Codewalker

Link please.

I want to see at least 33 instances of Atlas Park filled with characters doing /em protest at 11:59.

Let's make it happen.

Very true, and I wasn't talking about your usage of the term. I've just seen it thrown around a lot lately in cases where it sometimes applies, and sometimes doesn't.

As someone who has a bit of an inside view, that's not true. Everything is taken with a grain of salt, especially when it's claimed to be inside info that isn't supposed to leak out. If I were Brian Clayton, I'd be careful about what I said to someone, even a friend, who I knew was going to turn around and post it publicly.

ML is passionate, driven, and tends to be a little loud about her opinions. She also is quick to leaping without looking as a result of that. She doesn't represent the entire movement by herself -- even though to outsiders it may appear that way because of sheer post volume. What she says isn't taken as gospel beyond question, by any means.

Also, dissenting opinions are welcome so long as they are constructive and don't degenerate into petty bickering. Tony's made that clear a couple times, including asking some of the more rabid supporters to back off.

The Titan forums have always been relatively quiet, so the sudden explosion in traffic is taking some time to get used to. We've never really had to moderate anything other than spammers before -- all I can I ask is for people to be patient while we try to find the right balance.

Not sure how new it is, but "demopause 1" at the demo console pauses playback, which Arcana was asking if it was possible.

It actually takes a frame number, so you can pause at a specific frame from the command line if you want, but if you specify a frame number that has already played then it just freezes it where you currently are.

*cough* That's why I mentioned the bit about exactly that being included in the demo file, even though I was sure Arcana was already aware of that. A program isn't necessary since the game can already do it for you.

Vorpal's just a fancy animation that makes it look like you're moving, when in reality you're not, and end up back where you started. I believe that animation only works because of the unique nature of Vorpal's targeting -- directly in front of you -- and wouldn't be convincing if you could pick your own location.

Similarly Shield Charge and Spring Attack are both just teleports with some FX.

The new ForceMove mechanic would actually move an entity, whether it's a mob or the player, covering all points in between the source and the destination. In addition to the mentioned water ability, Utility Belt had an experimental flying kick style power that used it. Not sure if it would have made it into the final cut or not, but it's clear that someone was thinking about how "Shield Charge should have been".

There's also two test powers that use it, Temporary_Powers.Test_Charge, and Temporary_Powers.Test_Death_Grip.

That's not the only new thing lately, between that and Lua hooks, and several other new mechanics that had been added recently, it's clear that the programming team was in the process of making substantial changes to the engine.

Spawning a pseudopet on the target could always technically be done -- that's how the NPC versions of those powers work. Since the AI can't pick locations, all of their versions just spawn on a target. However the limit there is that it's a different target type, so it's not something you can just switch on and off without making an entirely different power.

Something like that might have been possible using power redirection, but there's still the issue of not having a UI to enable it.

Yes, you can record a 1ms long demo standing by the portal. The entire base map, including all rooms, items, and storage bin contents, is encoded in the "MAP" line at the start of the file, so freelook and/or demoediting will let you see the whole thing.

And yes, that means that those of us who knew how could tell what you had in your super secret hidden enhancement tables just by stepping foot in your base for a moment while you were the team leader.

Better than flip-flopping. Being an election year, there's already more than enough of that right out of the gate.

That one was removed in the last beta patch that went out. I figured it was cancelled since powersets normally don't get removed (and all the other WIP ones were still there), but you would know better than I what the plan was.

Aah! [Parkour Run] away!

Heh, my generic bin file dumper that handles most builds back to I18-ish weighs in at about 3MB, which in my opinion is about 2.5MB too big for what it does. That's a x86-64 release build, stripped of debug info. When I dug into it, I found that most of that bulk is static initializers from STL containers, and the umpteen different versions of them that got instantiated from all the possible classes that could be stored in them. Boost is a hog as well, as nifty as some of the metaprogramming you can do with it is.

Memory is plentiful until you use it all up. Also, don't forget that while CPUs are very fast, memory bus bandwidth has not scaled upward as quickly and is lagging behind. So you have a ton of memory, and a ton of CPU resources, but a relatively small bottleneck to load data from that memory. In practice, performance is limited by the CPU's L1 cache, and to a lesser extent, the L2 cache.

That's why these days my default optimization level is -Os. In my admittedly somewhat limited testing, being able to fit more code (and as a result, data) into the cache significantly outstrips the benefit of things like loop unrolling in the average case.

Using "resources are plentiful" as an excuse to be inefficient is the reason that the Windows 2008 server admin tools are so painfully slow. I peeked at one with a debugger once and cringed at the sheer bulk of the many dozens of .NET assemblies it was loading, just to view the event log...

Well to be fair one wouldn't normally expect that code to reference the fields by name, since that kind of information isn't necessary at runtime.

In this case, however, we lucked out that the devs used the same client build for development, so it's fully capable of loading the data from the source text files instead of the bins. I imagine that's for quick changes since they apparently used a local mapserver pointed at the same data files.

Even before that, ent_types was easy at least. They helpfully included the source files with the client for twenty issues.

I may not trust a computer more than my own skill behind the wheel, but I certainly trust a computer more than everyone else's bad driving. If I have to give up my own control to get that, it's probably a good trade.

And I have to admit it would be really tempting to use it anyway, especially on the drive home where I typically only can go 5-10mph on the highway anyway thanks to all the traffic. Kick back and surf on my phone while I let the robot deal with that mess.