Necrotron

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Can't comment on any of the speculation

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Can't, or don't want to?

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Big update wont be CoH2, just will be a brand new forums. [censored] 'invalid form' or timeout stuff we got now..


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So putting the last 2 posts together it's obvious that GR can't - he keeps trying to but the forum keeps telling him it's an invalid form he's submitting.

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My coke! Damn you!

Speaking of cookies, quite a lot of people read my post, so I'd better get baking. Damn.

Early CoH arcs were written with the contact as the narrator, telling you where to go and who to beat up next. Plot twists were always shown this way. By CoV time, contacts were just as much a part of the story as you. Seer Marino will always stick in my mind as the contact that showed me how you break the mould. Doubly so when you play it a second time and see how wrong she is at one point, how mad with rage she was.

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Maybe you didn't arrest Countess Crey. Maybe you arrest someone POSING as Countess Crey, because the REAL Countess Crey was missing, and therefore the imposter KILLED THEM.

That seems to make sense. Well, Kellum-sense.

She's my new most-hated contact.

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That kind of logic assumes that the Countess is Nemesis. Only he makes plots like that, and plainly, the Countess is not Nemesis.

...Or IS SH- No. No, no, I won't start down that path. Figuring out Nemesis plots leads to people taking me to the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time, and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats and they're coming to take me away, ha ha!

Strewth, 360 replies to this thread and I can't see any flaming. This really struck a chord with the community.

One wish that consistently shines through is that of a unified game world, like that of WoW, WAR, or GTA4. There are an insane number of subtopics and related topics that bear discussing when this is brought up, not the least of which is how difficult it would be to implement. So I'm gonna go out on a limb and rant about it, if only to myself.

The first thing to consider is what exactly you're making this shiny new overworld out of. Some people say they should move the game to a real-world city, but to them I say that would be removing the Gotham from Batman, the Detroit from Robocop. The city is far too entrenched into the lore for anyone to conceivably say "Hey, heroes of Paragon City, you all need to move house!" and suddenly find that all 150,000-odd heroes playing the game (not counting alts) have invaded an unsuspecting US city. No. The action is staying within Paragon.

So, if a unified overworld is to be made, it will be of Paragon. This simplifies matters in some ways. Although such an undertaking would likely warrant the creation of whole new gameworld-creating tools, and the creation of the gameworld using these, the existing districts of Paragon City could theoretically be kept intact. You'd still have your Kings Row, Steel Canyon, and Atlas Park. There would just be a whole lot of new stuff between them. Creating all this new content is both a massive amount of work and difficult to design. What do you put in these areas? Do you chicken out and have the area burnt out and decrepit, without any points of interest? Do you create them as mere copy-and-paste city blocks, more generic than what we already have? Or do you ask the developers to fill in this new void fully? There is no perfect solution.

Assuming the developers think of some innovative way to leapfrog this problem - which they may very well do - you now need to integrate everything. This doesn't sound very easy at all. Each city zone has been designed as separate entities, each one blissfully unaware of any other zones. Putting them in the same map will likely break many of the systems the game uses. I can think of two solutions for this, neither being easy: firstly, you write a tool that ports a zone over to fit perfectly; and secondly, you manually fix whatever bugs come up. And there will be millions of the buggers.

Okay. With the planning, mapping, and unifying done, you now have a solid base to make your game use a single overworld. You also swiftly prevented your graphics engine from ever handling the city in a million years. I made a thread in the Suggestions area ranting about how the engine dealt with distance culling (removing far away objects from the screen) in a very bad way, and reached an agreement with PRAF, the cad, that this wasn't ideal and was the cause for choppy performance in Grandville. A single zone can already bring this graphics engine to its' knees because it simply draws everything in front of you, and now you're asking it to handle all zones? No. You need to do a serious do-over on the graphics. And while you're at that, you may as well update it with some new features to show off your shiny new overworld.

Finally. After all these hurdles, you're there. I have quite possibly missed out other pitfalls, these are only the ones that I can think of with my measly 3rd class computer games design degree. And even I see that the road to this shiny new CoX2 isn't an easy one.

But then. I've been thinking. Issue 13 is largely populated by stuff made by a few of the new NCNC employees. For example, the Cimerora story arcs were made as a way to teach someone the ropes of story arc creation, and they used existing assets. The other features of the issue were mainly issues to be undertaken by "code" people, as they were referred to; people who add in new game systems. Nobody will probably agree with me on this, but I can't really see what the Freem Fifteen (I can't type that without giggling...) have been doing. The mission architect is largely finished as far as I know, the only barrier to release being the customised bosses. And as there are now three times the amount of people employed by NCNC as before the acquisition, I have to ask.

What have they been brewing?

It's something big. Stupendously big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to how big this is. Could it be this mythical singular overworld? Could they be making an upgrade to CoH that satisfies our every expectation? Have they indeed created something so awesome that it will silence all naysayers, beat CO into submission, cure cancer, and end all wars? Who knows. But until they play their hand, all we can do is try to read their poker face.

If you read all this, I will mail you a cookie.

I said... wait, what? I ain't even mentioned the word 'thugs'.

I brought up power customisation because being able to change the appearance of Mastermind pets falls under that. Inheriting the costume from the player would take some new code, as would inheriting powers, which would most likely be stupendously difficult. I only suggested power inheritance as a way to make your own damage and that of your pets scale in a way that agrees with self-replication. It's not going to happen, but it's how I see the set.

The game is full of gimmicks, mate. And you're right, it would take a fair bit of effort.

Mainly the hard part is implementing henchmen that not only use player costume pieces, but copy your own. This is above and beyond power customisation. Then there is the rather large hurdle of making your duplicates inherit your attacks. I don't doubt we won't see a set like this, but it's nice to theorise.

I don't know about the design issues of self replication, but it MAY work. Many people hold that MM attacks, when all taken, can act as another 'tier's worth of damage.

This set would need to break the mold on masterminds. Rather than 3 tiers, you would be able to duplicate yourself an increasing number of times as you rise in level, peaking at 26. Say, ten copies of yourself at that point. At other levels you would gain attacks, similar to how new equip and upgrade powers bestow attacks to your henchmen.

It's actually a good idea. Hmm. The only problem is one of game design, which is quite large.

I'm glad we're on the same page.

Did you try out the 400% detail haxery?

I'm a bit drunk, but I still agree. CoX doesn't deal with fog realisticaally or efficienttly. and where is my screenie?

You can see the giza from those coordinates? How... strange. Before I break out the cutlery, let me see a screenshot so I can compare.

PRAF, I completely agree with your idea of what distance fog should be - a blue/green tinge on objects that doesn't obscure them. I live near a wooded area called Cannock Chase, where there are quite a few spots that let you see for miles. Why, at one point I saw a couple of tower-flat-jobbies in the distance beyond the town I lived. With my camera I could zoom in and make the detail out, but it was very heavily blue tinged. I looked it up on the map later, and the only built-up area past my hometown was 17 miles away from where I was standing.

I'm not asking for 17 mile draw distances in CoH, but it does show that fogging everything to the point where only the outline is legible isn't very realistic. Yes, this is a comic book game, but when you look at it you realise they're going for more of a realistic-comic-book look, not cel-shaded hand-drawn stuff. Like a live-action marvel or DC movie with lots of CGI. It looks believable, but it's very much fantastic and blown out of proportion.

As for the ins and outs of rendering, I can indeed speak with authority now that I have a degree in computer games design (barely). Just because something isn't visible doesn't mean work isn't gone into drawing it. Take this fact as an example: when you wish to draw a 3D scene, you render out every single object in a back-to-front fashion. If there are hills in the distance, you draw them. If there is a building in front of it, you draw that next. You keep going, drawing each polygon in order of distance. This gives you something that looks correct, but much work has gone into drawing objects that may not even be visible. If there is a line of very simple buildings obscuring a very complex hillside, you still draw the hillside. Techniques like BSP-culling (putting areas in large boxes and testing if the box can be seen), z-buffers (send rays out from your viewpoint and see what you hit), and LOD (level of detail, simplify objects if they're far away) are used to minimise wasted rendering time. CoX uses BSPs and LODing; z-buffers aren't really worth it on cityscapes, it turns out.

That was a HUGE wall of text, and if you don't already know how 3D rendering works, I'll be impressed if you got this far. (Not you, PRAF, you seem read-up on this already.)

Now, this fogging out is a disadvantage because it doesn't simplify the rendering procedure at all. If anything it gives you a performance hit, as it's an extra step to do. It does indeed cover up for objects that aren't drawn, but you already see a fair amount of object pop-up on 100% detail (that's when trees and such magically appear when you get near them). As for buildings, they're drawn at some level of detail with full textures, lighting and reflections on the windows, yet the fog shows you none of that. Thing is, you HAVE to draw everything that way, just in case the player gets close enough to see any of those things. There is no way to tell if a skyscraper is far enough away to not bother doing any texturing, so the engine does textures, lighting, and reflections for everything. The only reliable way to get that sort of information is to use a z-buffer, which CoX doesn't use.

At the end of the day, I may not be working for NCSoft, but car mechanics don't have to be employees of BMW to tell when your beemer has a broken starter motor.

Some people are convinced that the fog isn't working as intended on my machine. Either something is VERY wrong, or nobody has noticed just how bad it is. But before going into a rant about that, I'll validate my position by either proving or disproving that it's WAI.

PRAF, neko, or whoever can be bothered, drag a villain to St. Martial at the point -278, 236, -357. That should get you on the very top of a crane. Then, look south, at the Golden Giza (the huge ziggurat-shaped casino). If you can see it, I'll eat my hat. No, really, I'm wearing it right now. Seeing the neon lights doesn't count, as they are unaffected by fog. You should be able to see the giza in all its' golden glory, along with everything around it.

Play with the world detail slider a bit, even if your FPS dips to "I'm flipping through a comic book" levels. Notice how the fog advances and retreats between 50% and 100%, but doesn't budge beyond that. Despite this, the amount of detail and objects increases a lot, even when said objects are behind the fog. If you're feeling insane, use /vis_scale 4 to force 400% detail level (seriously, use with caution) which basically shows every object in front of you at any distance. Well... it WOULD if the fog weren't there. And no, I'm not complaining about that, as 400% detail level isn't allowed for a reason.

Oh, and /vis_scale won't work for 400% if you have your graphics options open.

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Doing shadows properly in this game would, bar me and a very small percentage of people on the face of the planet stupid enough to have bought a load of otherwise useless computing power, utterly crush your PC like a US Armoured Division encountering a bunch of half starved Iraqi militiamen armed with rocks in open field combat.

It's not just real time rendering of realistic shadows of at least an entire city block around you, it's real time rendering of realistic shadows of at least an entire city block around you whilst the light source is moving through its day cycle fast enough for you to watch your own shadow moving around you. That's not just difficult, that's utterly, utterly sick. The entire citys shadows would be moving all around you, non-stop. Morrowind managed to beat every bodily fluid imaginable out of computers just by being dumb enough to always be rendering the water at sea level you couldn't even see below you. Constantly moving realistic shadows whilst running through Paragon? The game might as well be presented to us as a series of comic book panels.

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You're absolutely right. I'm not suggesting they implement full dynamic shadows for all objects. That would be insane, even more insane than the WoW shadows recently introduced. But there are other ways to emulate shadows that don't heavily impact performance.

My main beef is that objects themselves don't have much shadowing going on. Increasing the contrast between light and dark is what I really want.

WinterFlare, that's much appreciated. You were complimenting me so much I was expecting a "...but you're wrong" at some point. And don't worry, I won't stop voicing my opinion. The main reason the jabs hurt is because of the community. If this was the WoW forums, I wouldn't care, but I hold the CoH community to a very high standard, so I take everything that much more to heart.

PRAF, I've been to Birmingham, Leeds, London, Orlando, Las Vegas, and many others. You're absolutely right that smog is more visible at low angles. Yet look at it again. At low angles the distant sky is bright, unaffected by smog, yet skyscrapers are completely obscured. Go to the area in question, one of the cranes in northwest St. Martial.

As another note, there IS one area where the fog is outstanding... Dark Astoria. It uses very close in fog to great effect, and it also obscures the sky just as much as buildings. The result is an extremely oppressive feeling zone, which nails the aura that they were going for.

I'm a bit disheartened (well, a lot) that people think I'm being that bullish. Believe me, that wasn't my intention. But you ask for valid arguments, so I'll get into some more.

Some people have said that mist and smog are to be expected on coastal towns. I can live with that. But no city has this much dirty air, and if it really IS that misty, why can I see the sky with perfect clarity?

The problem with City Of is the sheer levels of fog encountered. If indeed, heavy mist from being on the coast, and heavy smog from pollution really does cause things to look like CoX portrays them, then I must ask this simple question: Why can I see skyscrapers in perfect clarity in Los Angeles? This is both a coastal city and the most polluted city in America. But look at it. This city has the most smog and sits mere miles from the coast, yet it is completely clear. Sure, there's a bit of fogging, but everything doesn't turn grey and blend into the horizon.

Something else I want to add is how that picture exemplifies the lighting problems in CoX. You can see that it is an overcast day, with heavy clouds obscuring the sun. The dark areas are how CoX portrays all outdoor areas; dull, without contrast, and lifeless. The sunny areas are rich, with deep differences between the shadow and the light. Now, I'm not saying we should implement cloud shadowing, but the sky is pretty clear in CoX. Instead of drawing everything overcast, we should draw buildings as if the sun is shining brightly... which, for the most part, it does.

Now, on the concern of performance. My real bugbear with how CoX fogs things out is how it no longer saves performance. On 100% detail level, skyscrapers turn into slightly lower poly versions of themselves, which is mainly hidden by the fog. But on the 200% setting, buildings remain at high polygon levels for a very large distance, and despite that they're fogged out. We are asking our computers to work hard on drawing full-detail buildings, then throwing away the result.

I'm not saying this is the worst approach for speeding the game up. There are many methods that can be used for distance culling. You can simplify objects, you can cull things, you can blur them out, the options are many. For a game based in a city, there are quite a few methods that are better suited to it, methods that save performance just as well. Computer hardware may have advanced, but so has the software. There are methods out there now which people didn't know about in 2004.

This all brings me back to one conclusion: get rid of the fog. With that gone, purged from the game, NCNC can implement a better method for getting more performance. There is no need to raise the minimum spec if it's done right. And if NCNC were looking to add fluff for high-end PCs, they can do that, just as WoW has added in dynamic shadows. Personally, I think that was a cheap way of doing things.

I'm a bit short of time, but I can elaborate more if needed later. I hope this is satisfactory.

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Yes, you certainly do sound arrogant.

I think I'd be better off leaving you to it. So I shall.

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Chill out man. I don't want to be "that guy" on the suggestions board that can't handle criticism. Please, argue with me!

I think you misunderstood me. That, or I didn't explain it enough.

Removing distance culling and extending the draw distance a large amount achieves the same goal. If they want to implement a form of distance culling that doesn't involve greying things out, so much the better.

My real beef with the current 'fog it out' system is how it doesn't save much on performance. You can still see skyscrapers a long way away, depending on the current world detail setting. If you increase it to 200%, skyscrapers remain highly detailed far beyond the distance that the fog obscures things, yet you still pay for the detail in tens of frames a second. And please, don't say "you have no idea how the engine works" to me. I know I sound arrogant here, but believe me, I see absolutely no payoff for such aggressive fog. If you want to fog out truly distant buildings, so be it.

I don't want to cripple performance for people, I just want a better system than The Grey Death of Doom. That doesn't mean increasing the minimum requirements.

'Some' musings? Maybe I lied. What follows are the two bugbears that I have with current CoH graphics.

Firstly, the shadows.

I should conjure up a deadly hex on whoever designed the shadows in CoH. Not only is it a pre-calculated cheat, but it doesn't affect the right things, it isn't correct, it looks bad, it clashes with the fog, and crucially... it fails to convey any sense of lighting. Skyscrapers appear to be equally grey on all sides. There IS a difference, but it is too subtle. Area shadows, those pre-made dark areas that move around, are also broken.

Look here. The transition from light to dark is so jarring you'd think you had been smashed in the face with a frying pan. This particular example doesn't take the angle of the sun into account, so it's plainly obvious that the shadow just starts and ends at the mouth of the tunnel. And that car is completely bright, even though it should be very dark, which looks horridly out of place.

Character shadows are also poor. Human-sized NPCs get a blob under their feet, small NPCs (like those spiderlings there) get nothing. However, in this instance I will admit that stencil shadows, shadow volumes, and shadow maps can be very performance intensive. The real problem, when it comes to characters, is the lighting and shadows on themselves. Like the skyscraper, there is far too small a difference between lit and unlit. It's as if there is complete cloud cover, making everything look murky, even when the sun is shining brightly. So yeah... I don't much like the lights or the shadows. I hate them even more when they show through objects (see just east of the steel canyon green line).

Secondly, the fog.

Look at it. It's an eyesore. The outlines of buildings are shown in perfect clarity, and there is no fog obscuring the sky; yet there's some... magic fog between you and the building, which shapes itself to the outline. Everything just ends up blending into a VERY muddy horizon.

What really cooks my chicken (I can't believe I just said that) is how they're still rendered with all polygons. There's a performance penalty for looking at them, yet the fog completely obscures them. Why, why, why is it like that? What possible gain is there? You're still rendering skyscrapers in the distance, you're just obscuring them for no conceivable reason. Is it to save on textures? Most buildings share textures anyway, and with that in mind I doubt there is any tangible gain from isolating the odd texture. You just end up with a really murky skyline, horrible skyscrapers, and nothing to show for it. You go to all that effort to draw a city, then you erase all your work.

And look to the right... both of my bugbears coming together. Bad shadows showing through the murky fog. That is simply wrong.

The solution? Lift the fog.

Seriously. Get rid of it. Distance culling is not acceptable for a modern game based in a city. Grand Theft Auto 4 only gets away with it because modern consoles have 512MB of RAM, total. That's the minimum spec to play this game, and that excludes the 128MB and above that a graphics card has, plus whatever is on the hard drive for paging.

If NCNC really MUST do some form of distance-based culling, do what GTA4 does and blur things out. At least you can tell they're skyscrapers, and not muddy blobs on the horizon.

Fixing the shadows is more wibbly wobbly. It's the hardest thing to do in games today. I would accept them keeping current shadows, but I'd desperately want some kind of contrast enhancement. Widen the gap between light and dark, make shadows richer, and add highlights to some things. Do the same on characters. Honestly, you'd have no idea how much that would spruce things up.

So in conclusion... ditch the fog, and add contrast. You'll have better looking characters, you'll see skyscrapers from afar, and everything will look richer. We don't need new models or textures for the game world, we just need to use the existing assets better.

tl;dr, I want to turn this... into this.

If I were you I'd ditch windowblinds altogether. It sucks system resources like no other. Even though it can use your GPU to accelerate explorer windows, it ends up counteracting this by being a pig.

What do you use it for? I'm sure there are better alternatives for any use of Windowblinds.

Sorry if I'm being a bit dense, but are you putting ""'s around the command? Nobody seems to have mentioned it. It should be:

/bind "key" "command stuff"

Put the goto_tray at the END of the macro. That will fix it. You aren't the only one to have a Kheld and fall victim to this issue, don't worry.

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It's been suggested many times. The general consensus is that such a feature would very rapidly result in the death of the EU servers.

So sorry, but

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I don't usually bother on US/EU threads, but with that, I'll bite.

If as you say, an arbitrary restriction is all that's keeping the EU servers up, they deserve to die.

I don't care what you get on WAR. Quite a few ISPs throttle the specific ports that CoH uses.

I had serious issues updating on Demon, with constant file manifest hangs. Everything else ran at full speed, just not CoH. I changed to Be and got I13 in 7 minutes flat.

Standoff is right. To clarify, you couldn't install CoH or CoV by itself if you WANTED to.

A better way of seeing it is Alliance and Horde on WoW. Two separate factions with their own classes and zones, but a singular game, and a singular program.

Also, because CoH and CoV accounts have been fully unified as of July, you now have access to both no matter what account you have, or when you got it. So you wouldn't want 'only' CoH or CoV installed. Unless you're a thicky, anyway.


If you're still having problems with downloading, restart the updater a few times. That will cycle the port it's using to connect, and assuming your ISP is throttling these ports, you may get lucky. There's also the possibility your ISP is throttling ALL CoX ports. Who are you with?

There's a high probability your ISP is throttling the port. Who do you use?

Well, this is far too complex to be part of a graphics upgrade. Contrast upgrades, real shadows, and some kinda ambient occlusion. Although it'd be AWESOME.

The occlusion effects can be baked into some kinda texture, simulating the effect with only a small bump in RAM needs. The shadows would be awesome, but a bit demanding. I sure hope what we get at least resembles that photo.