Samuel_Tow

The problem isn't that some hairstyles clip with some hats, it's that ALL hairstyles clip with ALL hats. When you place a hat on your head, it compresses the hair underneath it. As someone who wears a hat most of the time in real life, I can testify to the kind of disastrous hat hair I end up with at the end of a long, hot day of wearing a baseball cap. That's why most hats follow the contour of the skill, and almost no hairs in the game are so thin, flat and round as to follow that closely enough. Thing is, 3D mesh hair doesn't compress, so pretty much all hairs will clip with pretty much all hats.

This isn't an issue with belts and tails, simply because all belts are flat at the rear and all tails connect to a flat surface. This isn't the case with hats. It's also not a case of letting people deal with clipping. That amount of clipping is unacceptable.

The only realistic solution is to give each hat several hairstyles unique to that hat, say one bald, one short an one long. Just separating hats from hair won't work on its face.

I delete because I have no use for characters that aren't true to their concept. I play for the story and the narrative, and as such if a character was "improved" by being rerolled, then I quite literally have no use for that character ever again. Just a combination of powersets and levels doesn't interest me without a story attached, and if I have a version that's truer to that story, then the old one is obsolete.

That said, I'll keep an "old" version of Xanta off-server just in case I end up hating Titanic Weapons after the fact, but I rather doubt it.

I disagree. When I think about Superman or Batman, I roll my eyes. The Statesman is pretty much City of Heroes' Superman, right down to the ridiculous 40s costume, and as such he stands out like a sore thumb against the much more believable and varied background of the rest of the game. City of Heroes sis not "about superheroes." It may have been inspired by American comic books of the Golden and Silver age, but that doesn't mean this is all it's "about." City of Heroes is - as I said before - about freedom of expression. If that means American comic books, anime, pulp fiction, cowboy movies, high fantasy, political drama or realistically speaking any genre where meta-humans can exist, then that's just as applicable.

City of Heroes is, currently, the only "super hero" game on the market that isn't JUST about super heroes. Not incidentally, it's also the best game out there with quite literally no serious competition. And this freedom of expression and over-abundance of no particular theme is one of the central reasons why. Comic books are still niche appeal, so keeping a game as primarily about comic books is a mistake, especially now that they're looking to expand.

I have nothing against comic books as a theme, of course. But the game provides you AMPLE tools to emulate pretty much all the comic book heroes and villains you might want. That's not to say it can't have more, and definitely not to say it SHOULDN'T have more. After all, I've been asking for smooth tights on Big and Banded boots and gloves, and more patterns can never hurt. But this IS to say that the fictional universe doesn't need more people wearing tights. Comic books have their history dating back 60 years, if not more. In them, it makes sense to see people running around in stretchy polyester. City of Heroes and its world, however, are borrowed more from contemporary reality, and as such, you see characters of all kinds.

But you are right: When I think "super heroes," I do think about Superman and Batman. And then I change the channel. I'm glad those two aren't rammed down my throat in City of Heroes.

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There isn't any one thing that City of Heroes is "about." It's "about" everything and nothing at all at the same time.

I suspect it's part of the same bug which causes some character models to be able to use powers WHILE resurrecting while others are rooted and cannot use powers until AFTER the rez animation has played. Possibly the same bug which makes some characters using Return to Battle float up with the Resurrect animation while others clamber up to their feet using the Revive animation.

Either way, it's bugged and needs to be re-examined. I've filed this as every kind of bug report I can think of, I've tried to bring it to David's attention, I've filed a Support ticket about it... We'll just have to see what becomes of it in the years to come.

In drawing, yes. Not in animation, that's my point. Sure, you could use blurring and after-images in animation just to make frames blend together better, but JUST that isn't enough. In actual animation, you can't fool the eye that it's seeing something faster than what it's seeing with just fancy effects over a slow animation. To my eyes, Flurry looks a lot like the combo of gut punches Agent Smith delivered to Neo near the end of the original Matrix, and it suffers from precisely the same problem that entire movie suffered from - none of their super speed looked like super speed. It looked like a psychedelic dream. Especially Smith's gut punch combo, which honestly looked like what it probably was - a normal series of punches with after-images added.

Actual, real speed comes across best when it's actual, real speed. A lot of the time you don't even have to depict the action in question if you make the beginning and end obvious enough. That's why anime movies can get away with a character "disappearing" across the screen within the span of a few frames to signify speed - because it actually IS fast. For an American example, Ben 10 had a really hit-and-miss history with Ben's super speed alien, Accelerate. In some episodes he'd zoom through a shot in zig-zag in quite literally a single frame, leaving a "Tron bike wall" trail which would fade away slowly, and it would look amazing. In other episodes, this supposed super-fast alien would "speed" around in just slightly above regular speed, but with that same Tron trail, and it would look REALLY bad.

When you need to animate something to look fast... Make it fast. That's really the best way to go about it. Instead of animating the full punch which, if I timed it, would probably take a quarter of a second, just animate the start and stop of many more punches and have your character swap between them, say, every 10 milliseconds. Just slow enough to where the motion isn't outright lost at lower framerates, but more than too fast to actually see the transition from state to state. Then throw in after-images in there after the fact and let the character play through, say, half a second of pure punching (totalling 50 hits of animation) and then pad the thing out with phase in and phase out animations until it's at least 830 milliseconds (same as Energy Punch) and use that. Finally, drop a high-frequency repeated hit sound like Wolverine's Berserker Barrage from my bad mock-up and you're golden.

And also, when we're talking about super-fast animations, these look best when you don't involve large, complex upper body movements. All the bobbing and weaving that Flurry does right now only serves to make it feel even slower. I'm sure fictional speedsters can dance a waltz in super speed and still make it look graceful in painted still shots, but in actual, real-time animation, large, complex, weight-shifting movements simply played in fast forward look goofy more than they look fast. Remember - Benny Hill made a career out of sped-up film and a lot of silent cinema comedies managed to make really unfunny activities very funny when they played them at double speed or so.

In much simpler terms - when it comes to animation, you can't "fake" speed with slow animations. At best you can pretend the slowness isn't there, and at worse you make everything feel even slower, which is precisely the problem Flurry has right now. For a "Speed" pool attack, it's incredibly slow, both in terms of visuals and in terms of root time.

This was in response to a post talking about heroes on villain-side since before Going Rogue. In general, though, I happen to believe that once you step out of the intended use of the game, you take what you can get and don't ask for more. Even from a pure customer support point of view, once you tell a CS rep you did something unsupported, most of the time he can simply tell you "I'm sorry, this isn't supported." and end it there. There really isn't any ground to make a convincing argument here, because you implicitly gave up your right to make a convincing argument about it when you chose to take the unsupported route.

All of that said, I have no problem with you asking for it, none at all. When I called CS about the Microsoft Language Bar crashing City of Heroes when I tried to swap keyboard layouts, they told me it was unsupported but tried to help me anyway. In much the same way, if you want to ask for an easier way, I can't stop you, nor would I want to even if I could. There's no harm in it. But this thread has sort of crossed the line between just making a request and trying to shut down those who don't agree with said request. When you go from arguing about something you want to something you feel you deserve, you cross that line.

What I mean is I enjoy City of Heroes because in this game, really any thematic is appropriate. Comic Books aside, heroes can fight crime in tailored suits, casual street clothes, anime armour, alien carapace, their underwear, pirate getups, ninja costumes, robot forms, animal forms, monster forms and more. That no one aesthetic reigns supreme over all others is something I consider to be a huge perk of the game. For this reason, whenever I see allusions that "classic" super heroes are somehow "better" and the game suffers for not having most be like this, it just bugs me.

City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Today's Ustream chat talked about 10 costume slots per character, so chances are you can double up on your existing costumes and just swap the weapon between them. Then you can use an existing costume change emote or one of the set's powers to swap on the fly. I think.

It's possible I misunderstand what you mean. Could you elaborate?

There was a screenshot I saw somewhere that had the Railroad Crossing sign, plus what looked like a long shaft with a spiked club head at the end and some kind of large fancy Fantasy sword. I don't remember where I saw that, though. I'll repost the pic if I see it.

That's pretty much where I am, as well. For me, it's not so much Fantasy or Anime that drives my desire for the set, as much as just my affinity for big things. A big sword looks heavy an it looks like it hits really hard. What can be cooler than that?!? To this day, Broadsword's Head Splitter is probably my favourite animation of all, but I have a sneaking suspicion I'll be looking for a new favourite come Titanic Weapons.

A whole separate set, yes, not just more weapons. It seems like it's quite a ways away, though. I managed to get a question answered on today's Ustream chat (still giddy about it ), and it was about Titanic Weapons. It's for after I21, but apparently quite a bit after, since they really can't talk about it. I'm actually not sure how something this far into the future got announced so early, but I'm glad that it did. It's revived my love for the game big time

And if that's what City of Heroes was, I'd never have stuck around past the first day. I find "superhero common costume features" to be corny and goofy, and this is what has kept me out of the competition's super hero MMOs - I'm not interested in their IP and I'm not interested in "classic" super heroes. In the slightest. City of Heroes may have been inspired by the American comic books of yesteryear, but it's by no means limited to them, choosing instead to depict its own world with its own sensibilities, thematics and appearances, one which is ostensibly "real" but for the few remarkable ways in which it's not.

If most of my enemies dressed up like 1960s costumed villains, this game wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

The forums DO lack an ignore button, but not an ignore function. To ignore someone, got to your User CP then choose "Edit Ignore List" under Settings and Options. Once there, add the name of the person you wish to ignore to the "Add a Member to Your List..." field. For ease of use, it's usually best to copy the person's name right out of the forums and paste it in that field. Enter the name there, hit OK and you will never see this person's posts ever again. Until someone quotes them, which for people deserving of ignore is usually all too common.

We'll have to wait and see what it will end up costing those of us who want, plainly speaking, everything. So far, aside from the occasional limited-time offer like the DVD collector's edition which sold, like, once and never again, I've been able to get most everything the developers have had to offer for the price of subscription and a Booster every once in a while. We'll see how that changes.

I'm not sure about that. The screenshot in question is called "questgivers.jpg," and I know developers have a habit of calling things on their side by what they are and only giving the fancy, unique, specific names on the player-side of things, like how Devices is internally called Gadgets.

I worry that this will be exactly the kind of mechanic that pretty much every Fantasy MMO uses, which is to say contacts who have missions for you will display a "coin" with an exclamation mark above their heads and contacts you have finished missions for will display a "coin" with a question mark on it.

Then again, given that this is a "coin" with an arrow on it, I do hope that you're right and I'm wrong, and that this hideous thing only appears if you slap a waypoint onto a contact. And even then, I honestly preferred the little arrow waypoint. It looked more like it was part of the UI, like something a character wearing HUD goggles would see printed on the glass. This coin thing looks like it's part of the environment, because it's proper 3D. It kind of makes the game look like those old Sims commercials where live action actors would walk around with the green double-pointed pyramid thing over their heads.

To be completely honest, I don't believe that even auras around characters' feet were necessary in the first place, but them at least I could get, since they're not as obvious if you don't look at them. But the coins are just... A bit too much.

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Like I said, though, everything else is amazing. I have no REAL complaints.

I don't know what you're talking about. Could you elaborate?

For Stardiver, I actually wanted to have kind of a "loner" persona. Her kind of enigmatic aliens are scattered across the universe, pretty much surviving on their own. She's the kind of creature who crashes into your star, then lands on your planet for a few days to recover, keeping to herself and not interacting with anyone, then leaves never to be seen again. This one has stuck around on Earth for some reason, though (meaning I haven't thought that far ahead...), and is being more proactive in communicating with the locals. The central aspect, though, is she's still kind of like a mute wanderer. She's always by herself, she doesn't speak with anyone, if you approach her while she's fiddling with her tech she'll simply ignore you, you never know what's going through her head and so forth.

To make Stardiver a Robotics Mastermind would be... "Sideways" of that, I suppose. For one, I want her to be a competent, confident survivor, something Masterminds usually aren't just by the nature of the AT's design. They have help. Secondly, a Mastermind to me is someone defined by their followers, robots included, like Vox who is a walking zombie plague or Nathaniel who is a military commander, or the Rook who has built himself a veritable army of combat drones. Their concepts work because they're defined as much by the "help" they get as by their actual powers, if not more so. Stardiver is defined by her own, concentrated power and weirdness.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite done with Stardiver's concept, so if it sounds like I'm making it up as I go, I apologise. Still, here is what she looks like, from before I finalised her name and concept.

I should probably relate a touch of history on Bodyshop. He was I think the third character I ever made back in 2004, back when he was called the Meat Machine. He was a Grav/Rad Controller because look at the pretty bunny! Not too long later, I realised I didn't like playing Controllers and he had no story at all, so I deleted him. When Radiation Blast came out for Blasters, I desperately wanted to use it, and I remembered my old Rad Controller. The name "Meat Machine" had been taken by then, so I went for the more obscure but still nasty when you get it name "Bodyshop," creating a character who had no reason to exist other than to carry Radiation Blast.

The story was that the cancerous tissue which made up his body was the result of an experimental radiotherapy treatment on cancer cells which, instead of killing them or making them shrink, made them divide violently. The monster could not be stopped because it grew too fast, until it grew into and interfaced with the helmet of a long dead cyborg villain, which pacified the monster, but still left it mindless. It wasn't until the soul of a hero recently killed in the line of duty somehow merged with the creature that it finally became sentient, having the hero's mind controlling the AI in the helmet, and so controlling the cancerous body, shaping it into a humanoid. So that's still a hero, just a hero who's been taken out of his body and into the body of something completely different.

The reason I make these long explanations is making this guy a Necro Mastermind would turn him evil. Zombies, pretty much by definition, are transformed people, meaning Bodyshop is infecting and mutating people to serve as his soldiers in a Stubbs the Zombie apocalyptic fashion, and that just seems like too easy a solution. I rather prefer to have the fleshy, horrible, disgusting monster be a hero, just to fly in the face of expectations. That's not to say I don't believe Necro characters can't be heroes, not at all. It's just that I don't believe a character who uses a mutating, disfiguring disease as his primary weapon can be very heroic.

That, and I already have Iprit, the walking disease creature who infects and poisons people, then uses their diseased carcassess as its legions of minions. Necro/Poison with Necromancy powers coloured a pea soup yellowish-green looks positively rancid and disgusting, but that really isn't what I want for Bodyshop.

I kind of want to focus on the signature power of a cancer - it regenerates. If you burn, poison or cut out most of it but leave a small part behind, it can grow back and become even bigger. That's sort of what defines this guy - you can't really kill him because he'll just keep regenerating. Which, to me, says Regen, practically speaking, and being defined by his powers of being hard to kill tells me "Brute." Powerset proliferation will see to that. As for offensive powers? Well, what's the most visceral, bodily type of powerset, if not Spines? Do Brutes have Spiens? Will they ever have spines?

In a roundabout way, I think I may have come up with a good combo for this guy, if it's possible - Spines/Regen Brute. I recall wanting to make him a Spines/Regen Scrapper at one point, but I have another Spines/Regen Scrapper with an alien story so that was never possible and I think I just forgot about it. Yeah, that will probably work.

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Also, if it seems like I'm just rejecting suggestions, that's not at all the case. Every time I explain anything at all, this helps, and greatly. Being able to verbalise all of these things makes the problems a lot more clear and the solutions a lot more focused. This is helping tremendously. Thank you!

Heh, personally it reminded me of Straga, and anyone who knows what I'm talking about earns a cookie.

Less NPC, more storyline character who only shows up in cinematics. He's an interesting take on the classic angelic design parsed through Blizzard's eye for design (and they do make some amazing designs), and his "wings" are less actual wings with structure as much as they are an enormous cape of glowing tentacles with which he can stab at people, grab things and even support his weight.

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Actually, this is probably Tyriel's one real claim to fame all told. And it just serves to highlight how ****** the old FMVs we fawned over really are in retrospect

If these characters were created "years ago," then the ability to use villainous ATs for heroes wasn't available, either. If you chose to create villains and pretend they were heroes anyway, then you accepted the problem then, whether explicitly or implicitly. Just because new systems were introduced to include the options you wanted does not justify asking for this to be given freely to all characters who were made on the "wrong" side.

This is like me making a Petless Mastermind and then demanding I be given a free respec into a Dual Pistols Blaster because the callous developers forced me into making my pistoleer in the wrong AT on the wrong side of the game. When you do things that the game doesn't support, you relinquish the right to make claims of support towards them. It's really just that simple.

Whoever did the Comic Con recap recently said that "they don't flap, they swim" and explained the wings don't capture well in still shots, but look much better in actual motion. I'm not really sure what that means, but I'm hoping this means they're animated auras, kind of like Tendrils but more awesome.

And dot dot dot. We've been having a lot of these posts lately, where it seems the poster expects you to sit down an reconstruct his intent like a forum archaeologist.