Samuel_Tow
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:I don't see layers on it at all. I see folded cloth like what I'd get if I tied a t-shirt around my waist. Yes, it colours in two sections, but I just see that as an artefact of colouring more so than an artefact of layering. Then again, I know next to nothing about Victorian attire.Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards
It's a matching clothing piece for the bustier and a top-layer for the skirt too. The thing itself even has layers to it. Yeesh.
I'll be the first to admit that Steampunk is one of my least favourite thematics, so I don't know all that much about it. I'll be reusing the various costume pieces for other designs altogether. -
Quote:In which case a computer algorithm working on a specific seed isn't random at all, it just appears random to a non-scientific, non-informed observer.Originally Posted by Ironblade
"Random" can be tested and mathematically verified.
Furthermore, putting rewards on a random roll has got to be one of the worst, most repugnant practices in gaming history. I'd much sooner see rewards based on collecting a large number of points, than rewards you have to be lucky to get, even if the latter MAY end up being more common than the former. I prefer to me in control of the amount of effort I put into a game and I prefer to have a direct system of feedback as to what my effort is accomplishing. Six-times-hidden systems for measuring participation on top of a pure random roll is the exact opposite of that. -
Quote:The simple answer is that it shouldn't be done. I don't care about hypothetical situations and possibilities. If City of Heroes goes "Free" to Play, I cancel my subscription, uninstall the NCsoft Launcher and never look at the franchise again. That's all the discussion that needs to be had on the subject as far as I'm concerned.Originally Posted by American_Knight
Again, this is not a debate as to IF it should be done, but your ideas of HOW is should be done.
To me, this is like that "Life After People" tripe that the History Channel keeps rerunning. "This isn't about how human life would end, but about what happens when they do." Here's the thing - I don't CARE what would happen if people suddenly disappeared off the face of the Earth but left all their possessions and buildings behind intact. I'm not interested in idle hypothetics that start with a basic assumption which is neither pleasant nor interesting.
Other games may or may not have had success with F2P transitions. Other games are not City of Heroes. -
What IS the belt supposed to represent, anyway? I've never seen it as anything but the top of a boiler suit tied around the waist like what Chell did in Portal 2
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Subjective:
I don't believe the new faces are bad, but they are certainly not good. If the difference between the old and new ones weren't as jarring, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart. If anything, the new shininess and better shaders make them look like they're smeared in oil. They're serviceable for what they are, which is another low-detail face option.
Objective:
The new faces have very low-resolution textures and a very low polygon count that the new shaders don't do much to offset. When compared against the Mutant Pack faces, which have VERY high-res textures, the new faces appear very much out-dated. I run the game at HD resolution, and it's very obvious on my screen what items have high-resolution textures and which don't.
Low-res costume items make the game look dated and ugly, whereas high-resolution items hide much of the age. For years now there seems to have been a concentrated effort to add more special effects to the game when the basic truth is that sharp textures and detailed meshes do far more than graphics technology can ever accomplish. The best graphics technology can hope to achieve is reproduce the effects of large textures and complex meshes, which it utterly fails to do in this case.
The first thing faces in City of Heroes require is not new technology. It is a higher standard of basic quality, which means more detailed texture and more complex meshes. Only once that is achieved should other technical fields be pursued. -
Backpack suggestion:
Add a version of the backpack that does not come pre-coloured and tints to the colours it is given, not to a browner shade of them. This is what the backpack looks when tinted white/white:
As you can see, I've selected a white primary and a white secondary from the colour picker, and as you can see, the backpack is not white. This is because its base texture is brown and grey, not white like other costume items. The only other place I've seen this tinting is in skin textures, where it's excusable because skin textures are supposed to be impossible to match to costume colours, so adding a tinted base texture is understandable. I see no reason to add a tinted base texture to the backpack. -
Quote:This:Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards
Now I want to know what you've got in mind for that clock-sash-belt-thing.
It's not a complex costume and it doesn't use many steampunk pieces, nothing beyond the bra thing (with a Sports Bra underneath) and the "crumpled cloth" belt. The overall idea was to give this one the look of a greasemonkey in overalls, but with the top pulled down to the waist and with attitude. I used the Vanguard rifle because it's the only decent rifle in the game that's not incredibly tiny, and for this one it kind of had to be big. -
Quote:Really, it's not a bad booster. I've already seen a lot of cool stuff done with it, though primarily for women, for whom there are fewer brass parts and fewer uncolourable bits. In fact, women seem to get mostly Carnival of Shadows bits, like the boots, the belts, the corsets and so forth. The belt alone has given me a cool idea for a character, so I'll probably get it just for that. I've bought boosters for less.Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards
Ahh! I see. I didn't quite understand the whole forced-brown-tint thing and I now know why. As you pointed out I haven't been using any of the stuff that barely or doesn't tint. That, for me is no problem because I may never use them - but now I can see how it would affect other folks. That, now I know you weren't being silly and joking around.
It just bothers me that the artist put his or her own artistic vision ahead of customization and gave us pieces with very limited use for no real justifiable reason. It's gotten to the point where I cringe every time I see an orange or brown steampunk costume, because I KNOW that's the only thing which works.
Oh, and then there's this. Pretty much the majority of costumes I've taken home from here have had nothing to do with actual steampunk, or indeed Victorian gentlemen or ladies. I have a costume cooking up for a character I've never made that I'll post when I get around to mocking it up.Quote:Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards
The flexibility of these new costume pieces is incredible. All of the costume pieces I've used the Steampunk Pack on so far aren't even related to steampunk. This Pack is seriously awesome!
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Quote:I made this post based off of screenshots and trailers and before I found out that most of the pieces I was referring to were either not available to the right gender or not tintable. You've made good use of the few pieces that don't have mandatory brown on them, which is essentially most of the female cloth elements, but the things I wanted were the boiler backpack and the hats, both of which have large uncolourable brass elements.Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards
Wait a minute. You're just being silly and joking, right? What happened to this post?
Moreover, the pack represents something I dislike a great deal - style over substance, or shiny graphics over customization, as it were. Unless we're talking about a costume piece which fills in a brand new category, like tobotic legs, monster heads, invisible torsos or so forth, what I want out of my costume pieces is the ability to use them in a variety of designs and make them work in all of them, and anything with brass or hair in this pack is hard-locked to a very specific take on what steampunk should represent.
As of right now, I have at least three characters I'd like to update with Steampunk pieces, but can't because I don't want brown in their costumes. -
Personally, I feel they should have made that into a costume piece. That would have ended the problem right there.
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I'm afraid that this is the first booster pack that I simply do not like. There's too much brown in it, and too much of it is not tintable.
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Quote:The problems with the pack pieces is that they feel like a graphic artist sat down and made an NPC piece with a set colour scheme, then remembered this has to go on a player character and threw in a couple of custom colour patches. The problem with this approach is that it limits the item's use to a great extent while adding absolutely nothing to customizability, outside of a few specific corner cases of people being able to use the default colours in their colour scheme.Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Still not got a chance to test yet, but what Sam mentions does sound like a bad idea. having an 'Original' option for a peice with the current settings, and a 'Altered' option where you can colour the metal sounds like a better idea. And would also work on MANY other pieces than the pack parts.
If I want to use a costume piece detail to represent brass, I am more than capable of colouring that item a brownish-orange. Having the game FORCE me to wear brownish-orange brass goggles on my hat is not a superior decision just because I can have a black hat with orange goggles on it. All it means is I can't pick that hat if my character design doesn't involve brass elsewhere on the costume.
And again - "steampunk" is not the same as "everything is made from brass." Even the Nemesis Army uses (or used to use) shiny silver steel for the claws on their Warhulks. Suppose I want my boiler to be made not of bronze but of wrought iron?
Leaving uncolourable, very specific details on costume items has always been a very bad idea, and I thought the PPD shoulders had served as sufficient proof of that point - that yellow looks goofy unless you alter your original design to use yellow, which is often not worth it just for the shape of these things.
Please, give us doubles of the costume pieces which can be coloured completely, even if they end up with less colour detail in them overall. I'd sooner have my goggles match my hat if it meant I could have them black AND pick my hair colour. -
Having seen the Steampunk pieces, I find myself profoundly disappointed in how such lovely pieces can be so horribly mismanaged.
Forstarters, anything brass on any of the pieces is not colourable. I don't know if the developers honestly believed that in asking for Steampunk, we were secretly asking for the brown-orange of brass and copper. Having non-customizable colours on any piece is a horrible design decision if said colour isn't black, and it isn't here. Furthermore, the two male hats come with a predefined hair colour, one black and the other brunette. Why? Even as restrictive as regular hats with hair are, we at least get one colour for the hat and one for the hair.
The problem is that a lot of these pieces are designed with three, sometimes even four item colours spread between primary, two detail colours and one accent colour. However, we're not playing Champions Online. We don't have the ability to customize four colour per costume piece. Designing costume pieces with four colours, therefore, is a huge mistake. This takes costume pieces which could have been great additions to a wide range of concepts and reduces them into parody novelty pieces that are only every useful if you're looking to make a steampunk character clad in brass and copper, never you mind that steel was just as popular of a construction material.
Perhaps the biggest offender in this regard is the boiler backpack. Not only can we not colour the smoke/steam (and we really should be able to), but the secondary colour applies to only half the secondary pieces, leaving the rest a brass brown. Why? Why design it like this, a though expecting that I'll have a third and fourth category of colours to apply over the rest of the piece. We either need to rework the existing pieces to allow colours to affect more of them, or otherwise need copies of the pieces that we can actually colour. What's the point of customization if you can't customize? Why are our graphics artists continually making pieces that don't fit together with anything outside their own set? WE are supposed to be designing our characters, aren't we?
There's also the gender inconsistency. As was mentioned, men get the Victorian jackets but women don't, and for no real reason that I could determine. Inversely, women get the belt options, the ones that look like a boiler jumpsuit taken off and hanging around the waist, yet men don't. Why? Women get only a skin for Victorian gloves, but men get 3D model, and again - why? And why are all female Victorian boots high-heeled?
I was looking forward to this pack with great anticipation, but having seen not just how badly it's being mismanaged but how profoundly it misunderstands the concept of character customization, I'm not sure if I'll get it. And that's coming from the guy who got the Party Pack the day it came out. Poor show, guys. REALLY poor show. -
I don't really know much about the Interface procs, but I do know one thing - putting proc chance on every tick in a rain power is just asking for trouble, and one need no further evidence than Ramiel's first mission. I recall running that with a Fire Blaster and trying my bestest most strongest attacks to relatively decent results. Then, by chance, I tried Rain of Fire and found it DESTROYED everything under it because the fictional extra unresistable damage was proccing on every tick, and that power ticks every half second or quarter second (I forget which).
I can't say if the actual current change is the right way to go, but A change in how procs work in rain powers should not have been unexpected. In fact, I would expect rain powers to be held to the same standard as AoE powers and tweaked to achieve a similar overall proc performance.
*edit*
I haven't had a chance to check the Steam costume pieces. -
Quote:Pointless post in a pointless thread, just as one would expect on the Internet.Originally Posted by Nihilii
-- random guy on the internet, 19/05/2011
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Quote:A hot coffee is hot if you drink it too fast. If you fell into a vat of molten steel, that "hot" coffee would be pretty dang cold by comparison. And while that beer you just took out of your fridge is cold, taking a stroll around the South Pole makes it feel warm by comparison.Originally Posted by Jophiel
Erm? Hot is the opposite of cold but that doesn't mean everything is freezing or searing. Most things are just room temperature, neither hot nor cold by our perception.
There are degrees of everything. When you have two competing concepts, it is a big mistake to only define one and then postulate that the other is the same but opposite.
More specifically, I'm talking about character and story design. If you need to create a villain and his story, you don't do this by creating a hero and his story and then inverting everything. The opposite of good is not evil, it is stupid. The opposite of a hero is not a villain, it is caricature. The opposite of a hero's story is not a villain's story, it is a right mess. I've seen PLENTY of games design for a good path and then just invert all decisions to form a bad path. This produces very bad stories in the end.
A good villain is not defined by the hero he is the opposite of. A good villain's story is not defined by the hero's story it is the opposite of. A good villain is defined in and of himself, not as an extension to another character, plot or concept. Said villain's motivations are his own, based on his own logic, his own rationality and his own emotions, not the theoretical opposites of a good characters' logic, rationality and emotions.
Just because you took a good heroic action and made the reverse of it doesn't mean you ended up with a decent villainous action. Instead, most of the time this leaves you with a shallow plot. -
There are quite a few interesting pieces in that Booster. A few nice hairdos, quite a bit of cool steampunk tech and a few snazzy clothes items. Worth the price of admission, easily.
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This again, huh?
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Quote:Let me provide an example of what I mean:Originally Posted by Solo_One
Evil is defined by Good as what Good is not. So, to Good, Evil is it's opposite but to Evil, Good is not the opposite of Evil.
About half an hour ago, I decided to eat dinner. I don't think you can define eating dinner as an act of good, which means it must be evil. So does eating dinner make me an evil man?
More broadly, viewing every decision as either purely good or purely evil and nothing in-between and nothing besides is very limiting to a story's morality. Not every action an evil character makes HAS to be evil. Indeed, not every action an evil character makes has to be "not good," either. To build a villain by taking a hero and drawing the inverse is simply flawed design.
Evil is not the opposite of good, just as a villain is not the opposite of a hero. This isn't about real-world morality, it's about good storytelling. -
Dog! I forgot to add:
Evil is not the opposite of good.
Anyone who plans to ever write a story for a villain, please write this down and read it between every sentence. "Evil" has many definitions, but "the opposite of good" is probably the WORST of the lot, and the most useless when it comes to writing a convincing evil character. Simply creating a heroic story and then having the villainous character to everything opposite to what the hero would do makes for a CRAPPY villain.
A believable villain has both a reason to be evil (even if it's not a valid one) and a specific kind of evil that he or she adheres to. Not every situation that has an unambiguously good and evil binary choice will have an evil character pick the evil option, because a character needs more motivation and justification to take an action than what it's labelled as.
Simple example: You have an option to save a person from a monster or let him die. "Let him die" would be considered the "evil" option by virtue of being less good than the "good" option, but that doesn't mean every villain would take it. Some might save the person to get paid, some might do it because they hate monsters, some might do it because they believe they're good guys, and some might do it because, hey, free XP! However, none would do it "for the evulz," because if they did, then they're not very interesting as player characters OR as antagonists. -
Quote:That's actually a pretty good way of writing, I've found. I personally tend to not have a practical description of "who" a character is, so much as a long history of events that they've taken part in and memory of how they've felt and reacted in response. Whenever I need to decide how a character would react, I don't ask "How would character X react to situation Y?" but rather "How would someone who reacted with A to situation B react in situation C, which relates to situation B in such and such a way?" This is also an easy way to spot when you're flanderising your own characters, when you catch them reacting one way, but can remember them reacting a different way in a similar situation before.Originally Posted by The_Overlord
I think it's that moment when your characters do or say something that surprises you - but you think about it and realise it's exactly what they would do. That's when you know you've made a great character, who's really become a person out of your control all on their own.
More to point, I have been surprised by the reactions of my characters in the sense of poor planning. I've planned the resolution to a situation ahead of time, but when I put the character I wanted to resolve the situation in it, I realise that this character's precedent does not match what I want the character to do in this instance. I wanted the character to do one thing, but when it came down to it, "the character" chose to do something else. I then have the option of backtracking and swapping situation or character, or quite simply changing my plans for the future. "Changing" the character is never an option, and I have very little respect for writers who redefine their characters every time they write them into a corner, or whenever they damn please. -
This bears repeating - there are two questions here that get instinctively mangled into one very fat, unwieldy one. These two questions are:
1. What makes for a good antagonist in a story?
and
2. What kind of villain do I want to play?
These two questions are not interchangeable, and they're really not talking about the same thing at all. Designing a good antagonist, for the most part, revolves around designing someone you HATE, even if you infuse that someone with positive, or at least "evil is cool" qualities. Designing a good player villain is almost the complete opposite. It involves designing someone you kind of sort of secretly really like, even if you pretend you love to hate him.
This is City of Villain's primary source of fail, in my opinion - it does a decent job as far as creating stories for villains goes, but it fails to account for the PLAYER at the controls of these villains, and in so doing creates a terrible environment FOR THE PLAYER. The whole of the experience is dark, dreary and depressing, exactly what life for a true villain should be like, and exactly the WRONG kind of experience for people looking to have a spot of fun and maybe feel good about themselves. The key to designing a good villainous experience is just that - giving the players the chance to end the day feeling good about themselves DESPITE having done evil, not BECAUSE of it. You want people having genuine fun, not make-pretend fun because the act of doing bad things was well-represented. And, honestly - unless you enjoy seeing people suffer, a game that's all about suffering isn't going to give you sunshine and roses.
This is why I talk about "villains with style and class." In order for players to have fun, in my opinion, the game has to be on their side. To ensure this happens, you need to take the glamorous parts about being a villain - the powers, the technology, the grandeur and so forth, while simultaneously playing down the unglamorous ones - murder, betrayal, torture, psychopathy and so forth. Give people the kind of fantasy where it's OK to be the bad guy for a day and do indeed get away with it and win in the end. Every time you stop by to beat people over the head with how horrible they are being, you essentially have the game tell them "You should not be having fun! Stop it!" Not a good approach. -
I have another VFX bug for you, this time with pictures and precise description:
Pic:
Affected powers: Martial Arts -> Crane Kick, Martial Arts -> Cobra Strike
Bug type: Power effect isn't greyscale and overpowers colour choice options.
Detailed description:
This bug affects the "ring" power effect that plays with Martial Arts attacks Crane Kick and Cobra Strike. This ring does not take tinting colours properly, because the ring effect is not greyscale. It's in the same raibow as the Original Invulnerability effects. The effect DOES tint, but the tinting is applied over the existing colours, so no matter what colour you give it, it always looks like a tinted rainbow.
The pic in question displays Crane Kick as used by my female Martial Artist using Bright Crane Kick, with custom colours set to white/white. The neutral colours don't tint the effect and show what it looks like base.
The rest of the affected powers' effects are working as intended. The... Starburst glow sparkles and motion lines on Martial Arts kicks tint properly and assume the proper colour. It's these two very obvious rings on these two powers that throw the entire set out of whack.
My suggestion would be to out-and-out replace this effect for customizable versions of the powers and put in a white ring that, at best, takes on both primary and secondary colours. Or, much more simply, just draw it as a single-colour white ring and tie that to secondary colour for tinting.
Please fix this
*edit*
The Dark themes of the powers appear to be affected, as well. -
I've always been a fan of making our body-parts invisible, and possibly replacing them with auras, either per costume piece or with just a full-body aura. It would look really cool.
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I personally find that the puppy-kicking kind of evil as expressed by Westin Phipps and Peter Thermai is tasteless and unpleasant. It may be good for an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, but it's not the sort of thing I would want to be associated with, even when we're talking about my villains. Never forget that you have to strike a balance between what constitutes villainy and what people will actually play, speaking of those who don't get off on being evil, at least. To me, this balance is best struck in two ways:
1. Concentrate on the glamorous side of villain - the super science, the amazing power, the impossible achievements, the constant ability to outsmart, outmanoeuvre and downright overpower everyone else. A "cool" villain is one that cannot be stopped, cannot be tricked and who, when he gets serious, can clean house bit time. It's the villain who manages to get what he wants DESPITE all his enemies and all his allies trying to stop them, and who does it in a way that makes it look easy. Evil with class and dignity, as it were.
2. Present a reasonable villain. Hyena-cackling morons who want to eat babies and rip the heads off pretty girls because the voices in their head tell them so are boring. Give me a villain who feels the world is weak and it NEEDS a strong leader, or one who feels that the fight against evil justifies all casualties or, hell, even one who feels that free will is an abomination because it makes order impossible and then we'll talk. As long as the villain has a reason to be evil that I could look at and say: "Well, that's insane, but I can see the logic." Then that's a villain I want to play as.
In general, when making villain content, make sure you make content that people WANT TO PLAY, not content that repulses people.