Mister Rik

I use the free ClamAV on both my Mac and on my Windows 7 laptop.

Here's Neptune's Niece on Virtue:



To be honest, though, I didn't design the costume with Water Blast in mind. I created this character last December, before I'd even heard of Water Blast, to represent the planet Neptune in my personal solar-system-themed SG, Solar Angels:

http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/coh/solarangels.jpg

(big file, so I'm just linking it instead of posting it)

She was originally an ice/ice blaster and I got her to level 10 before I heard about Water Blast. So I left her at level 10 and then rerolled her as water/ice yesterday. The costume is supposed to look like a swimsuit/scuba bikini.

I've finished the first three missions of a story arc titled, "Solar Angels in Peril!", and I'm looking for a few tips.

Story summary: Dr. Margaret Sanderson, aka "Mother Sun", founder and leader of the supergroup known as "Solar Angels" has asked for your help. She, and the rest of her team have been mysteriously de-powered, several members of her team have been abducted, and she needs you to rescue those missing team members.

(Solar Angels is a team of my own themed characters on Virtue. Dr. Margaret Sanderson/Mother Sun is a scientist who developed a procedure to imbue normal humans with superpowers. The rest of the team is made up of volunteers who underwent the procedure, and each member represents a planet or other major object/feature in our solar system. They all have the "Science" origin, except for Ms. Mars, an actual Martian, who is a "Natural" sword/shield brute.)

So:

Mission #1: Rescue Ms. Mars (rescue ally) and then locate and access a computer. Pretty straightforward.

Mission #2: Rescue three more allies: Girl Mercury, Notta Planet, and Saturn Signal, removing the power-suppression collars they're wearing to restore their powers. Again, pretty straightforward. However, I originally wanted an ambush/defeat boss after rescuing the final ally (Saturn Signal), but I ran into problems with both options. With the "defeat boss" option, it seemed the boss had to be a "Boss"-level mob or higher, where I just want a Lieutenant and a couple Minions. The "ambush" option didn't work because it falls under the "non-required" mission objective category, so if I set it to spawn after rescuing the final ally, the mission completes as soon as I rescue that last ally and defeating the ambush becomes pointless. Is there a way around this? For now I've just left out the ambush/boss objective.

Also, three allies: too many? (granted, the last one is basically superfluous without the ambush/boss, though I've left her as an ally so that she doesn't simply run off as soon as she's rescued).

Mission #3: Rescue the final Solar Angel, Venus Lass. She's actually had her powers drained, not simply suppressed, so this is a "rescue hostage" mission, and she leaves after you rescue her, rather than staying to fight with you. Find a clue on another computer, and destroy the Experimental Power Drainer device at the end.

Mission #4: I haven't started this one, but it will be the finale, and here's where I want to know if I can do a specific thing. Destroying an object at the end of the mission will shut off the power-suppression effect, giving the remaining Solar Angels their powers back. So I would like, after destroying the object, to have Mother Sun appear near the player character. That is, Dr. Margaret Sanderson, now powered-up, will appear in her Mother Sun guise to congratulate the player, and maybe have the player speak with her to complete the mission. I've made two separate characters to represent the same person: Dr. Margaret Sanderson in her "civilian" identity, to function as the mission contact, and then her costumed superhero identity of Mother Sun.

Can I do this? The only way I can see to have Mother Sun spawn after destroying the object is to link an ambush to the object, but obviously I don't want her to be attackable.

I just tried it again while standing inside the University in Steel Canyon, with 5-6 other characters standing right in front of me, and the initial window said "No heroes found!". I clicked the "Search" button again, and it gave me a very long list.

Heh. I opened the search window while I was in Skyway City. It showed just me and one other person.

A note about iFreeMem - I noticed on its web site that there is a different version for each version of Mac OS X, but the last version they offer is for Snow Leopard. While that version seemed to work fine under Lion, I went looking for something more "current".

I visited the App Store and found a 99-cent utility called "MemoryFreer" that seems to work better than iFreeMem.

In any case, while both of these utilities helped somewhat, I've come to believe that this issue is deeper than simple RAM issues, and is likely a problem on my end rather than with the game itself. I installed a fresh, clean copy of Lion on an external drive and have tried booting from that drive before playing CoH, and so far, so good. I've come across a handful of corrupted files on my internal drive (and given the huge number of files on that drive, between my personal files and the OS itself), that suggests there may be many more corrupted files, and that may be the root of the problem. Though why the problem didn't manifest until the day I installed the Issue 23 update, and why the problems don't start until after I run CoH … that's the question.

If continue to have no problems after playing the game under the "fresh" install of Lion, I'll start the long process of fixing the internal drive. Alas, this is going to involve backing up everything important, and then reformatting the drive before reinstalling Lion and all my apps.

That's great to hear!

I have a War Mace brute who uses a baseball bat. However, according to her backstory this character is from the UK, so I found myself wishing she could swing a cricket bat intstead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_bat

I posted a tentative solution that seems to have fixed the problem for me:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=292468

I've hunted all over my game settings and interface, looking for a way to list all online characters (or at least those in my current zone), and I'm coming up empty.

Not that I actually have a personal use for this feature. I'm just assuming it must exist judging by some of the scenarios in which I receive blind team invites or whispers:

• I log into the game, my character is inside a building, and there are no other characters present. Nobody can see me, yet I'll get a blind invite within 10 seconds of logging in.

• Standing in front of an ICON employee working on my costume. I would assume that if another player actually spotted me there, they would know that I can't see the invite popup or my chat window while I have the costume creator interface up, and that I'm probably not going to back completely out of the costume creator (and lose my changes) just to see what that little beep was about.

• Flying at high speed through a zone and, as a result, being hard to click on, or even read my name as I go by, and getting invite popups.

So I have to assume people are seeing my character on some list and they're inviting me from there. Where the heck is this list?

In the last few months I've posted about a couple serious problems I've had with the game:

Paragon Market crash: Is this only affecting *me*?

Getting frustrated: apparent memory issues

I filed a bug report with Support about the first issue, back in March, but apparently they were never able to find the cause of the problem. As to the second issue, I've been trying to determine if I simply have some sort of hardware problem (bad RAM, corrupted hard drive, etc.) going on before filing a report with Support.

As part of my ongoing experiments, I decided to perform a clean install of Mac OS X 10.7.4 (Lion) on one of my external hard drives. This is the same external drive on which I have City of Heroes installed. So I installed Lion and then rebooted from that external drive. After launching the game, I decided to try accessing the Paragon Market. And what do you know, the Paragon Market came up and functioned perfectly! That pretty much confirmed that the problem was at my end — something on my internal hard drive was causing a conflict of some sort.

Since my actual main reason for installing OS X on the external drive was to root out the source of my more recent problems, though, I started thinking, "What is in my "old" OS X install, on the internal drive, that isn't in the "new" OS X install on the external drive?"

The answer to that question was: "FONTS".

For whatever reason, I had a memory from my past experience with Macs (going all the way back to System 7) that having a large number of fonts can end up consuming system resources. And I also remembered a little thing called "font conflicts". It so happened that I had over 800 fonts installed in my internal drive's Fonts folder (I do a lot of "hobbyist" graphic design in Photoshop, and really do use all those fonts). So my first step was to go in there and remove all those extra fonts. I opened the "new" (external drive) Fonts folder in one window, then opened the "old" Fonts folder in another window, and proceeded to remove every font from the "old" folder that didn't exist in the "new" folder.

Aside from the possible benefits of removing all the 3rd-party fonts, this led to another interesting discovery: I had somehow ended up with multiple different versions of all or most of the system default fonts. Like so:

"Verdana"
"Verdana.dfont"
"Verdana.ttf"

It was the same for nearly every font that gets installed with OS X - I had at least three different versions of each. Note that's "versions" not "variants". ".dfont" and ".ttf" indicate entirely different file formats for the same font. My 2008 iMac shipped with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installed, and since I've had it I've upgraded to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and then to 10.7 (Lion). These upgrades were done on top of the previous installs, rather than as "clean" installs. And it kind of looks to me like the different versions of OS X may have installed different versions of these fonts without deleting the old versions. Additionally, it's possible that Microsoft Office added its own versions of some of these fonts.

So, along with removing the 3rd-party fonts, I went ahead and deleted the versions of these "system" fonts that didn't match the versions in the "new" Fonts folder. In most cases, this meant leaving only the version that had the ".ttf" or ".ttc" extension. Once I'd finished this "Spring cleaning", I rebooted from the internal drive, launched City of Heroes, and went to the Paragon Market. And it opened right up and worked properly, without crashing my game client. Problem solved.

Additionally, I went on to play the game for a few hours, and after quitting the game I had none of the problems I described in the "Getting frustrated: apparent memory issues" thread. This will require more time and observation to confirm, though.

But ... fonts. Who would have thought? I suspect Apple didn't set up the OS upgrades to get rid of the old font versions because having them there wasn't going to cause any problems (and I think some older "legacy" graphics/page layout software popular on Macs may be dependent on having specific fonts installed so as not to "break" older documents). And indeed, I'd had no troubles at all except with City of Heroes. I think the key is that the "Mac version" of the game is, as I understand it, actually the Windows version wrapped in Cider. And I'll bet Cider isn't equipped to handle conflicting Mac font versions.

So to anybody else who is running Lion and experiencing issues similar to mine, check your Fonts folder.

On the subject of ambushes, though, I wonder how many people who leave them behind simply didn't even know they were there in the first place? I've noticed that ambushes are sometimes really "late". I was working through Mercedes Sheldon's arc (I think I was on the "Magic Man" section) last night on a level 24 character in Talos Island, and got ambushed between two of the missions. But the ambush took so long to happen (and I didn't know it was coming - this was the first time I've gotten this far in this story arc). I'd just exited one mission, turned it in by phone and accepted the next mission. Then I noticed that my Enhancements, Salvage, and Recipe inventories were full, so I stood there in the same spot while I opened my map and located the nearest store so that I could sell the Enhancements. The ambushers didn't even show up until just before I got to that store, and I didn't even realized I'd been ambushed until I'd already clicked on the store door. As soon as I realized it I came back out of the store to deal with it, but they were gone. I don't know, though, if they just despawned or if they wandered back to their spawn point.

In that particular case, though, the ambush mobs were within the zone's level range, so no biggie there if they were "left behind".