Codewalker

Some things, like CancelOnMiss, Arcanatime, and effect conditions are probably actually easier to implement than to simulate. They seem complex on the surface, but that complex behavior is actually the result of two much simpler systems interacting with each other.

Take 'Arcanatime' for instance. There's no 132ms timer, and if you were to use one, you wouldn't accurately reproduce the timing. There's a frame timer (30hz) and a combat clock (125ms), and it's the sync between the two that results in an average cycle time of 132ms, but it will alternate between being a little higher and a little lower as the two timers drift in and out of phase.

Effect conditions are literally miniature programs in their own right, and RPN interpreters are dead simple to write -- it's implementing all the variables that they reference that would be the hard part. But to evaluate them the easiest way is for the world to actually be in the state you want it to represent, and just execute them.

CancelOnMiss requires complex math to calculate in a single bound, but if you're implementing it then you just evaluate the chance on each tick and you're done.

Pseudopets are similar. If your engine actually supports distinct entities, then they're no problem at all, they're just like an AI controlled ally, except not targetable. Programs like Mids have to bend over backwards and use all sort of ugly tricks only because they weren't designed with the idea of separate entities in mind.

Also, don't forget that Arcanaville has already spent a significant amount of time thinking about and figuring out how the combat engine works. I'm not sure if that was factored in as part of the 3,000 hour estimate or not.

It's more a terminology problem. It increases the recharge rate of the power by 33%. So a 100% increase in that rate results as the power recharging twice as fast as it did before (i.e. in half the time).

The problem is that the text in the game says it "reduce the recharge time of the power" by 33%, which is not anywhere close to what it's actually doing. The help text is wrong.

The same thing plagued the descriptions of accuracy/to-hit enhancements and inspirations for a long time, seriously confusing the issue there as well.

Edit: Just got an updated version and uploaded it; the one at

http://cit.cohtitan.com/downloads/SentinelPlus.tgz

Has been updated with fixes for all known issues. So grab a fresh copy and find us some more!

Guy and I had some discussions about the nature of the verification key while he was developing it. While I won't reveal what it is, I don't doubt it could be reverse engineered and spoofed by someone who knows that they're doing. It's not something you could google a premade answer to, and basic attacks won't work on it, but it is fast and relatively simple and probably wouldn't hold up to a detailed cryptographic analysis.

However, someone who is capable of doing that probably knows enough that even if it were a highly secure cryptographic hash, they could just fool the program into dumping some other data, or tap into it and modify the data before the key is computed, or any other manner of tricks.

The fact of the matter is, since the code runs on someone's PC and dumps that data locally, with the added restriction of not depending on network access, they are ultimately in control of it if they want to be. There's no way around that, and we all know it. So we're trusting the majority of people to be honest. Cheaters gonna cheat, no matter what you do.

If it were up to me it would be a 4096-bit RSA signed SHA512 hash with a secret salt that's assembled by hardened code with reverse engineering countermeasures, but that would be massive overkill and probably a waste of time to implement given that this needed to be available sooner rather than later.

I don't know, that looks pretty close to me. The only thing missing is a humongous gun (inexplicably with two barrels) in addition to the sword.

First of all, many, many thanks to Mind Forever Burning for his hard work on the Mac port.

Big news: We have a Mac version that is ready for testing. Once we've verified that it's working correctly, we'll update the page on cohtitan.com to reflect its availability.

http://cit.cohtitan.com/downloads/SentinelPlus.tgz

It should be as simple as dragging the app out of that archive into the folder that you want to save your characters into, then double-clicking the app while City of Heroes is running and you have the info window up. The OS should prompt for your credentials as it requires administrator access to run.

If you have the ability to test on both Mac and Windows, we would really appreciate it if you can try exporting the same character on both and verify that the files are the same. Failing that, if you want to test and don't mind putting your XML file somewhere accessible so we can take a look at it and make sure everything checks out, that would be helpful.

Those are the the original character selection icons from launch IIRC.

Those pictures look like they were extracted with a certain Viewer tool that a lot of people like to use. I recognize it because it doesn't preserve transparency unless you export it as BMP, and also because it ignores the dimensions specified in the texture header, so it ends up dumping the entire underlying power-of-2-sized image, which is why there's those repeating bits on the edges that shouldn't be there.

It was the general badness of said tool that originally motivated me to start exploring formats so I could write my own.

I checked my archived copy of the launch client and extracted and converted these:

That's understandable, though I honestly think much of the fault was with the metrics being used (which I'm sure were imposed by the agency and the advertisers).

People may have supersped by them, but almost everyone I know in-game knew about the Jester Clutch and the Tony Hawk ads. Either by word of mouth, screenshots, or seeing them as they flew past.

Some of that is possibly because they were 'new', but the idea seemed to disappear before it really had a chance to mature. I bet the number of 'impressions' was way higher than the metrics indicated. Advertisers are so fickle. :-/

Freakin' awesome video Leandro, can't wait to see the final cut.

I this this is part of why they haven't made everything on the market cost 0 points, or made all free players automatically VIP.

Because they still think there is some chance that the game might continue, and don't want to trash the database (or worse, have to roll it back) if that happens.

Yes, it does.

There was also a big layoff (approx 400 employees) in June, shortly after Nexon bought a large share of NCSoft. The severance from that layoff is one of the reasons that they posted a loss for Q2.

It seems that that's about when the "restructuring" really started ramping up.

If you have an old Windows install disk and find that VMWare or Parallels isn't an option, CoH can also be made to run under VirtualBox, which is a free virtualization product that has an OSX version available.

It crashes when you start it up due to an OpenGL bug in CoH, but I, uh, have a patch. If any Mac users find this is a route they need to use, you can PM me and I'll provide it.

You'd _probably_ have a better chance of it working with the Mac version of WINE than with Cider, but honestly I have so little experience with the Mac client that I'm guessing wildly here.