Samuel_Tow

I suppose one can argue that with what they did to Atlas Park, the development team would be gunning to revamp all other major zones for a consistent feel. One must, however, also argue that in light of what they did to Mercy Island, that is not always necessarily the case. If anything, though, I would agree that Paragon City needs to be prettier and the Rogue Isles need to be LESS PRETTY. There's no excuse why Cap Au Diable would lag for me after six years when I'm running a GeForce GTX580 card on an I7 processor with 8GB of ram when it is a zone that's still six years old and untouched. And I'm not even running ambient occlusion, bloom or blurry eyes.

If the argument were that any zone the development team ever touch will have to be remade to be current and not blocky, then we have to figure out what Mercy Island means for that notion.

Fair enough. We both know I don't have one. And again - I wasn't saying you prove what you're saying is true. It's just so different from what I remember that I... Don't get it, honestly.

I remember Melissa saying the chose no to redo the War Zone because they didn't have the resources to do it, and I remember Matt Miller saying that revamping an old zone is as expensive as making a new zone, but at the time he was referring to the Faultline revamp which WAS a new zone. I simply have a hard time understanding how making a whole new zone and NOT making a whole new zone can be relatively the same amount of effort when making a new zone has always been said to be a lot of effort.

Again, I'm not doubting your word, I just can't make sense of this in light of what I remember. It's possible I remember wrong, it's possible you're referring to posts I never saw. I could well just be wrong. But it's difficult for me to just conclude I've been remembering this wrong for how many years now?

I mean a source of the original quote. I don't mean to be a dick here and go "Pics or it didn't happen!" but I remember that post from War Witch and I don't remember it going like that. Do we have it recorded somewhere so I can refresh my memory? Because I honestly do recall her saying that the development team at the time intentionally didn't do almost anything in the zone specifically as a means of saving time and money so that they could get the other things done.

If a not doing a total revamp of the zone from scratch didn't save much effort, why didn't it happen? Wouldn't that mean it wouldn't have been much effort to do it?

No problem at all. As I've said before, simply having you and David posting in your respective All Things Art threads, even if you don't have any inside information to share or clarifications to ask, is still a major boon to the community, I think. Even just dropping by to say "Hey, I'm still reading. Keep it up!" makes a bigger difference than I suspect most people realise. You guys are pretty much the celebrities of our game

So, yeah, it's very nice to hear from you

Question: Wasn't support of further power customization a priority in the newly redesigned character creator from Beta? I can't really claim one way or the other, but to make a complete overhaul of the creator interface and not plan for pool and epic customization would seem unlikely from my outside-looking-in position. Wouldn't the new Freedom interface make that transition easier?

Question: Long before he left, Christopher Bruce, AKA Back Alley Brawler spoke at length about weapon auras and essentially discarded that particular idea as unworkable. The way he explained it, adding auras to weapons would require that every weapon-and-aura pairing to have its own copy of said weapon, producing both humongous weapon lists that become cluttered and constituting a maintenance nightmare. Do you have a solution to this problem via new tech, or are you just considering rolling with it anyway?

I know this is probably not really FX-related, but I've noticed something else that might help here. Regular weapons are coded as their own category with only a single option for category type - "Weapon." What weapon we use is selected from the single subcategory of that main category. Shield Defence, by contrast, is coded as a main category with one option for every shield type, and then subcategories for the various finer options on the shield. For instance, the Round Shield and Kite Shield are major categories similar to Pants and Monster Legs for the lower body, and selecting the Round Shield then gives us the subcategory of texture finish (flat or riveted rim band) with its own sub detail option for patterns where applicable, plus another subcategory for shield emblem that is independent of the rest of the shield's options.

Would it be possible to redo the other weapons so that each weapon is its own main category with additional options like scopes and silencers on pistols, colour patterns and indeed weapon auras being subcategories? Or am I overthinking this?

Speaking purely for myself, I actually want an option to make my effects LESS transparent. Currently, the only way to make a semi-transparent (bright) power effect opaque is to make it essentially white, either directly choosing white or choosing pale colours that, when they stack, add up to white. If I want to have a power that's a vibrant primary colour and yet still opaque, I have no option to do so. For reference, check out a small sample of old console 2D sprites, specifically the opaque fireballs. These are what I had in mind, but these are almost completely impossible to do in City of Heroes.

When I first heard of Power Customization, what I really wanted to do was to turn Energy Blast into a dense, vibrant, vivid blue. When I picked a pure blue primary and secondary, however, what I ended up with was a transparent blue-tinted beam that looked almost like it were made of blue cellophane. Trying different shades of straight blue didn't help, and only served to make the beams whiter as they grew more solid.

Right now, trying to control power opacity via power colour is very complicated and requires both knowledge of how the system calculates colours, knowledge of additive and subtractive colour models and at least some experience working with colours and transparency to know how they behave. It took me something like eight hours spread between several days of reading Wikipedia articles, running calculations and messing with the editor before I gained even a rudimentary idea of how what I was doing was affecting the results. It quickly transpired that pure primary colours used with the additive (Bright) colour model made for highly transparent sprites since anything which wasn't that particular primary colour would add onto it and form clear shapes that showed through. Using secondary colours helped, and using white-washed version of them helped even more, as they had more of the other colours and thus caused overlapping sprites to meld better into white and to meld better into white with the background colours. Finally, having to test these on a blue-tinted or red-tinted background is highly misleading.

Control of opacity via colour choice is possible, but at least to my limited understanding and practical artistic skills, it is also very difficult and very limiting. Allowing us to choose our opacity even in as little as two or three general settings would help greatly. If I had the choice, I would make all of my sprites non-transparent in their interiors as I simply prefer monolithic uniform dense single colours. Right now, the only way to achieve this and not have your effects transparent is to either have them Bright and white or Dark and black, as it's only the extreme values that become overbright, and it's only overbright sprites that look opaque as they simply cause the background to meld into a singular white/black mass. Even then, that's not opacity so much as it is extreme distortion. We're still seeing the background through our effects, we just can't recognise it.

Ideally, I want a pure 255 blue fireball that looks exactly the same regardless of whether it's on the background of blue water, red lava or grey cityscape, and I haven't found a way to produce this so far.

If you're talking about the suppression of other players' or unnecessary effects, then this is something we're looking into.

As long as you keep it alive, Tunnel Rat, the thread will live, this much I can guarantee without a shadow of a doubt There are few things players like more than the notion that their voices are being heard.

I apologise if my posts comes off like a long-winded rant or a know-it-all tirade, as that was not the intent. I honestly don't know anywhere near enough about FX to speak with any authority, but I'm hoping what I've said will make sense just the same.

Honestly? I'd let Arcana attest to that in person. Or not attest to it, if that is what Arcana chooses.

Well, on Beta, those should show up in the new "Find Contact" interface one way or the other. This one contains all contacts who will speak with you, whether or not they're actually in your contacts list. The last time I tried it, it was showing me David Wincott when I had never so much as set foot in the Hollows, never gotten a pop-up announcing him and no contact ever mentioned his name or his turf.

If these auto-unlock, I'm sure the new interface will make finding them a breeze. And even if not, there is always ParagonWiki, as you mentioned. The act of finding them once I know they exist, are unlocked and are willing to give me missions should be only a token effort

If that were to happen, then red-side would be a whole new experience for me, because I didn't know about half of these contacts and I've only ever really worked with two, maybe three. Johnny Sonata, Ambassador Khur'Rekt and the Television are the only ones I can think of.

This doesn't seem to stop people from Group-Flying their henchmen and still have them do just fine. I had a friend of mine who spent most of his time running Group Fly on his Mercenaries and used slotting and Leadership to compensate for the to-hit debuff, and his mercs did just fine. Furthermore, flying NPCs already exist, in the face of Stunner Chiefs, Nerva Spectral Demons, Tsoo Ancestor Spirits and more, all of whom are melee critters.

Personally, I'd be all for seeing this as an extra Mastermind primary.

Aaah! OK, NOW that makes sense. Frankly, I feel very strongly that taking Lighting Clap away from Electrical Melee is an improvement to the set even if you put nothing in its place and leave the set with just 8 powers. So trading that for Assassin's Shock is an unambiguous improvement. OK, I see what you mean now.

A longer damage buff after a successful Assassin's Strike? Not a bad idea, actually. I like it! I'm not sure if I appended that to my original post, but someone suggested something to this effect previously. That one was just a flat damage buff after a successful assassination, and I honestly did like that one, and I honestly do like yours, as well. Considering how long Stalkers spend doing Assassin's Strike and Placate, having some way to elongate Build Up or supplement it would be swell.

And they're terribad at it. Not only are Mastermind attacks almost never worth the cost of endurance to fire them, but they're also very rarely worth the time spent firing them when one could be using his vastly superior support powers or even just running basic henchman controls.

I take and use my Mastermind attacks on all of my Masterminds for no real reason other than because I want attacks, but I only ever use them against easy opponents. As a Mastermind, I can oftentimes outright FORGET I have a secondary and do just fine, and in those instances I simply have nothing better to do than plink away impotently at my enemies. But in any situation where performance actually matters and there's a real risk of danger, Mastermind attacks become a liability.

I ask you this - if it takes me seven or eight shots to take down a non-resistant minion, what am I really contributing? When every one of my henchmen can outdamage me, why am I even bothering?

I'd like to see a source of that, personally, as that's not how I remember it. As I recall, the reason they didn't redo the Rikti War Zone geometry was PRECISELY because it would save them a ton of time which they could then spend making the Rikti Base tileset, artwork for the new NPCs, new contacts and so on. That was the point of Melissa's "We could either do the zone or do the story and we chose to do the story" comment.

I have a hard time comprehending how doing that AND making a brand new zone from scratch could have been pretty much the same as just doing that and leaving the zone unchanged.

Wait, what? What's a Henri Dumont? That's the first time I've heard this name.

Actually, my reaction to realising that the developers had dropped the unlockable contact idea was "Thank God! This was the worst idea I can think of off-hand at any particular time!" More contacts is always good. More contacts that most people won't see or even know exist? Not so much. One of the reasons that City of Villains comes off as so repetitive is that while it has a lot of contacts, a great many of them are locked such that you'll never even know they exist.

Want a fun fact? A few days ago, I realised that the game had a contact called Crimson Revenant when he called my old Stalker for reasons that were never adequately explained. I've played City of Villains for seven years and I never even knew that Crimson Revenant existed, much less that he had a skull for a face. I recall, now that I've worked with him, that I've heard the name off-hand on the forums, but in my head, I always thought people were talking about Christoff Jaeger.

The contact in the OP is Veluta Lunata, and she is a contact that I have only ever heard spoken about. I don't know who she is, where she is, what she looks like, what her missions are or what I need to do to unlock her. "Trap ghosts" people say, but how one does this is usually left unmentioned.

I'm told that a contact exists who is a slot machine. I've never seen this contact. I was told it was somewhere in the Golden Giza, but a cursory look through their collection of slot machines did not reveal one which looked like I could speak with it. I don't know what I need to do to unlock the contact, but I'm told it's something to do with the Family.

"Locking" contacts does nothing more than hide content... Viridian! How could I forget... Actually, I know exactly how I could forget about a contact that I'm never going to unlock because I have a life and don't feel like wasting it hunting Protectors in the Fab or farming a select few missions for bosses. I hear he's a cool contact, something of a counterpart to Crimson (red vs green?), but I'm never going to be able to run his missions, so that's a waste.

"Locking" contacts does nothing more than hide content, which is pretty much the opposite of what any MMO should be striving to do. It's a well-known fact that MMOs simply cannot have enough content to keep the game from being repetitive, and indeed rely on time sinks and attention grabs to keep people interested. So to hide the content that already exists strikes me as a very, very bad idea.

On the flip side, there's the Trial participation metric (something else for a Did You Know, thread, by the way ) which seems to be regarded as a company secret. My question here is why, in this particular case, are players not told they are being graded nor told HOW they are being graded? I get that the point is so players won't be able to game the system if they don't know the rules of the game, but isn't just blindly thrusting players into a situation where not only can they not tell what they're doing wrong and what they're doing right, but can't even tell what they need to do to improve... And them not knowing is working as intended... Kind of harsh?

I guess the drive behind my question was "does knowing enemy powers and mechanics really give a knowing player a significant advantage? Does, for instance, my knowing that Chill of the Night is auto-hit and debuffs my defence a significant advantage that I have over a new player which a new player would feel ostracised by not knowing? This is an honest question, too.

Out of context, but I have to say - I still want Foreshadow's arms... On my girls! The dude is already using separate arms via the Robotic Arms technology, so why can't we? I'd even accept having to deal with the metal rings around the shoulders, honest I would! I'd also accept never being able to apply patterns to the arms, either, if that's what it took. I just want arms that look solid enough to carry the heavier weapons we'll be getting some time soon.

They didn't do that with the Rikti War Zone that I could tell. Off the top of my head, only three things changed in that zone when it went from Crash Site to War Zone:

*The Crey's Folly gate was closed and associated guards removed.
*The hospital was boarded up and sealed, replaced with the one in the Vanguard base
*The Rikti Saucer was tilted to lie flatter on the ground so it could be stood on more easily.

And, OK, four: The old Peregrine Island teleporter exit was moved to the Vanguard base and replaced with theirs.

But those are all small, isolated minor changes (yes, even the Rikti saucer re-tilting) that left the majority of the map completely intact. Spawns may or may not have been reshuffled, but the zone itself remained the same. Granted, Melissa Bianco's explanation as to why more wasn't changed at the time was that they simply didn't have the manpower to do it. They could either choose to work on the story and new instance or on revamping the zone, and so they chose story and instances (good call).

Since then, I've continued to argue that the Hazard Zones don't need a graphical revamp, they just need new storylines added to the existing geometry, via new contacts. Not a single thing needs to change about Astoria itself for it to receive contacts inside it handing out missions.

Incidentally, what happened to Iakona? I remember something about a ban for posting confidential Beta information and then nothing.

OK, could you answer a question, then: If I told you I prefer to play by myself specifically so that I could play slower without other people rushing me, how would you class this? Easier or harder?

Cards on the table: I'm clearly missing something. Which Stalker set is it that gains an Assassin's Strike without losing an AoE power in the process? Are we looking at Dark losing... What, Dark Consumption? Soul Drain? This isn't sarcasm, by the way. This is me honestly not knowing.

I have no problem with alternate solutions, actually. A lot of the things even on my original unedited lists contradicted each other. If we can do that, we probably should and I'd support it. If you have any ideas containable within a single paragraph to that effect, let me know and I'll append them to the original post (with credit) if I haven't already done so.

It is? The **** was I looking at, then? OK, I can admit it when I'm wrong. Sorry about that

That's where I drew the inspiration for my original doctored screen shots that I showed David. If you look closer, you'll notice that the female dummies are actually using the MALE tights texture. You'll also notice that it looks almost purpose-designed to fit the female body frame. That was the cornerstone of my argument back then - if something as simple as swapping the female texture for the male one could produce what is ostensibly a viable character model, just imagine what an actual artist could do.

Fun fact - look at the female Paragon Protectors sometime. They have the same abs and use the same male textures

I've always felt that Masterminds need to have a high ranged damage mod. Their attacks are already unimpressive by virtue of them only having three, one of which is AoE. But if the attacks were meaningful, then there would be a point to take them and I wouldn't feel like such a four-sided idiot for doing so anyway.

And, yes, my Ninja Mastermind has Snap Shot, Aimed Shot and Fistful of Arrows. I would like to put my money where my mouth is, please