BackAlleyBrawler

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It was BaB's first, too!

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It was and I gotta say, not impressed. But I grew up in the south and midwest. I've faced down hurricanes, tornades, thunderstorms, hail, sleet, blizzards, you name it I've been in it. Got myself into a load of trouble by venturing out into a hurricane with a trash can lid when I was a wee lad. I was trying to turn myself into an untethered kite in 100+ mph winds before my mother caught me.

This earthquake just rounded off my exposure to natural disasters. All I need now is a volcanic eruption to complete the set.

Okay, so sure it was surreal, but no more surreal than vibrant green funnel clouds or standing outside in the eye of a hurricane.

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Sorry did not have time to read through the whole post.

Does anyone know if animation will change with blade weapons depending on the weapon you choose?

Meaning lets say I have a ninja blade stalker and I choose the red cap dagger as my blade will I wield it with 2-hands using ninja blade animation? Or will it switch to broadsword animation so I can wield it with 1 hand?

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No. Animations and FX will not change. The redcap dagger is not available for Katana users (handle's not long enough to wield as a katana)

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Is weapon customization only seen by the original player and other players just see the default weapon? Or do all players see each persons customized weapon?

I am guessing the latter is correct but wanted confirmation.

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It's essentially a costume piece. So anything that applies to a costume piece will apply to weapons.

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OK how about customizing my henchmen colors if I am a Mastermind.
Its states "Current power sets that benefit from this upgrade include Assault Rifle, Mercenaries/Assault Rifle, Bow, Broadsword, Claws, Villain Claws, Dual Blades (see below), Katana, Ninja Blade, Mace, Robotics/Pulse Rifle, and Thugs/Dual Pistols"
Why would they specifically say the primary for those MM ATs?

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Currently, no. This is only player power weapons. For Masterminds it's the bow, pistols, assault rifle, and pulse rifle for Ninja, Thugs, Mercenaries, and Robotics powersets. If you don't take any of those 3 non-pet powers available then you won't see your fancy weapon.

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will the weapon customization effect ninja katanas or bows?

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Yes, and this was actually a tricky combination to figure out. A Thugs/Trick Arrow Mastermind for example will be able to customize both their left and right hand pistol as well as their bow.

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Hey BAB, has there been any news lately on the development of that Psionic Weaponry set? I'd love to know if my hopes for it are at least remotely founded.

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Castle makes a strange noise whenever it's mentioned.

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not to mention the animation will be ripped from the exsisting powersets making it not even close to being new.


i look at it as a iron blade temp power gone wild..it wont be flashy,neat or cool..it'll be simple im sure


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...Have you even BOTHERED to read anything the Dev's have said about Dual Blades? They already said it was having new animations.

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Which is one of the reasons that BAB had those sticks in the pic of his cubicle. He needed them to try out different attack motions. Animators do that quite often, so they can tweak the way it looks in the game. If I recall from the behind the scenes documentaries for some films, BAB would probably have attached to the sticks and to himself (or others that were trying out the new moves) sensors/reflectors which is used to help record movements and placement of the blades and the character.

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No mocap!

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not to mention the animation will be ripped from the exsisting powersets making it not even close to being new.

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Every attack animation for Dual Blades is completely new. Both Stalkers and the other AT versions.

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That said, I still hate dual blades, but people voted for it. And plurality * $15 > minority * $15, and thats what it comes down to.

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The poll wasn't the only deciding factor for doing Dual Blades as the next powerset.

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Bab's office space, notice fighting weapons which is why I choose to go in stealth mode.

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Are those escrima sticks? Or are they longer weapons resting on the floor?

If they're escrima sticks, I hold out new hope for the Dual Blades set.

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Not really, they're just a couple of dowel rods with some electrical tape on them. I used them as props trying to sort out some of the new dual blade animations.

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Back Alley Brawler, you like Harley Quinn!? That is MY girlfriend! You back off right now, or I’ll start a thread about the color of Sonic Resonance!

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I'm not sure if like is the right word.

What you're not seeing in that picture is my two framed prints done by Alex Ross, both featuring Harley. Or my 2 macquettes of Harley (one from 'Batman: The Animated Series' and one from the recent Women of DC line). Plus the little plastic toy from many years ago, the complete comic series, graphic novel, and misc other comics featuring Harley in that big white comic box sitting there in the photo.

Yeah, I like Harley Quinn

Jay actually has a few Harley items I don't have. He is also fond of the little minx.

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Dear devs,
Please post on the boards more. The boards get lonely without you guys posting.
Love,
Vanden

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Dear Vanden,

How are you? Good I hope? If so, great! If not, then get well soon! Talk to you later.

XOXO,
Back Alley Brawler

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I hear if you bribe them with foods not found in California they will come. But try finding a food not found in California.

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As a person who moved to Austin, TX from the Bay Area in CA I can tell you this: I didn't know what real barbeque was until I moved out here.

We should send them a teeny tiny box of Texas Barbeque and tell them they can't have more unless the come to Austin.

(Works both ways, though. No one out here can make really good Sourdough bread, either. Sure, they LABEL things Sourdough... but it's not. It's a mere facsimile.)

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<----- Texan native, born in Conroe.

I don't think I'll ever be able to attend any sort of get together in real life because I'd wouldn't be able to decide whether to go as BAB the dev or as my main character and be able to hang out with friends/SG mates.

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The explanation that the devs gave us as to why power customization was not possible was that the auras and power effects could not be changes, they were 'baked into' the animations themselves.
Of course, redoing the animation without them and adding a way to select which power effects you want and their color and stuff (basically power customizaiton) was possible, technically. But was not realist in term of work load for them.
Now, if there is a way for the player base to give them these animations already done... then, I guess, power customization become doable.
It is one of the most desired feature for the game, from what I read...

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No, the colors for a lot of particles are 'baked in' to the particle's texture. The FX scripts themselves are completely separate from animations. In fact there's a lot of animations that are shared between different powers with entirely different FX.

Power customization has some pretty big hurdles to overcome.

1) Powers currently point to one animation and one set of FX scripts. There's no way in the our engine at this time to have them reference a different animation or different FX without just changing it in the power definition (which changes it for everyone). This isn't a small or insignificant change and without it we literally can't even begin to do costumized FX or animation.

2) Colors in FX are often baked into the particle textures. Most of the time they're not, they use a greyscale texture and tint the color with an RGB value, but there's enough that do use a colored texture that it would require quite a bit of work to overhaul and set everything up for customization. We did test a more global system that could just shift the hue of the entire FX script around the color wheel, but it's not a complete solution to the problem. Namely that FX aren't normalized to a common color, there's no way to dynamically change this 'shift' value, and there's still issues with blend modes.

3) Particle FX most often use an additive blend mode. Additive means that the closer a color is to white (in RBG values), the more opaque it becomes. Secondaries like yellow (255, 255, 0) are more opaque than primaries like red (255, 0, 0). Black (0, 0 ,0) ends up being completely transparent. So to take the Energy Melee FX for example and make a black version or even a dark purple (64, 0, 64) or dark blue (0, 0, 64), we'd have to do more than just shift the RGB values around.

4) Even if the system could accept more than one animation or more than one FX script for a power, we don't have an in game system for allowing the player to choose this themselves. We could make one (probably based off of the costume editor in some way) but it's still another chunk of time to devote to this.

Those are the major issues that I can think of right now, there's other minor little issues here and there but it all adds up to a tremendous amount of dedicated work from multiple departments to pull it off.

Hey everyone.

Just a quick head's up about the new CrypticAR rig. This is not the rig we use for CoX. While this was in development we've been casually discussed the possibility of community created animations, especially for use as emotes in game. While we love that idea, there are some caveats.

We could, in theory, take animations done on this rig and port them over to one of our existing player model rigs, but none of us have really had the time to look into exactly how much work that would be. Could be turnkey, could take weeks of scripting. Even assuming we could get the animations onto one of our legacy rigs (it's all just moving bones around after all), we still have to go through the process of exporting, converting, setting up sequences, and tying those new sequences into an emote. Not a ton of work, but also not something we can just dump into a folder and call it done.

There's also legal issues with doing something like that that we haven't really investigated and I certainly don't understand.

So, feel free to download it and play around with it. If someone does something really amazing, then we might more actively look into what would be involved in incorporating it into the game. But no promises.

Hamidon and the mitos do damage through Phase Shift to prevent Phantom Army and Phase Shift type powers becoming "required" for a raid.

Fictionally, Hamidon evolves. When he's continually defeated using a particular strategy or power he's naturally going to evolve a counter to it. This ability to attack phase-shifted targets is part of that evolution. Why not simply change the AI so it ignores Phantom Army? Because we don't want it to ignore Phantom Army. Using Phantom Army as a diversion is a perfectly sound tactic. We just didn't want PA to be any better than other pets/minions for that purpose.

We've gotten many PMs with similiar laments about defense, resistance, stealth, etc. All of which are reasonable complaints. However, it's simply not what this particular encounter is. As others have pointed out, in order to make a single entity that can be attacked by 50 players at the same time we have to step outside of the bounds of 'normal' rules in order to make it challenging.

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They learned from the last Event. They camped the hospitals for I think it was Cuppa's party, or one of the prior anniversary shindigs

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Not true. I was playing as Manticore during the Cuppa-thon and was responsible for spawning all of the critters during that event. None of the devs ever camped the hospitals. I spawned the RV versions of the Freedom Phalanx and Arachnos AVs at one point and I believe what happened was some crafty player managed to train some of them up into the rez stations. I was babysitting everything I spawned and killing off the things that were wreaking too much destruction. In the chaos, I lost track of a few of the AVs and just assumed that all of the players had taken them out. As soon as I heard over broadcast that they AVs had gotten up there I went up and killed them off. It was never us griefing you. At least not directly.

I suspect that this is what happened this time. Ghost Widow was actually the only dev who had permission to spawn anything during this event. I don't believe anyone working at Cryptic or NCSoft attacked another player. We actually have very strict guidelines about what we can or can't do while logged into a signature characters. So if you were attacked by Lord Recluse it was undoubtedly one of the AI critters spawned by GW.

We took a lot of extra steps to make sure everyone was aware of what was going on this time so everyone could avoid it if they wanted too. We had 8 or 9 instances of Pocket D open during the event and things were only being spawned in 1 instance at a time, with plenty of fair warning beforehand.

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Hey gang. Here's what happened. Matt's been swamped with Inventions and I9. He approached me a few days ago about helping him write this article as I was the one who wrote the original design doc on all of the changes we're making to Hamidon in Issue 9. I wrote out the article for curse-gaming and at the very top, I left a blank section to talk a bit about Hamidon's back story, the history of raids over the years, and reveal what Geko's original idea as far as player strategy was.

I'll admit, I was a bit hazy on the back story. I've done the arc myself and I had the vague memory that it had something to do with a mutated scientist named Hamidon, but couldn't remember the details. All I could remember was his creation of the Devouring Earth, and part with Terra and the love letter. I didn't want to mess anything up and get the facts wrong, so I just left that section empty and set it back to Position for him to fill in. When I read over what he'd written, I didn't think that sounded like what I remembered. "But he's Positron," I thought, "Surely he'd know.

Well, he got it mixed up obviously. Between his own hazy memory and more importantly just being really busy fixing things for Issue 9, he came up with something about an ancient god. Brian, one of our mission/story writers, set out an email shortly after the article went up that that basically said "The Hamidon is a what what of what?"

So Brian, who actually knows what's going on in the story and was conveniently ill the day we sent this article out, has rewritten the backstory and we've asked curse-gaming to update the article.

Other than that, I hope everyone enjoys the article. I had a lot of fun writing it.