Necrotron

I reckons we can improve the graphics while leaving the models and most textures untouched. Removing that HORRID distance fog is a start; imagine seeing an entire city zone from the sky. That would want some engine tweaks to support, as it's a biit of a dog.

Next up, lights and shadows. Right now, buildings have pre-made areas of darkness that move with the sun. And... they're a bit [censored]. You can see them through fog, messing up faraway buildings, and completely stuffing Dark Astoria over. You can even see them in tunnels that pass under these shadows, or on walls beneath them. The green line in Steel Canyon, the trees, looky!

In the pre-beta screenies, characters had proper stencil shadows, and indeed the game still has a registry setting for this, albeit an unused one.

They need to go through the engine with prining shears and fix the shadows. I'm sure there's a shadow system out there that can fit the bill. Then they should darken the shadows a bit, and really emphasize them during sunrise and sunset. A bit of contrast tweakery wouldn't go amiss either.

For a quick and dirty example, go to the EU server status page. The lower area should give you a view of the sites background; that is an area of paragon city. Looks rather swish.


Oh and they really should do glowmaps on costumes.


EDIT: Where did Posi say there was an upgrade on the cards?

Here's an idea. The Fifth Column and a moonbase. That's the PERFECT setup.

Issue 15: Punch Nazis In the FACE. In SPACE.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/12/01/jo...-of-heroes-ke/

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Issue 15 will be centered around the Fifth... Anniversary of City of Heroes. [Note: The MMO's 5th anniversary will be April 28, 2009.

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Evil Genius: Arachnos Edition.
Managing your own secret Arachnos base. Recruiting henchmen and villains from the Rogue Isles for your nefarious deeds.
Defend your base from snooping PPD, Longbow and Wyvern and signature heroes while building your doomsday big spider thingy.

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Sounds like Evil Genius.

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You LIE! >_>

I have an idea, but some explanation could do.

World of Warcraft. Love it or hate it, it's huge. Plainly, a successful game. Where did the Warcraft franchise start? Why, Warcraft itself, the RTS. They managed the transition from Warcraft III, one of the most successful RTS games ever, to World of Warcraft.

Why not go backwards? From City of Heroes to, say... Conquest of Heroes? The ideas presented to emphasize signature characters are solid, and this is where Warcraft III innovated, with a well-designed part-RPG system. In my opinion, the basic combat mechanics can be ported over to an RTS as-is, with the same ToHit checks and whatnot as CoH has. All RTS games already use an identical diceroll system. This means a mob of Longbow would be equally effective in the strategy game, solving balance while remaining faithful. It even opens up the door for some form of signature character import feature... load up a costume from City Of, pick an archetype and two sets, and you're off. Dealing with Enhancements is far too in-depth, and so is power choices, so powerset choice would be as deep as it got. But your character could earn various buffs, unlock the high-tier powers over time, and use temporary powers. If you tied the games in enough, you could have your character earn badges that translate over to City Of.

The problem is the setting. One possibility is to have Longbow and Arachnos fighting it out over various settings. The main battlefield might be various islands on the Rogue Isles archipelago, islands never seen before, but that's nowhere near big enough for a whole game. To fill out a singleplayer campaign, you would need to take areas from all of City Of.

Luckily, I can think of a fair few areas. The Shadow Shard is a goldmine, perfectly suited to a base-building RTS. Build up your forces, planting down Firebases as you explore uncharted areas of the SS. Base building shouldn't be TOO involved, as you may fall into the trap of a Dawn of War situation where you win by micromanaging upgrades and construction. Besides, City Of has always been about the combat.

There are also other dimensions to consider. Notably you'd have the Rikti home planet, although getting a whole army there probably defiles the lore a bit. But that got me thinking... what about certain singleplayer missions where you only control a handful of units? Warcraft III itself used this to great effect, and I hear Red Alert 3 does it too. Imagine leading Ms Liberty and four Longbow troops through the Rikti home planet, causing havok and freeing prisoners as you go.

Chuck in a skirmish mode, perhaps co-op, online multiplayer, get a developer who can make good RTS missions... and you're gravy. What about an overall plot for this? Beats me. Ask Hero One, he writes it.

If NCNC did want to go this route, and I severely doubt it, they'd probably contract someone else to do it. Here's a question. Who would YOU have make Conquest of Heroes?



EDIT: Oh heck. I... I... I think I just outlined Warcraft 4.

Anyone know King of Toys? Quite famed in the Mastermind world. But then, you can't mention MMs without Master Zaprobo.


...

Heroes. Not villains. I am a numpty. Feel free to humiliate me.

When it's done.

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It will be released on Thursday 27th November - the servers will come back up at 15:37 GMT precisely.

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I will give you a tenner if that turns out to be true. Or, one quid if it's the right day.

This is to say nothing of the level boosts that can occur on test. You could have a level 35 character that you've never played in your life, and switch it over to the live servers. That just isn't cricket.

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I would suspect that its more a time constraint and going back and adding a glowmap to each and every costume part (x3 for the three body types) is just too much work. Weapons are IIRC only a single model per item which then uses the body scale for size, so you don't have a female bow a male bow and a huge bow its just a bow... could be wrong though.

If they started adding new costume parts with glowmaps they would be nagged half to death and back to go back over older costume parts to update them.

Also while this doesn't exactly support my theory it doesn't harm it: If you look at the really old CoH costume parts they are all clearly older tech than the costume parts added with villains, costume parts added with more recent packs/issues are again better looking than CoV costume parts.

I suspect we'll get glow maps on costumes but probably not soon.

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But again, I'm suggesting we use existing patterns as glowmaps, not making new stuff. These patterns would simply work as-is on any costume piece that can already use a pattern.

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that's not true, as you can see if you look at the textures that were made for upper leg and are then stretched on to trousers, they look horrible blocky and distorted, it affects pattens a great deal.

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If anything, you're agreeing with me. Stretch the model and the map is equally stretched. What I was trying to get across is that size doesn't affect mapping at all. If you could stretch a weapon, the texture (and glowmap) would conform, although it wouldn't look right due to the texture being created for certain proportions, just like pants and tights. Resize a weapon, and everything looks right.

I have to ask though, what does any of this have to do with glowmaps and weapons? I'm getting a bit confused at what the problem is...

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Something to Note, you can't alter the dimensions of the weapons at all. only change the colour.

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Weapons take their size from the size of your costume. Some will tell you this isn't true, but my Bane Spiders' mace gets an extra foot when I switch to the Arachnos costume. That said, the dimensions of an object are irrelevant when it comes to texturing. All you need do is flatten out every polygon of an object in your 3D package of choice, so that a texture can be painted onto it. This flattened-out map (called a UVW map) stays constant when you enlarge, shrink, or stretch the model, or even when you move parts around.

tl;dr, size and mapping don't affect each other.

I had completely forgotten something else, too... weapons have used glowmaps for quite a while. The Broadsword Tech Sword uses both an aura and a glowmap, all Talsorian weapons use them, and the various Rularuu weapons use glowmaps on the runes and the eye.

But it does make me wonder... they can plainly get player costume items using glowmaps, but at the same time they haven't used the feature in any costume item other than weapons. Why? I have no idea. On the one hand, this makes it appear that glowmaps are easy to implement. On the other, you have to wonder if there's a reason they haven't used them. We really are talking about the inner workings of their costume system, and only a developer would be able to comment on that. I wouldn't dare to say anything either way. All I know is how glowmaps themselves work.

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Thats cool idea. My cloak would look nice. Dark cloak and full of circuits. Maybe some kind of unlockin system could work, likes capes have? Badge perhaps...

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In addition, maybe also add "Transparacy" to capes.

So we can have a slighly see though cape, with a circuits boards

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We already have transparent capes. Insect capes and all of the oddly-shaped capes (especially the scarf) use a separate transparency pattern to give the effect. They wouldn't allow for any old pattern of transparency because there would be some very broken capes out of that.

Semitransparent capes, maybe... you'd have to adjust each pattern so that black areas (which define transparency) would be grey (translucent), and you can do this en masse with a program like Photoshop. This would also increase the memory footprint for the game, as you'd have two of every pattern. Alternatively you could create new cape transparency code which somehow squashes the 0-255 range to 128-255, reading black areas as grey and grey areas as light grey, so that you only needed one copy of a pattern to do both jobs; but again, that's a code issue, and beyond my knowledge.

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Also if you lose your mentor or are exemplarred would be better if the pets would just drop in level and only the ones beyond those you are entitled to drop rather than needing to respawn them all.
Also should apply to all ATs with pets not just MMs

[/ QUOTE ]Hmm... I don't like that idea. If im being lackeyed and suddenly my mentor goes some distance away while im in a fight, my robots can continue the battle before they're desummoned or I rejoin the group. If they suddenly dropped in level, it'd be an effective death sentence for me. Yeah, I realise that other players get that anyway, but then other players don't have to spend an age resummoning and upgrading them again.

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Who said anything about an age? Henchmen upgrades are AoEs now.

Holy Cripes on toast!

There's a shields option called Tech Shield. Not only does it use a glowmap, it's animated. It pulses power in a colour of your choosing. Seriously!

All I want is for that awesomeness to be on the rest of me.

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I doubt would be quite as simple as the OP suggests, but it would certainly be a welcome edition.

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I say it's relatively simple. It should be simpler than implementing any completely new graphics feature, due to experience with the subject matter and existing code to refer from.

Only BaBs can say if the idea has merit, and he doesn't come to these parts much.

Custom weapons are costume pieces, just like belts and boots, that are attached to the hand. They also only show themselves when you use the associated weapon powers; these powers used to have the weapons within themselves, and you can't change a power just for your character.

All the spines projectiles, from your ranged attacks and that AoE I I don't know the name of, are treated the same way as a blast of fire or energy. They're baked into the power, and can't be changed for each player. Weapon customisation dodged the issue by putting swords and rifles as costume bits, which are special for each player already, but projectiles and the like can't be done that way.

It's entirely possible to do Power Customisation, and the developers even know the best way of going about it. But... that involves going through every individual power and re-making it to be tintable and with different models. It's simply a very long job which would tie the devs up from doing much else. They figure we would rather have new enemies, or maps, or even more powersets. And they'd be right.

Although they DID say in a very recent interview they would be able to implement things that they weren't able to before, thanks to the new staff they have. Could be anything.

Another point to make is that glowmaps don't take any GPU power to do. A glowmap just tells the engine "don't put lighting and shadows on this, show it as-is". But because you have shadows on your body even while in broad daylight, the effect is always noticeable and striking. It sounds like a pretty sweet deal, depending on how much work it would be to port this to players.

I had another thought on what you could do with glowmaps. It's a bit... retro, but I believe y'all will appreciate it. You could make yourself look like you're out of Tron.

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No, the work would be getting the existing glow code to play nice with players and their patterns, which I can't comment on, as I have no knowledge on the particulars of their systems.

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The comment was, purely, that the assumption that something is easy because you can see it being used somewhere makes it easy to implement elsewhere. It doesn't. The only thing I can say for certain is that the existance of glowmaps in the static NPC models doesn't make them instantly employable in the dynamic player models.

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And... on that, we are agreed. But neither of us truly know how easy or hard it is to perform this feat. It seems like a relatively small amount of work for a fairly large outcome; I'm not asking for full power customisation here. I genuinely believe that this would take less effort than creating the animated combat auras did. That took a fair amount of new code, as auras and combat states had never crossed paths before.

But if we don't suggest ideas because they aren't guaranteed to be instantly doable in the engine, this section of the boards would be a bit dull.

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they could use glowmaps to add a time-cheap but cool looking techy/magical mini-patterns to your costume. Perhaps they could be earnt via badges or an addition you get to add as the level 40 costume improvement (which seems to be missing atm).

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Well, I could settle for that I suppose. But I was talking about applying them to existing costume pieces and patterns. We already have bracers and tattoo patterns in the game, and if player-glowmaps were added it'd be a doddle for players to make whatever they wanted to look like a neon sign.

I have another use for it. Magical tattoos. In fact, a lot of magical things can be done with glowmaps. Maybe you could put one of the many bracers onto your wrist and set them to glow; magical bracers, giving you enhanced strength/reflexes/whatever?

So the Science types can use it, as can Tech and Magic. That leaves Mutants who well, are a diverse bunch. Let's say you were a mutant who possessed radiation emission... what about putting a vein-pattern glowmap on your skin, for irradiated blood vessels glowing like uranium?

Naturals, well, perhaps you could use it on incidental technology like night-vision goggles.

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It would just give a fairly large graphical beef-up to characters and aid customisation, all while using existing code.

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Aside, of course, from the updates requied to the costume editor and the changes required to put this into effect on character models, which aren't the same as NPC models.

i.e. If it's a change then it isn't 'using existing code,' is it..?

(Note: not saying it's a bad idea, you're just making assumptions that I don't see as backed up by reality.)

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By "existing code" I mean glowmaps themselves. If the engine didn't have the ability to do this already, adding it in would mean writing up a whole new shader for it, or else changing how the diffuse shader works. But that isn't needed.

And like I said, the hard part isn't getting it to work in the costume editor; it seems to be more flexible than we give it credit. I don't think either of us can say how feasible or infeasible changing the editor to work with glowmaps is, but I suspect the only change would be adding a new option in the UI to enable or disable glow. The difficult part, and the main hurdle, is implementing exactly what this 'glow' is.

No, the work would be getting the existing glow code to play nice with players and their patterns, which I can't comment on, as I have no knowledge on the particulars of their systems.

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Maybe make a travel power set that is based on gadget's.

1. Jump enhancer (boots that make you leap further less powerfull then sj o course)
2. Flight jetpack (makes you fly but slower then normal fly power)
3. Grappling hook (Point shoot and be pulled towards that point)
4. Teleport device (A teleport power)


Yea I know power 3 and 4 are a bit similar but these are just examples(couldn't think of anything better), but I think it's a great set for pvp since it gives you the ability to take all kinds of travelpower without having to take multiple pools.

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So you want one pool with 3 travel powers in, and a grappling hook we can't do? I can't see that happening. Travel powers were put behind other powers for a reason.

That said, what you ask isn't entirely infeasible. Should Power Customisation see the light of day, and should it include custom animations, you'll be able to make your travel powers look like whatever you want. Fly will have a jetpack, Super Jump will have some kinda boosters, Superspeed will... well, the sky is the limit.

As for power customisation, don't hold your breath. (That said, a very recent article said they would be able to implement features they said were impossible before...)

I know what you're thinking. New kinds of graphics aren't needed, they're time intensive, CoH looks fine as it is. These are all good arguments. In fact, if what I'm proposing wasn't as simple as it is, I wouldn't have made this thread.

CoH has the ability to use glowmaps. A glow map is like a texture, but it lets you define areas on a model that you want to be bright. Instead of being affected by lights and shadows, you can make things ignore the environment and just stay a solid colour. This might not sound like much, but it has a whole bunch of uses.

"But the devs would have to work hard to get that in!" I hear you cry. Not quite. I don't know the full extent, but glow maps are already used in CoH. The best example is in the new Rikti armour. All these effects? Done by glowmaps. The code already exists in the engine to do this.

What I propose is allowing players to add glowmaps to their character. In some ways this is simple, as a glowmap is a black-and-white texture, with black not changing you and white being uber-neon. Luckily, all the patterns that are available to you are black-and-white textures. The proper word for it is a 'mask'.

To try and put it in a simpler way, let me try this. Right now you can slap a pattern on most body parts, and you can define two colours on this pattern. I propose that the glowmap code be used on these existing patterns, allowing you to make parts of yourself glow in a pattern, just like that Rikti. The first use for this that came to my mind would be in the various tech armours, letting you appear to surge energy from the cracks in your armour like Iron Man.

But that's just a fraction of what you can do. Picture this: take a face, put a small pattern like make-up on it, colour it neon green, turn on Glow, and boom... glow in the dark face paint. Or apply it to only the eyes somehow, and they stick out in the darkness, like an eyeshine.

There are gonna be people making some pretty dire costumes out there with random pink glow over their whole body. But that shouldn't discourage the devs, as people already have the tools to make horrid costumes. It would just give a fairly large graphical beef-up to characters and aid customisation, all while using existing code. The most difficult part would be getting it to work with patterns and the like.

What do you think?



tl;dr, I want to let players put this glow effect on themselves.

I read about these changes on the US boards. I think it's really awesome, but demands more slotting.

If we lob three endurance IOs in both powers, it'l cost a hair under 50 end to use them both. This means you can't simply resummon a single henchman and upgrade him without wasting half your end bar, but there's a way around this.

In quite a lot of cases, if one of your tier one pets dies, the others are going to be damaged as well. So we can dismiss all tier one pets, and do the same thing that we were going to do - resummon, and double-equip one. We've spent more Endurance, but we've also refreshed the health of an entire tier of pets.

It isn't an ideal solution, and it will want a change in strategy. But it shows you how you can minimise the waste.