Mikuruneko
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Posts
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Joined
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I would have to say I fall into the camp suggesting that it be the same as what MMs/Controllers/EATs cost to unlock.
However, my concern would be if it's 800 PP to unlock the AT itself, but you then had to purchase powersets within that AT. Would this hypothetical new AT come with 'bundled' powersets? Like:
New! <insert name here> - [800 | 1200] PP
Includes:
xxx Primary Powerset
yyy Primary Powerset
zzz Primary Powerset
...
aaa Secondary Powerset
bbb Secondary Powerset
ccc Secondary Powerset
...
Given development time, if that were the case, I wouldn't be too unhappy paying 1200 PP for a brand new AT with remixed and/or brand new powersets that we got a few of as part of our purchase.
But I think about what it potentially costs for a Freemium player to make a Time Manipulation character (800 PP to unlock Controllers, 800 PP to unlock Time Manipulation), and those points really start to add up quick. My feeling is that if we're going to drop a bunch of points for a new AT, we need to be able to use it right off the bat without having to pay even more. -
Quote:You are absolutely correct. A petition under Harassment could be filed and reviewed by the GMs. It doesn't provide immediate relief though and it's always questionable whether RP griefing will actually merit GM action or not. Given the number of griefers who say they don't care if they get petitioned because nothing ever happens to them, it's hard to say whether it's effective or not.Originally Posted by Moly
Crazy question but if someone is bothering you repeatedly with the snowball couldn't you just report them to the GMs? If you and the other people they are harrasing did this it would surely result in some action.
But you are, again, absolutely correct, that action can be taken by those being griefed. -
Quote:And I get about as annoyed with those powers too. =)Originally Posted by Dark One
You could say that about ANY power that breaks emotes. There's always the option to take it to a SG base if it gets truly out of hand. Failing that, you could bind the emotes to a keystroke so that you don't have to hunt for it.
Just remember, the more you react to the griefers, the more they'll grief you. If they don't get a rise out of you, they'll move onto other targets.
Though one of the big complaints I hear is that "everyone's always just RPing in their SG bases", that is indeed an option. I generally try to not react to the griefers, but it still kinda puts a damper on your day when people decide their need to troll you outweighs being respectful. There's only so much you can ignore.
Of course, that can be said about quite a number of actions taken by any group.
I'm not angry about it. I'm not going to quit over it. I'm certainly not going to let it make me stop RPing. I just wonder if the devs understood the griefing potential. I guess it wasn't enough to rule out doing what they're doing so it will be what it is. -
Giving some additional thought to potential griefing, I suppose the devs _could_ tag the Snowball power to be affected by the D's anti-teleport field. Since that doesn't work outside of the D proper the Chalet wouldn't be affected and the D itself could be free of that particular griefing.
That doesn't solve the problem with meetings outside of the D but since the D is a major RP hub it might be enough.
Just a thought. -
Quote:Certainly valid means to explain getting hit by a snowball in July. Reminds me of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. XDOriginally Posted by Dark One
RP it in the sense of Kramer from Seinfeld. He kept snowballs in his freezer until the summer so that he could pelt people out of season. Failing that, use it as someone scraping the frost from their freezer and making snowballs.
The problem I have is that getting hit by snowballs breaks emotes and having to constantly reset the emote you want your character to be doing for RP purposes because people won't stop hitting you with them is annoying.
Of course, I can solve the problem myself by simply not going to the D or any of the other usual RP hangouts... though that kinda defeats the purpose. -
The decision to include the snowball power as a permanent option in the Winter Holiday Pack is... interesting.
A number of RPers, while they enjoy a good snowball fight on occasion, find it rather difficult to enjoy their RP if they're dancing at a radio show or just doing their own thing if people continually pelt them with snowballs. Even moreso when the people doing the snowball throwing won't stop if you ask them politely to.
With the inclusion of that power in the pack, there's now no respite from this form of RP griefing. At least before, we knew that if we waited long enough after the event, it'd stop. Now we have all year long to look forward to people who feel the need to keep others from having fun doing what they do. Please reconsider this, or at least let Null the Gull give us the option to not be able to be hit by them (which you probably actually can't do with current tech, sadly). -
While the visual clue in that pic makes it pretty evident who the devs have in mind, I must agree that Statesman would be a better choice.
- The City of Heroes comics tended to portray Statesman as arrogant and self-absorbed. His continued leadership could pose a problem to effectively dealing with the Praetorian threat.
- Even Hero 1 thought Statesman was a bit too violent. Hero 1 (nee Honoree) could always be restored to his old self using the Lost Cure, perhaps with Sister Psyche's help in restoring his shattered mind, and step in to fill Statesman's leadership role.
- Statesman dying, as one of the fore-running Incarnates on the side of good, would give more weight to the role of player Incarnates who would have to step up to fill the void left by the death of Marcus Cole.
- Statesman's death would potentially even give Emperor Cole pause, as they share the same powers and source of their power and if Statesman can die, as powerful as he is... it could demonstrate to him that he's not as safe as he thinks he is.
- It would be an excellent opportunity for a major player-participation event in the game.
Anyway, just my $CURRENCY 0.02 there. -
Good luck and godspeed, Castle. It's a shame to see you leave. Thanks for all the hard work you put into this game, even if we didn't always agree with it.
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*sigh* Another cool costume code I'll have no chance to get whatsoever because I have to work and can't sit refreshing Twitter every 5 seconds.
I appreciate that this contest is open to everyone, but it's seriously unfair to the vast majority of the playerbase.
That said, since nothing's gonna change about it, I wish the best of luck to those who have a chance and hope they enjoy their new code. -
Yeah, and can we please get that PPD salute as a player emote? Please? How else can my Loyalist properly show reverence to Our Beloved Benefactor, Emperor Cole?
All hail Emperor Cole! -
Quote:Grats!Originally Posted by lll Phoenix lll
SUPERSCIENCE
. now i have to buy all the rest though. always wanted them but didnt have the money -
Quote:Hey, at least now you have that code AND waffles.Originally Posted by Terminal Velocity
It was one of the two I didn't have! *dies from choking*
MMM, waffles.
*laments the fact the Ring Mistress NA code is borked* ;_; I never win on these, it's depressing to see that the one time I seemed to be ahead of the pack, the code doesn't even work.
Oh well. Such is my luck =) -
If you all haven't checked this out yet, you should. I'm totally buying it, and I applaud Paragon Studios' decision to make a proper soundtrack-y soundtrack for the expansion.
AmazonMP3 link (sorry iTunes people, I'm not at home with access to it)
http://www.amazon.com/City-Heroes-Go...66867&sr=301-1
*really likes "Very Dark Places"* -
You can put me in the group happy to see the prompt back. I'd rather hit "No" than automatically get stuck with a -ToHit from one of the random fortunes. Hopefully they made the behaviour a toggle in the in-game settings, so we can choose to autoaccept if desired.
[Edit] Zombie Man beat me to it, and evidently there is no toggle. *sigh* Please don't remove the choice dialogue again, just make it a toggle, devs. Please. -
Quote:Well, after reading je_saist's post (and I do get that the GR website is Pro-Cole spindoctoring), it might not be so odd.Originally Posted by Zombie Man
It would seem odd to, even in a propaganda piece, lie about Shalice's true age.
They're stating in the propaganda that the Seers have a limited lifespan, and that "unstable" psy people have an even shorter one. If they revealed that Praetor Tilman (in whatever body) was in fact 80+ years old, it'd fly in the face of their statements about the Seers and could potentially bring other things into question.
[Edit] Not that I'd buy into any of that Resistance-spewed slander or even think to question the word of Cole. All hail Emperor Cole! Please don't send me to the Behavioral Adjustment Facility. -
Quote:I don't necessarily see an issue here. Remember, Praetorian Earth isn't just a goatee'd mirror universe, it's a history that played out differently due to catalytic events unfolding in a manner separate from ours. Perhaps in Praetoria, the events that resulted in the birth of Shalice Tilman simply ended up occuring later than in Primal Earth.Originally Posted by Zombie Man
Uhh... yeah. This.
I hope this piece is propaganda and not an attempt at cannon info, because it would greatly contradict established canon.
Though... I would prefer to hear an official response about the discrepancy. -
Seems it was just the connection I was on at the time. I took it back home (I was at work at the time) and it's merrily chugging away at 390KB/s. Why Steam can use full bandwidth at the office and City can't, I'll never know, though it's probably due to packet shaping. I just hadn't updated my Mac client at home in a while. >.>
Nevermind. *sigh, feels stupid sometimes* -
It was a wired connection, and I was able to pull 1MB/s from Steam when downloading some of my SteamPlay stuff. So very strange. Maybe where I was at throttles whatever ports the updater uses. >.>
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Has anyone else had an issue with the Mac updater downloading patches significantly slower than the PC updater? When downloading patches on my desktop I generally get around 200+ KB/s... on my Macbook the patcher barely tops out at 15-16 KB/s. I'm not resource-bound (CPU is mostly idle, memory has plenty free, and I know disk IO can handle faster).
I've also noticed this same issue trying to run City in Wine. Is the Mac _updater_ native or does it run under Cider as well? I wonder if there's something in the Cider/Wine codebase that's hampering the City updater?
I know the Mac EVE client seems to do better and its updater and patch downloaders run under Wine/Cider as well, so I'm not sure what exactly the issue is.
Is there anything I can do to help speed up the patch downloading for my Mac City client? -
Quote:I'll try turning off VSync and see if that changes things. As Texas Justice pointed out helpfully for me, I am running in Windowed mode at 1440x900. I will also do a test from a clean boot without starting up most of my other applications I usually run and see if that makes a difference. Should Windowed versus Fullscreen mode affect FPS any?Originally Posted by Tex
With vsync enabled, the GPU will wait for the end of the vertical sync to swap buffers (so you don't get tearing) and this can caus the GPU to go idle.
Also, if the CPU is not feeding the GPU data fast enough (or feeding it too much data which is taking too long to get to the GPU), then the GPU could be idle while waiting for more data to process.
You did not mention what resolution you were running at which makes a huge difference.
Also, other applications running on your machine can compete for resources (CPU/memory/disk access/network access/GPU) which can cause the game to not run optimally.
I think you should get some benchmarking tools and compare them to other people's results which similar hardware. Remember that CoX is an OpenGL based game. So doing DirectX benchmarks may not necessarily translate to OpenGL performance.
Regarding CPU usage: I don't think Process Explorer shows affinity for threads, but City of Heroes typically is using about 17% CPU time, and my usual total CPU utilization sits around 24%, which was the case when I took these readings.
I'll try to find some good OpenGL benchmark software to get a comparison.
UPDATE 1: Standing in Pocket D on Live, with VSync turned on: ~31fps. With VSync turned _off_: ~40-45fps, fluctuating and going lower as more people show up in my field of view. HUH. However, it's still not pushing my GPU to its max.
UPDATE 2: The only pure OpenGL benchmarker I could find after a reasonable Google search was FurMark, so I did some testing with that using the latest version, 1.8.2.
I ran it in Benchmark Mode, Windowed at a resolution of 1440x900, with Displacement Mapping, Post FX, and 16X MSAA turned on, for a duration of 1 minute. This resulted in a max GPU load of 88%, a max Memory Controller load of 59%, and a FurMark score of 3462, with a minimum FPS of 53, and a maximum of 65, 58fps average.
When ran with the FurMark standard benchmark settings of Fullscreen, 1280x1024, no MSAA, no Displacement Mapping, no Post FX, for 1 minute, the FurMark score I received was 5182, which based on their comparison table on the FurMark website, puts my card's performance somewhere between a Radeon HD 4870 and 2 overclocked 8800GTX cards in SLI.
This is all with stock Nvidia Control Panel settings. Benchmarking for this update was performed running the typical application spread I run on my system. I'll provide additonal information if a fresh reboot without usual additional applications yields any significant difference.
I'm curious to see what other people are able to get running the same benchmark. -
Issue 17 is live and Ultra Mode is lovely, but I have a couple questions regarding performance we should be expecting, and whether there's something wrong with my setup or with the game. Prior to I17 launching, and prior to enabling Ultra Mode after launch, my FPS was generally pegged to VSync with some dips depending on the zone, but generally never below 50FPS.
To start, the pertinent system information:
CPU: Intel Core i7-860, 2.8GHz, Turbo mode Enabled.
Motherboard: ASUS P7P55D
Chipset: Intel P55
RAM: G.Skill DDR3-1600 @ 1600MHz, 9-9-9-24 timings, 8GB
PSU: Corsair, 750W
Video: BFG GeForce GTX275 OC, 896MB RAM, running at PCI-E 2.0x16
Video clocks: Core - 648 MHz, Memory - 1152 MHz, Shader - 1440 MHz
Video driver version: Nvidia Forceware 197.44, OpenGL 3.3.
OS: Windows 7 Professional x64
And the pertinent City of Heroes client graphics settings:
Graphics:
Screen/UI Resolution - Windowed
3D Resolution Scaling - 1440x900
Gamma - 100%
FSAA - 4x
Advanced Graphics Settings - Enabled
Graphics Quality - Customized
Ultra Mode Options:
Shadow Mode - Shadow Maps
Shadow Map Shader - High Quality
Environmental Reflections - High Quality
Water Effects - Ultra Quality
Advanced Occlusion Settings - Enabled
Ambient Occlusion - Customized
Advanced Ambient Occlusion Settings
Occlusion Strength - Medium
Ambient Resolution - Performance
Blur - Bilateral
Advanced Graphics Settings:
Suppress FX When Close - Disabled
AGEIA(TM) PhysX(TM) support - N/A
Particle Physics Quality - Medium
World Texture Quality - Very High
Character Texture Quality - Very High
World Detail - 100%
Character Detail - 100%
Max Particle Count - 50000
Vertical Sync - Enabled
Mouse Cursors - Color
Use Geometry Buffers - Enabled
Anisotropic Filtering - 4x
Texture Crispness - Smooth
Shader Quality - High
Depth of Field Effects - Enabled
Bloom Effects - Regular
Bloom Amount - 100%
Desaturation Effects - Enabled
I am using TechPowerUp's GPU-Z, version 0.4.2, to monitor the specs on my card as the game is running. What I am noticing, standing in the spot shown in the screenshot below, is this.
Not moving, just looking forward, my framerate according to /showfps is approximately 30-32 FPS, with peaks up to 35 or so. According to GPU-Z, my GPU load is only 66-70%, Memory Controller load is only 7%, and Memory Used is somewhere around 530-540MB. If I change Particle Physics Quality to High, for some magical reason I _gain_ 10-15FPS, GPU load goes up to ~80%, Memory used to ~590MB, Memory Controller load to ~15%.
Of note, there is no apparent difference in performance between 197.44 and 197.45, FPS-wise, though I did not check Particle Physics Quality prior to changing driver versions. I was surprised when I logged onto Test for the 6 Year Anniversary celebration to find my FPS so low there, I remembered higher FPS earlier in the beta for I17.
My questions, based on this information, are thus:
1) What performance SHOULD I be expecting with the settings I have, on the system I have?
2) Why is the client _not_ utilizing my graphics card to its full extent? Shouldn't the GPU load be pegged if my FPS is this low?
3) Am I looking at an issue with the game client itself (optimization issues, whatever), with my driver, or with my actual hardware?
Your thoughts on the matter are appreciated.
The screenshot:
This is taken in Atlas Park, directly in front of the base portal, facing towards Steel Canyon. -
Kinetic Melee... which potentially gets stronger as it goes...
Brute Fury...
And support from a Kinetics corruptor/defender/controller?
...
...
I need a new Brute, I think.
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Y'know... there's some good points about the names... but I think we're analyzing them the wrong way...
First there was Statesman. The State, or a nation. A builder. A creator. He brought forth the game from nothing, gave us the State we play in. He fought the initial war for our right to survive. But his time is finite, eventually the founders must give way.
Thus, we come to Positron.
Positron, our positive caretaker, who has guided the State through dark times and good, kept the peace, ensured prosperity. But new enemies lurked on the horizon. Dark pacts were formed, plots were made to assault the City State and see it brought low, burned to ashes. The time to mobilize was here. Thus, the peacemaker stepped out of the way...
Which brings us to War Witch. Not even death can stop her. She can be multiple places at once, be multiple things as needed. The diplomat, the warmaker. She'll take the fight to the enemies of the City, she'll ensure we carry on through the trying times ahead.
I see nothing but good coming from this change. This is not a road to Doom, but a path to salvation!
... and I have way too much time on my hands today.
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And as a general response to the thread, a lot of you have submitted some really awesome reimaginings and updates. I feel sorry for the judges, they have a hard job ahead of them indeed.
Commander, your Statesman and BABs really stuck out for me, very good job.
Andi... the Fantasy Phalanx is made of win. =)
Good job, everyone. Keep up the creative and awesome submissions! -
Yeah, I agree that you missed the point of the contest with that submission. We're trying to update the signature heroes based on parts added to City after they were initially imagined... not another game entirely.
A+ for effort though. I like the Detroit Sister Psyche in particular.
