't wait to get my hands on this and test the crap out it.

The new MA animation do look a bit underwhelming from the videos I hope they look better in person.

Anyway Happy birthday Z I. gratz on the level.

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It's one powerset proliferated from two others.

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I just noticed I have more posts than BaBs and Positron!
BaBs: 1477ish
Posi: 1599ish
Me: 1679ish

HAHAHA! Eat it! I winz the internetz! Yeah me! I beat Posi and BaBs!

I hereby proclaim myself, King of Devs! Bow before me Posi and BaBs!

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA!


...

...Now if I could only get them to answer my question about custom animation (MA and SS) and if those can be set differently for each costume slot. Like how color customization works.


-Sin

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Checks reg date.

Congrats?

On a somewhat unrelated note, I just want to take a second to thank you guys for being so positive and excited about this feature that's consumed so much of my life for so long. It's been a very long haul and tremendous amount of work from many people on the team. Your excitement about this feature is making it so much easier for me to continue to be excited about it, and that's making it a lot nicer to get through the final stretches of finishing this issue up and into your hands. I can't speak for the other people who've done a tremendous amount of work on this feature as well, but for me personally...it's a huge deal.

The handful of non-glowing responses I've seen have been very reasonable and more in the realm of disappointed but still understanding. For that I'm exceedingly grateful.

So thanks for staying positive and constructive, it makes reading the forums so much easier and working on this game so much more rewarding.

"Mr. Moderator...tear down this thread!"

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Have we heard if we can change the powers customization based on the costume slot, or is it going to be one set of power color customization for one character?

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Powers can be individually customized per costume slot, but not supergroup mode.

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The powerset has a color choice box -- 'Default', 'Custom', 'Bright [power]', and 'Dark [power]' (i.e., 'Bright Fire' and 'Dark Fire'). When you pick 'Bright', you get additive color changes -- the colors you pick brighten the power (i.e., the standard Energy Blast colors are 'Bright'), and when you pick 'Dark', you get subtractive color changes -- the colors you pick darken the power (i.e., the standard Pain Domination is 'Dark').

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Could you expand on this a bit? Maybe because it's because I'm tired, but I don't fully understand what this means.

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Let's see. You see things in particular colors because the objects selectively absorb and reflect light of different colors. Leaves are green because they absorb red and blue light, reflecting the green light; a white object reflects all the light that hits it equally.

There are two color systems -- additive and subtractive. Additive color is the way light works, and its primary colors are red, green, and blue. If you have a white object and you shine a red light on it, it looks red, because even though it reflects all colors, it only has red light to reflect. If you shine a green light on it as well, it looks yellow, because that's the color of a combination of red and green light as your eyes see it.

Subtractive color is the way paints and dyes work; in subtractive color systems, the primary colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow (notice that these colors plus black are the ink colors in a color printer -- the CMYK system), more inaccurately described as red, yellow, and blue. Each color absorbs all the colors but the one it reflects, so to get green, you mix cyan and yellow.

The additive colors are like shining a colored light onto a white-colored power effect -- if all you shine on the power is a fully-saturated blue, it will never get darker than a fully-saturated blue; if you reduce the intensity of the blue by adding other colors, the light gets whiter and the blue power gets paler, turning back to white. The subtractive colors are like drawing over the white-colored power effect with a marker -- if you use a fully-saturated blue, it will never get lighter; you reduce the intensity of the blue by adding other colors, which makes it darker, making the power effect darker overall, so the color fades toward black.

Or you can just think of it as a double-wide color palette where the "Bright" colors take you from saturated color toward white, and the "Dark" colors take you from saturated color towards black, but there wasn't enough room on the screen to fit both, so you have to pick one or the other, with both the primary and secondary colors having to be from the same set.

I'll have to see about dragging my digital camera to the con and getting some screen shots of the difference.

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All computer graphics use an additive color model, as that's ultimately how computer monitors will display the image.

As for blend modes, we use Additive, Subtractive, and AlphaBlend for our VFX:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blend_modes
http://www.modwiki.net/wiki/OpenGL_B...28Materials%29

That first page is more geared toward image processioning software, such as Photoshop, but the basic principle is the same and it's a bit easier to read and comprehend (ie, has pictures). We're Compositing pixels on top of the pixels from scene that's already been rendered, and the blend modes are the formulas that tell the engine what to do with the source and destination to get the final result.

The second link is for some basic OpenGL blend modes, and you can see the exact formulas used to derive the final output for various blend modes. Our instruction sets aren't exactly like the examples provided there as we have to incorporate dynamic values for RGB and alpha rather than simply taking a texture and rendering it onto the framebuffer.

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How exactly is Mind Control not synergestic with Empathy?

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How does being able to affect the thoughts and actions of others translate to the ability to close and heal wounds and restore the recently dead to life?

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Mind Control is a Psychic-based control set. Empathy is a Psychic-based buff/healing set. Thematically, they work for all intents and purposes. I don't see why you feel the need to include something that will, functionally, end up replicating similar, if not the exact same effects, to Empathy when it already exists. Infact, they've done that already - it's called 'Pain Domination'.

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There's nothing "psychic" about Empathy or Pain Domination, you're actually physically healing your targets, not just making them think they're better.

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Pain Domination is entirely based on mental control. You don't actually 'heal' anyone, you just make them ignore any pain they might be feeling.

Kind of like how someone hopped up on PcP can demonstrate feats of 'invulnerability'.

Which is why it's a villainous powerset.

Haven't been able to replicate any of the issues reported here:

Tried 'Drink Formula' and 'Super Serum' costume change emote, both functioned as expected and played the entire animation from start to finish.

Also tried using an emote (/em dance) while in 'combat' mode, and it correctly interrupted the combat stance and played the emote.

That's with our latest code branch for Issue 15 though...it's possible something is off in one of the incremental builds.

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If I can't change out the geometry for Spines then forget about it.

Just say no to banana melee!

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Apart from Spines being able to use the geometry from Thorns, and Thorns being able to use the geometry from Spines (both of which can be colored), there will be at least one other set of alternate geometry/FX.

As for Martial Arts, the alternate animations we have right now are mainly punches. The idea was to provide you guys with a way to make the classic, fights with their fists and feet, super-hero that many have been asking for. That includes a new animation for assassin's strike (Assassin's Blow?).

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Any chance on the alternate animations that you can set it to cycle between the two (or more), or choose at random at each time the power is used?

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Right now, the tech doesn't work that way. It's more an issue with the VFX not syncing up with random animations, as we've had the ability to randomly or sequentially play multiple animations for a while.

It might be something we could do in the future, but very unlikely to happen for I16s launch.

Ya know, I remember pitching this as a vet reward back when I first found out we had a console command to do it. I still think it's a nifty idea. Great for unfettering the shadow shard maps, which are impractical to uncover by hand...great for revealing the sewers or abandoned sewers for a new character.

Nothing mind blowing, but still neat and handy in some situations. Kinda glad to see it finally going in.

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the recipe slots are nice...but uh fog of war?...am i suppose to be familar with this term?

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Its a term that goes all the way back to the good ole days of command and conquer and other games that have minimaps.

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It's actually attributed to Carl von Clausewitz, back in the early 1800s.

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Apart from Spines being able to use the geometry from Thorns, and Thorns being able to use the geometry from Spines (both of which can be colored), there will be at least one other set of alternate geometry/FX.

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Is that the steel-y spines that whats-her-face uses? Uh, Silver Mantis? I always thought that'd be a keen look for a spiky hero and/or villain...

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No. It never occurred to me that Silver mantis had spines. The ones I made are very basic, conical, metal spikes.

I am not a hotshot modeler/texture artist, so I prefer to work on the basic looking stuff that can accept a broad range of character concepts being projected on to it. My opinion is that the more specific and detailed you get with something like this, the more narrow it's potential for fitting a lot of character concepts become.

Similiar sort of philosophy for all of the shields and weapons I personally modeled. Except for the Rularuu stuff.

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We've looked into this one. Apparently the AI reacted funny to the phase changes. Currently the AI thinks everyone is a valid target, even though it can't actually deal damage.

Code is looking into it, and Bab's might be able to do something to make them a lot more transparent. That should make it much more apparent that the targets are phased out.

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I'm kind of working blind here as I don't know what this originally looked like or when/why it changed.

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If I can't change out the geometry for Spines then forget about it.

Just say no to banana melee!

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Apart from Spines being able to use the geometry from Thorns, and Thorns being able to use the geometry from Spines (both of which can be colored), there will be at least one other set of alternate geometry/FX.

As for Martial Arts, the alternate animations we have right now are mainly punches. The idea was to provide you guys with a way to make the classic, fights with their fists and feet, super-hero that many have been asking for. That includes a new animation for assassin's strike (Assassin's Blow?).

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Stalker - Shields or fire melee

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Shields doesn't mesh with most stalkers sets or the stalker theme. Fire melee functionally double but breaks theme since how stealthy is a man on fire?

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Where there's fire, there's smoke...and smoke hides just as well as being invisible. I could easily see a Fiery Melee or Fiery Aura Stalker work. Especially if Placate and Hide involved vanishing into a swirling mass of smoke and embers, and then reappearing in a sudden blazing flash when you strike, like a backdraft.

That could be pretty darn cool.

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We had to make one new animation for Broadsword Stalkers, but other than that they were able to directly port everything over or at least pull powers and visuals from existing powersets.

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Could you perhaps tell us what the AS animation for BS is?

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Sure. There's a 2 second windup, and then you stab your victim with your sword.

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Maybe next time.

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Semi-related: Castle, can you at least confirm or deny that the list shown on the site (Rad Blast for Blasters, etc) is comprehensive? Is it just a 'these are some of' list, or is that all the ones being ported? Just to direct the speculation from here, so we don't get several months of "But there could be more!" if there isn't going to be.

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If it is the same list I saw last week, and I am 99% certain it is, then it contains everything being proliferated in I16.

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You guys can probably blame me for these sets. I specifically asked them to proliferate sets that wouldn't require new animations or VFX, as we're already swamped with supporting power customization. We had to make one new animation for Broadsword Stalkers, but other than that they were able to directly port everything over or at least pull powers and visuals from existing powersets.

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No, I'm not because whatever the dictionary.com definition of the term, "Rube Goldberg-like" only has to invoke the illustrations of Rube Goldberg. The design of the powers system/animation system interface does. But its not especially complex. Although some Rube Goldberg systems are highly complex, not all are: the defining characteristic of Rube Goldberg systems are that they are more complex than they need to be. That doesn't mean they are very complex as such.

(Example: this is from the Rube Goldberg site in which sitting on a cushion forces air through a tube which blows an ice boat to a lighted cigar butt popping a balloon which causes a dictator to think he's been shot and fall over backward onto shutter bulb. That's characteristicly ridiculously more complex than necessary, but not very complex to understand in general).

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Actually, I wouldn't consider the animation systems to be more complicated than they need to be. I'd consider them to very uncomplicated, but because of the sheer number of animations that have to be wrangled, that simplicity makes the task extremely complicated and fragile.

The best analogy I can think of is to think of how the internet would work if URLs didn't exist, and instead all web pages were accessed using search tags. Defining an address for "The Official Beekeepers Society" web site would be pretty simple. "Bee" "Keeper" "Society".

However, the first thousand web pages were created using only 100 tags. Then they upgraded the web because there was only so many combinations where you could use "Bee" that made sense anymore, and they allowed for any number of tags to be defined and used. Then added about 5000 more pages into the mixture of old tags, new tags, recycled tags, massively overused tags, innapropriately used tags, etc...and the simplicity of the system makes it complex.

Tags as words isn't a very accurate concept either. Tags being keys that you would have to hold down simultaneously would be a more accurate analogy. So holding down "B", "K", and "S" would take you to "The Official Beekeeper Society." website, while holding down "B", "K", "S", and "L" would take you to the "Barbecued Steak & K'Bobs Lovers" website (great deal on aprons right now).

Then add in a half dozen or so cats who like to pounce on your keyboard while you try to surf the web, and you've got a pretty accurate picture of how our system decides what animation to play and why it's so damn tricky to keep everything working.