Hotaru

Congratulations, MP! I remarked at the Warburg PvP event that I was afraid you might deliver twins because, well, double XP weekend. Take care!

GlassGoblin, actually I've been demorecording like crazy since the announcement, and I'm probably not the only one. I think come December, there will be people around with years' of demos to share. I know I have stuff going back to May or June of '04, and I'd be interested in helping out with a project to update the Codex info.

Not sure when it stopped working. I've been playing back some demos with an issue 10 version of the game and getting sound, but not when playing them back with issue 23. I still have yet to try them with issues 17 and 18. But pretty much everyone is having the same "silent movie" problem with demos using the current issue.

Here's the Magi map for you:

Map maps/Missions/P_Endgame/Magisterium/P_Magisterium.txt

If you're willing to do a little demo-editing, you can even have heroes and villains on the SAME account meet up in non-coop zones. You'll need to record the meeting using the /demorecord command in game, then edit it later in notepad. Demo recordings are saved in plain text, so it's not a big deal to replace a stand-in with the character who couldn't be there via a little costume code cut-and-paste.

Here's a link to the wiki article to get you started:
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Demo_Recording

Happy filming (or at least successful filming--none of us are happy about having to do this so soon).

You could also look into the demo launcher created by Zloth many moons ago. It's still out on the web for download (requires the same .NET Framework as MIDS, though). I fired it up this morning and it still works like a charm.

More info and a link to the download can be found here:
http://home.roadrunner.com/~dasloth/...DemoLaunch.htm

That's the way I seem to remember demorecordings always being--no sound. I played a few back today, and that was my experience. But for a quick and dirty in-game recording resource with reasonably small output files, it can't be beat.

If you don't have it, you should look around for the demo launcher that Zloth created many moons ago. Good stuff.

Okay, here's what some tinkering has revealed so far:
The problem seems to be with using anyone besides Civilians from the Standard tab as your hostages. Using Arachnos or other mobs--even those who resemble civilians, like Nem Automatons--triggers the speech prematurely.

Some Civilians don't let you set inactive animations: specifically, the generic males and females in Business, Casual, and Citizen subgroups, plus males only for Police. Most others have a rather anemic selection of animations compared to Customs or even other Standards. But they are useful for mission testing purposes until this matter gets sorted out.

Also note: don't choose General Z or General Aarons from the Civilians, as both trigger speech prematurely just like customs do. There are probably others that do, too, but I'm not ready to invest any more time into that for what will hopefully only be a stopgap measure.

I'll be sure to file a bug report with my new findings, for what that's worth.

Grab bags or "fuku-bukuro" are insanely popular in Japan at New Years, which is probably part of why this became a problem in online games. But I doubt the Paragon Store could care any less about possible regulations in Japan, considering what a minor market it is for the COX games. Of course, they've never made any real effort to go after what until recently was the second largest market for movies (largely Hollywood-made) and dumped a COH localization project by NC Soft Japan--yeah, putting all the eggs in the Korea basket worked out real well for them.

I bugged this on 5/16 and in fairly short order got a canned response about bug fixes being priortized, some taking weeks/months/whatever blah blah blah . . . and it also mentions that the COH support team doesn't directly address issues filed as bug reports. So I guess we can expect to hear about this never. Maybe it'll get fixed, maybe it won't.

I actually have one mission where it's not triggering, and it seems that something wonky about the AE editor that doesn't give me the option to set up an animation for my captive for that one also keeps the verbal deluge at bay. I'm gonna try hand editing some other missions to delete the same info and see if doing that, while denying me starting animations, will keep them from blurting out their lines on other maps/missions, too.

I ran into this problem just yesterday--had Dr. Vahzilok as a contact on a mission I was writing and it wouldn't let me use that name in multiple spots in the text. That, combined with the error where hostages and captors spew out almost all their dialog the second you zone in, is pretty much killing my interest in AE. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to impact the real use of the AE, so everything must be WAI.

Test mode is working now--fixed with the latest update.

I have found the AE interface really slow at times, especially in opening the editor and publishing a story. And the other day I was having the hardest time just getting it to select a mission for some reason.

Okay, here's my offering:
The Mothership Strikeforce ID: 541329

Glad to see they got the tools fixed just in time to work on this.

Well, rather than redesign the whole gang, I've added a few new mobs at each rank to raise the challenge a bit without making it as trying as a group of completely custom critters.

You'll find them here:
Warriors come out to play
Arc ID: 449306

Just noticed something as I was going through an I5 demo from Training Room to get info on the new models--demo text files now include the HPs and Max HPs for PCs and mobs. Don't know how long this has been going on, but definitely cool.

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HOLY....!! Yeah, you need to make the change to make those work. I've never seen that problem before, myself. That stuff is all figured out when it initializes so maybe your computer is really busy when you're starting the demo?

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I've had that happen before--for demos shot during hami raids. Three out of my first four demos were like that (hey, there were like 160 people there) and some of them had a hundred lines of action before the header. But a little snip-snip and everything was back to normal.

Ha, dying is for chumps! Real cameramen take Invis and Phase Shift!

To make things run smoothly, some hammy raid organizers have asked players to wear less demanding outfits (no capes/auras), not run toggles like defenses that are useless anyway, and color code their costumes to make different ATs recognizable. I know some players might not want to lose the recognition factor, which is why I think it would be great for raids like that to designate "videographers"--people to not only catch the action for the "demo-challenged", but also to record people's usual uniforms and edit them into the finished recording.

Zloth, I was wondering if you or anyone else has had problems with demos recorded under "taxing" conditions--namely, 100+ heroes pounding the tar out of a blob who shall remain nameless. A week or two ago, I tried shooting a few demos of the heroic horde taking on this grim task, but the results were less than stellar. My first few attempts ended in empty files as my machine locked up (which is normal under the circumstances). Now I was a bit gunshy, so as the mass of heroes moved into the blob and the whole server seemed ready to seize up, I was starting and stopping recording every few minutes so I wouldn't come away empty-handed. These were borked, too. One had a good chunk of the header missing, while the other had the header about 100 lines into the demo. At least those could be repaired. Out of 6 or more attempts, only one ran just as it was recorded. Anyone else have this happen before?

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NPCs and Minions use different models than players. They also don't do nearly as much stuff or use any of the costume pieces, so that wouldn't be a useful way to test the new body types.

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Your standard male humanoid thug seems to be able to do just about everything players can do, and then some--play the bongos, use a pick, use a shovel, levitate books, steal stereo speakers, walk... If you play around with the MOV commands in recorded demos, you can make them do our actions and we PCs can take some of their insanely cool moves--like sitting on a trash can!

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[b]There’s a mission in the game that gives you a Freakshow disguise. This is a power, not a costume change. (It used to be “FX Maintained 3 POWERS/ITEMSANDTEMPPOWERS/FREAKSHOWPARTS.FX 0Ebut this no longer works and my old demo now just has me running around without the disguise.)

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I think this may be fixed with Issue 2--I saw someone "freaked out" in Boomtown this weekend, so it seems to be working in game. I shot a quick demo, but haven't looked at the text yet to see if it's using the same command as before.

Woot! Confirmation!

The "Theodore Knight" part stuck out like a sore thumb, but I love these kinds of riddles. Keep 'em coming!

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Man, this is so gonna turn things into "Six Degrees from kevin Bacon" at some point.

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You know, I had the line "and Kevin Bacon fits in there somewhere..." all ready to go and took it out at the last minute.

The Newsman exploration badge you can get in Faultline seems to have a tricky background to it. It reads:

The Theodore Knight building was home to many Super Groups in the years before the Rikti War.

Okay. That got my wheels turning.

Theodore Knight
actor Ted Knight
his newsman character Ted Baxter
the Baxter Building
home of the Fantastic Four supergroup

Man, that's just as twisted as the streets of Faultline themselves!