Necrotron

I feel I need to clarify something. While it's true that he likes City of Heroes, he doesn't love it.

When he did his piece on Psychonauts, he turned into a gibbering fanboy and inflicted harm on people who didn't buy it. He loves that game. CoH, he merely 'likes'. He doesn't like it enough to talk about it more or do a ZP lavishly praising it, and he doesn't dislike it enough to make one mocking it.

In other terms, if Psychonauts was his long time love, City of Heroes would be "just friends". But for a mumorpuger, that's probably the best you can get from him.

You can see his thoughts on the game in the TV show pilot he made a few years back, Game Damage. In it he makes a Martial Arts scrapper with a maximised breast slider named Jiggle Physics. He also happens upon a zombie invasion after doing the tutorial, and concludes "I'm sort of getting into it. Doesn't mean I'm gonna play any more of it until I HAVE to." (It's a pity Game Damage is terrible.)

One hundred MILLION dollars.



That is a whole lot of cash. That means a top tier Alpha, with its one Favour and two third-tier Alphas (one Notice each) in the recipie, will costs 400 million influence.

Coordination. Yeeeees. This is what we need. A task that jolts players out of their facerolling stupor.

I wouldn't worry too much about the 10 second window. There is a similar time restriction in the CoP, and this was extensively balance tested to work. If 10 seconds is insufficient, they may increase the time, but don't expect the final result to be easy.

This should really be in Suggestions.

I agree with all your items, and they are all fairly simple. Apart from power pool customization; this is an enormously complicated beast, even hairier than powerset customization.

Also, knowing Paragon Studios, a simple colour change won't measure up to their standards when it comes to the travel powers. They'd want to put in alternate animations and effects. Different styles of run, fly poses, that kind of thing. A lot of this technology doesn't really exist for the existing power customisation system.

tl;dr, pool power customization is just a big of a job as I16 power customization was. They know you want it, but it takes time and manpower.

SSDs do nothing halfway. Some are slow, inconsistent, and fast to wear out; others are extremely fast, unshakeable, and will last longer than any normal HDD.

Understand that an SSD will not help your framerate in any game, but it will help load times and reduce stuttering. You know how your PC starts to crunch when you do a lot of things at once, right? You can hear the PC whirring and grinding its gears as the hard drive frantically tries to fetch all the data you need. The same goes for loading Windows, as it tries to load up so many different things at once. In those cases, you'd be lucky if you saw one tenth of the speed that the hard drive is capable of. Maybe even one hundredth.

Solid state disks don't crunch. You ask for data, and you get it. You can load all kinds of stuff at the same time and it will do its job diligently. Just make sure you get one that has been recommended by any of the Nerdlington J Tech Supports around these parts, like Father Xmas or myself, and you'll do fine. If they are out of your price range, or you don't feel they're worth the expense, then keep the money. Cheaping out on an SSD will cost you.

This is less of a case of the CPU telling you what you can and cannot watch, and more a case of the CPU supporting the movie studio's definition of what you can and cannot watch. If it didn't support this DRM, you wouldn't be able to view the content at all.

This isn't something you need to worry about. There are plenty of tools out there which allow the non-pirate to watch their content on whatever computer they wish, without being stung by DRM. Besides, if someone introduced a movie streaming service that required Sandy Bridge to run, it would gain no traction. Least of all with Netflix as a competitor.

The game used to be badly written, but they've salvaged a LOT of performance in I17. Heck, Praetoria looks and performs like a modern game. It's nowhere near as bad as people say.

The real problem is when a badly optimized zone tanks the framerate, like south Cap au Diable. That'll be fixed when Paragon get around to updating the old content.

If you use a lower setting on Ambient Occlusion, you can get a lot of your framerate back. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) is demanding on any engine, and CoH has some esoteric options in the AO that even Crysis doesn't have. It's what makes a game like Battleforge into such a hog. They were planning for the future with this setting.

Catalyst 10.11 runs perfectly fine on CoH. The fact that newer drivers are broken is sadly entirely AMD's fault. Their enforced monthly driver schedule results in the odd driver screwing up and being released prematurely, WHQL or not.

Mephisto, I run a 2.66GHz Core i7 along with a Radeon 5850. This is not an unreasonable specification, and it mashes CoH quite well. If you're having problems, we can help you to fix things.

Adurrhurrhurr. This makes me laugh.

...sorry.

Data data data, we cannot make bricks without clay. Try a free proxy service. Also, try a direct IP: http://64.25.35.107

(This really is the cityofheroes.com IP, as found here.)

We haven't been RAM-bound so much to warrant disabling your background for a really long time. Not since we started getting 2GB and 4GB in PCs, anyway. People's needs and wants have changed; now we demand not just peak performance, but enough extra headroom to multitask effectively.

If I can have Photoshop open and manipulating large images while City of Heroes is running on 4GB of RAM, you can definitely keep your wallpaper on 8GB of it.

As far as I know, areas where performance tanks like the mess in Cap au Diable aren't improved by a reduction in resolution. Instead, it seems to tank because of all the objects that are on-screen. It must be a function of how the game handles object culling.

I'm running 1680x1050, and changing my 3D resolution setting doesn't really help THAT much at CaD.

Advice to gain better performance? Keep your World Detail in check, make sure you don't have any Flash pages open in the background (YouTube included), and... try to avoid looking at south CaD, I guess.

Been there.

I'd take a gander at your drivers.

I think it's safe to say that if you use a 'good' SSD, and make sure it and your OS supports TRIM (see: Windows 7), you will never have to worry about your drive going slow on you.

Good SSDs are anything by Intel, Indilinx, and SandForce. They can provide good worst-case performance even without TRIM. SandForce drives do amazingly well without it, and although it ain't perfect, it can justify you forsaking TRIM for a RAID setup.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I would suggest reading Anandtech articles on SSDs. Anand Lal Shimpi was the man who blew the lid on bad SSDs; he discovered, investigated and publicized how a bad SSD will cause half-second or one-second stalls in light usage. Thanks to him, we have SSDs tuned for real world performance, rather than peak benchmark scores.

Nyet. There are no RAID drivers that support TRIM within a RAID array.

Relevant information addendum.

It turns out that they've automated the process of upgrading your account. After installing City of Heroes within Steam (or merely starting the install), you will be prompted to go to the PlayNC website and login with your account, or create a new one if you don't have one. Should you have an account, it will present you with the Upgrade option, without having to copy and paste any keys.

I'm aware that it's possible to take a Steam-purchased City of Heroes key and apply it to a non-Steam account, but I do not know the exact procedure for doing so. While I would be able to figure it out, it's not me I'm worried about.

I intend on gifting the GR Complete Collection to a friend, and it just so happens that Steam has a sale on. On Christmas day (or perhaps Christmas Eve night) I am going to buy it as a gift and send it to my friend, but from there I wouldn't know what to tell him. What are the exact steps you take to get the CD key into an existing City of Heroes EU account?

They disabled the option for 3D sound in Windows Vista or Windows 7 systems. Even if you use ALchemy to restore 3D sound, the end result is not what the developers intended, and the crashing when the game shuts down is generally unacceptable. For these reasons, they disabled it.

You would be better off asking them to re-base the sound system on OpenAL.

City of Heroes has no damn right to be so fun. No right at all. A six year old MMO that endured its share of studio drama does not retain people this well.

Maybe I should open up a snow shoveling business. In hell.

I've an equal mix, myself. Depends entirely on how the concept works.

Unless we're talking about Arachnos Widows. I ain't staring at the back end of a man in shiny spandex for ten levels, waist capes or not.

Perfect. Just after university finishes.