Dr_MechanoEU

((oh the information on the website is stuff about the New You and Dream Partner program, Here be a link to the Unionverse page))

TVs throughout the land flickered, hissing into static for a brief moment before showing the symbol of a skull within a cog. It had been a number of years since such a symbol had appeared on Paragon and Isles.

A soft female voiceover follows.

"And now a presentation by Necrotech incorporated owner Doctor Edward Johnson."

Doctor Mechano appeared on screen, dressed in a smoking jacket, smoking a pipe and as the camera pans back out, a pair of pink fluffy bunny slippers.

"Hello there, now don't worry, I'm not about to attack the city, infact I've already done it, now over the past few weeks you've no doubt read the papers about one Ellie Stoneberg, you all ravished the news, printed the stories, even hunted her down and slapped a collar on her..."

Edward shook his head, "are you honestly that stupid? It was a FAKE! You morons were all fooled by this fake who acts so outlandish, so out of character and you bought it, you ALL bought it."

"I am a modern day professor Moriarty and you, you are all Detective Lestrade and one of you, ONE managed to be my Sherlock Holmes...well done to you Samantha Christophe...I shall be keeping my eye on you in future...and sending better ninjas damn you!"

"So yes, I've proved my point, the masses are ignorant. You know that you are better than this, I can make you better than this, stronger, smarter, able to throw fire or hurl cars, I can make you the best you can be for monthly payments, think about it...you can either be the schmuck that falls of such ruses or you can be the one that sees through them and defeats them."

"This is Dr Mechano signing off...oh visit the website for more information..."

The TV flickers to static and returns to normal programming.

Only the insane have strength enough to prosper. Only those that prosper may truly judge what is sane.
=][=

Edward cursed as he slammed down the phone.

"If you want something done right, don't hire budget ninjas...I swear one of them wasn't even Japanese...infact I don't think any of them were Japanese...I knew I should have just sent the Goop minions after her, how was I suppose to know she was a trained combatant..."

Complaining to nobody in particular he looked about the room, "alright, looks like we'll have to move up the price range...now the Family won't work with me after the Chronodyne incident and common Helions or Skulls would be just as useless as those Ninja."

He sighed and swung in his swivel chair and begun typing at the computer.

"The Knives of Artemis are having their own trouble, Malta won't work for me, I can't send my usual troubleshooter because everybody and their mother knows about Steve thanks to his online blog...so it's either robots or more expensive ninjas..."

Edward sat in his big, comfortable office chair, feet up on the desk. Reading a selection of todays newspapers...some of the less reputable ones were doing their usual thing, spouting off this and that about Ellie.

"Ah the guttertrash press, is there any bandwagon you won't jump on..."

He picked up the Paragon Times and read the article by Samantha Christophe.

"Hmm it seems as though there is one smart person among the press after all...now that just won't do will it...or can it...now if I silence opposition to the view that Ellie is a drunkard with uncontrollable Kheldian powers then it is going to look too suspect but all it takes is one dissenting opinion to sway the public...hmm I shall have to think about this...Steve fetch me my thinking coffee!"

Today: 4:30pm
Edward set infront of a desk, monitors arrayed infront of him.

"The world may have forgotten but I remember Ellie Stoneberg, I remember what got you in trouble a few years ago, let me see if I can't repeat that incident."

The Ellie Imposter ((henceforth refered to as the Elliebot)) had made her way into a very upmarket resturant, Edward having already pre-booked the table. Of course she got stares, that was going to happen after the charade in Pocket D.

Edward was looking through her eyes, making sure that there were no children present, he wasn't a complete monster after all. He observed her ordering from the menu, flirting with the waitress and now waiting for her food.

"Ok let us move from humilation to aggrevation..."

Edward entered the command code and the Elliebot doubled over in pain, he fired off the visual effects, making it look as if Kheldian energy was pouring from her uncontrollably, filling the place with an eyesearing blue and white light.

Then the explosion, the building shook to its very foundation and begun to collapse in on itself, burying the men and women underneath the rubble. He had made sure to make the Elliebot durable enough to survive, he needed her to be seen flying away from the scene after all. Blasting through the rubble the Elliebot took off at high speed, she would make a few stops to make sure to lose anyone or anything tracking her before returning back to the factory, after this her fuel cells would need recharging.

Edward chuckled to himself, Ellie had lost control of her powers many years ago and suffered majorly for it, hoping to repeart such an incident, especially since this time people got hurt.

He knew she would deny it, provide witness to prove she wasn't there but in denying it the distrust of her among the unpowered populous would only grow. This fear would drive up customers for his New You program, he would hold Ellie up as an example of how dangerous meta-humans could be...

One Doctor Edward Johnson aka the infamous Dr Mechano stood over a skeletal humanoid robotic form. The lights were down low, illuminating only the metallic body and a pair of faces. The grey skinned, elderly face of Edward who was making the last adjustments. The other the balding middle aged face of Professor David Thulian, Edwards' top research scientist and inventor of the blackhole gun.

"Well, lets begin this shall we, Mr Knightly was kind enough to provide the clothes, now we shall begin the next step, creating the replicant, now we've taken the holographic photos....I honestly can't believe she let me take those, we shall put on the synthetic skin over the...well you know how this goes, there's no point me telling you things you already know Professor."

"Oh quite Doctor, now since you've dragged me off my very important research for this, would you mind filling me in exactly why you've got it in for this particular woman?"

"Well she has always vexxed me somewhat, I don't hate her, I just find her a deeply annoying and I've decided that in order to get her back for all this vexing I should humilate her...well that and I feel it's been too long since I got into old fashion villainy business again."

Edward and David move the body into the mould, "oh...you did bring the wig as well right Dave?"

"Oh yes, made with real hair that I shaved off of many cats..."

"Good, Good..."

"Oh besides the humilation of course I will be getting her in trouble, we do have the holographic emitters correct?"

"Oh yes, while they won't strictly be Kheldian powers, they will look them and the overload will be highly lethal to those in the vicinity, activated at your command"

"This could affect the business you know?"

"Oh yes but boredom and villainy outweigh the needs to keep the company running."

Edward chuckled to himself, "well now, she'll be complete in a couple of hours we'll do a test run...and make sure the correct people don't interfere...the newspapers tomorrow will be filled with an interesting story...

((Stay tuned, there will be more tomorrow, this is just the setup post...oh and what happened in Pocket D last night was just the tip of the iceberg)).

Yeah finished watching Excell Saga a while back...and in a show of sad geekiness the phrase "My Tears flow like watefalls!" and "I must return to my hot sexy wife" have entered our catchphrase lexicon.

Once again I'm waaay behind the curve here and watching Angelic Layer and really enjoying it.

Especially since I could see that if such a technology takes off that games companies switching from the traditional video game fighting format to Angelic Layer and selling 'official' characters to use at official tournaments like EVO (under the guise that since they're not the custom ones it's all fair).

I actually found it quite funny that in order to fully customise and Angel you had to be a decent hairstylist and a decent tailor in order to get good looking costumes. At first I was like, "Really, no male Angels..none?" and then one turns up.

Also another thing I liked is the face an Angel controller is called a Deus, the latin name for God, don't know why but thought that was kind of awesome.

Ok my bad, people may still use open GL...but Graphics cards themselves don't really support it anymore which would be the problem, a lot of the higher end ones have to emulate it rather than actually support it.

Which as I said, is the problem with CoH since graphics cards which do support Open GL normally in the PC market are being phased out.

Lets be brutally honest.

When was the last time a Dev or even an OCR even responded to something in the Suggestions forum?

As mentioned above, the move from Development to For Fun shows that it is now the place where people put out ideas for people to daydream about, nobody takes the Suggestion section seriously anymore, not even the Dev team, so what is the point of posting in there?

Certain Game Engines will have certain advantages.

The Source Engine, for example, is apparently easy to work with and still provides some of the best easily used physics.

The Frostbite engine is for easily destructible cover and buildings.

The Crytek engine is usually focused on all out graphical impressiveness.

Unreal Engine 3 is used by soooo many people that there's a massive base to draw experience from but, as mentioned, it has problems with things like hair.

The problem with our current Engine is that it was made at a time when there were two competing APIs, OpenGL and Direct X. Now much like Betamax and VHS, one of them lost, nobody uses OpenGL anymore but CoH does. <ost modern graphics cards will have to emulate OpenGL because the don't actually support it properly meanwhile Direct X has taken over as the industry standard and all modern graphics cards support Direct X (This is another reason why it's a pain in the backside to get old games to run because the majority of them use OpenGL).

This is why there either needs to be a huge game engine rewrite (so huge it might as well be a whole new engine) so that CoX doesn't use OpenGL anymore and instead Direct X or they might as well make CoH 2.

The game engine is aging, badly, it's basically held together with duct tape, spit and hope at this point, they have no documentation on the Engine, all the old people who actually worked on the game and knew how it worked have actually left (BaB was the last one who really knew the guts of the engine IIRC).

So they're left with those poorly optimised, barely held together engine which nobody really knows how everything works and because they're still using this engine also means they have to pay Cryptic royalties (hence why Cryptics name is still on the loading screen) because it was their engine.

A whole new engine would solve a crapton of problems, bases could be done properly, full power customisation (as in APP/PPPs) could be done without any hastle, they could even add in things currently impossible like Swinging travel powers, running up the side of buildings etc.

Hence why there are a lot of rumours that the secret project is CoH 2 because, well, the Game Engine is in such a state there kind of has to be a CoH 2 in order to make any great strides.

I think the other thing that may attribute to this is the distinct nosedive in Dev-to-player communication and the 'Marketting Blackouts' that follow things.

Prior to two certain MMOs cropping up, the Devs weren't as tight lipped on upcoming features and I think the Marketting team was...well lets just say non-existent. Now we've lost all of the talkative Devs (Castle, BAB, Noble Savage etc.) have all either left or been moved to the mysterious 'second project'.

Dink is thankfully quite talkative, though I will say not as talkative as Noble Savage use to be IMO.

The Marketting Blackouts also compound this problem where Black Pebble and his team practically suffocate the dev team on what they can and can't say not to mention sometimes being borderline idiotic when it comes to certain things let Powerset or item release dates and them being stuck no matter what (yes I'm still bitter about Staff Fighting taking that freaking long to release when Beast Mastery was a bugged as hell and got released sooner just because marketting said so).

So yes, most of the Devs rarely communicate via the forums anymore and we've taken a noticeable nosedive from the so called Golden Age of Forum Communication a couple of years prior.

Notice I say Forum Communication, the Devs still talk at the Player Summits and on the Ustream chats but, as mentioned, the all great market team still throttle them with what they can and can't say due to fear the competition will somehow pip them to the post on...something...

Also the tanker Changes can belong in General Discussion since it is a General Discussion on what could be done to make Tankers more appealing in the age of Heroic Brutes, it's no a suggestion on how to do those changes but a discussion about the AT as a whole.

So Nya.

Yeah..you know...you could have just broadcast in the game saying.

"Hey can anyone show me what the celestial stuff looks like?"

I'm sure there would be someone that would show you what they look like.

I'm guessing you blew a massive chunk of change in order to get them before they disappeared and thus are now moaning about them because they're not something you wanted.

Besides just because YOU don't like doesn't mean it's stupid, you don't have to use the pieces in question, it is that wonderful thing called 'options' and 'choice' that we have.

Also your being an pancake but that's just me.

I also think it comes down to the fact that many people see the 'Suggestions' section of the forum as a place Suggestions go to die (i.e. be ignored by the dev team as a whole).

The Tanker Changes is an interesting one because it's less about "Tankers need a change and here is my suggestion for it" and more "How, as whole, can the community come up with a reasonable way to improve tankers".

The All Things Character art is a thread started by a Dev, no it does not move to Suggestions, it remains right where it is.

Cheap marketting idea...eh...suggestions are for ways to improve the game, marketting is a seperate entity to game changing suggestions.

Or in other words:

Stop being a grumpy git and let the mods sort things out!

Considering that here, for example, it was only available for 1 day (today) in about 3 theatres around the UK this wasn't a paid for film, I actually got to watch it free since it officially comes out on Monday and I work in DVD rental place.

So yeah if I'd have paid for it, I'd been even more disappointed.

Moon Nazis, Zeppelin Spaceships and...not very well done satire oh my.

Eh...even as a non-American I found the over the top satire on America that features in the film to be a bit...eh..I suppose I was expecting something more along the lines of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (alright the film isn't good but you know what I mean) and less Team America World Police with Nazis.

The film is fun just probably one of those things where it wasn't what I was expecting at all and because of that it went from "yay!" to "meh!" fairly sharpish around the 30 minute mark.

Satire on America being an overbearing warmongering nation has been done before, almost to the point where it is now cliched, I just wanted a straight up campy actionfest, the film does have these moments but they're too few and far between. It honestly felt like one of those poorly done parody movies like Meet the Spartans only with more class.

The other problem is...well I saw Avengers on Tuesday and...kind of still reeling from that film, especially since it was my first 3D experience (and it didn't give me a massive headache and eyeballs feeling like they're about to explode like the old red and blue 3D does).

So yeah, if you want another movie that does that angle of satire, go ahead and watch it.