Samuel_Tow

I find that people who dare to be stupid and choose to roll with it anyway end up making the most amazing stories in the long run Yeah, sure, you don't always score and a lot of the time you DO end up just looking stupid, but I find that to be an occupational hazard. After all, when I'm designing a hot pink scantly clad bunny girl inspired by a porn comic book AND I'm trying to give her a genuine, dramatic story... Well, suffice it to say there are as much hits and misses. But the result is almost always more memorable than GenericHero6546814.

The reason I take issue with "toon" isn't (just) because I'm a pedantic jerk, but rather because I choose to treat my characters as real people. Not even just as fictional characters in a book, but actual, real people that I know or am at least familiar with. Yes, obviously, they aren't real, but if I can manage to regard a fictional character that I'm writing for as a real person with real emotions and desires that I can sympathise with or at least understand, then my writing is that much better. Why I take issue with "toon" is that - in my eyes at least - it represents a profound disconnect between reality and fiction, regarding our characters as "work," rather than as "people."

A character I've created isn't a "creation" that I'm working on to me, but rather a real person that I usually respect, admire and even like. A character is a person that I can only control to the extent of the events I put them through, but not to the extent of personality. How my characters grow and change is down to their own personality and mentality, and the best I can do when writing for them is to stay true to their character, reinforce that and detail it further.

On the subject of writing stories without clear plans, I find that this is simultaneously the most organic way to write and the one with the highest workload and greatest skill requirement. This relies you to either plan an entire tree of possibilities for the future for events to pick from as they occur, or otherwise leave yourself A LOT of room to future developments to avoid writing yourself into a corner. It also takes a significant degree of "spin" to expand on previous plot points that may not have been entirely appropriate to the way the plot is shaping out, "but no, see, they actually were, but we couldn't understand it!" Either that, or you need to constantly back-track and rewrite which is... Time-consuming, to say the least.

Personally, I have an extreme dislike for stories where it seems that the plot was laid down first and every chance event occurs to serve the plot. The cocky hero's friend dies in contrived circumstances. Wait, why? Oooh, I get it! It was so the hero could learn humility! Hogwash! Eventuality should not be a slave to the plot. The plot should be a slave to eventuality.

Finally, on the subject of realistic, down-to-earth heroes: To each their own. I, personally, care very little for them. I have a realistic, down-to-earth life, I have a job, I have responsibilities. I don't need to relive my boring life in my exciting fiction. As such, I far prefer heroes and villains who exist above the mundanity of working for a pay, of hunting for food, of recovering from injury and so forth. Limited ammunition? Nanoforge with unlimited capacity. Grievous wounds? Healing factor. Long distances? Super travel powers. Death? Resurrection.

In a sense, I find it more exciting to start a story based off amazing, overpowered super powers and draw a dramatic, interesting plot ON TOP of that. Many people believe that characters like Superman are too strong and that makes them boring as nothing can hurt them, but really - it's a question of storytelling. A confrontation doesn't have to come down to Dragon Ball Z mathematics of power level subtraction, or indeed come down to who is the strongest. I find it easy to have my characters be completely overpowered, but face dramatic difficulties of an entirely different nature, such as the cursed powers, the fine line between hero and bully, the inability to be everywhere at once, relationships with non-powered individuals and so forth.

In short, I tell about the kind of life I'd like to have but know is not possible, not the kind of life I already have. I don't need to retell what's happening before my eyes, even if it's slightly tweaked. I specifically want my characters to NOT be relatable to me. That's what makes them interesting and unusual. Not a question of "what if I had super powers," so to speak. I find that this has blessed me with a whole cadre of REALLY weird characters, something I take massive pride in. Where most people's creations usually seem to come down to "man/woman in suit," mine usually constitute much more abstract constructs, such as "sentient cancerous tissue in the shape of a humanoid, running on artificial intelligence" or "ancient animal spirit awakened to bring wisdom to a blind world" or "an animate girl made of slime and electricity" or even "prehistoric insect queen seeking to colonise as many worlds as she can." Again, to each their own, but I find the most interest in the most fantastical and uncomprehensible.

Oh, I never said RP requires one to ruin his or her own gaming experience or play against the system, merely that it's easy to extend to to where it does. Roleplay does indeed encompass things as simple as having a magic-themed character pick missions to do with magic. It can also be argued to encompass a character who is incapable of travelling over water for fear of drowning, never being able to access Peregrine Island or Striga Isle. Or a character who can never visit a trainer for extreme arrogance and has to level up to 50 on his starting two powers.

Roleplay doesn't have to impair gameplay, and all I was really saying is that I won't let it. This doesn't mean I won't stick to concept or story where I'm given a no-downsides choice, obviously, but I have a very low tolerance for "character-appropriate" activities that ruin the gaming experience for me. And one CAN mix RP and proper gaming if both are taken in moderate amounts.

I still have you all beat

As far as I've seen, it's slightly above "look into" and into the "maybe" category, which is still just as much of a crapshot, but at least closer to 50/50, whereas "looking into" is just another way of saying "no, but we don't like saying no, so we'll keep an open mind."

I'm sorry, Tech, but you don't have nearly enough posts to be commenting on this thread. Why don't you take your paltry TEN THOUSAND POSTS and go play in the little kids pool, instead?

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I'm joking! I'm joking!

No, not really. Ninja Run is goofy and not in the slightest natural, plus I have to then explain why said character is able to kick and punch giant mechs to death in unarmed combat. Yes, you can "explain" anything with enough technobabble, but not everything is worth explaining.

To each their own.

I got up to hating Dragon Ball Z, I'm afraid. After that, it was getting repetitive.

You know... That's an EXCELLENT idea! Animated animal ears! To the Art Thread!

What's a "customized quickchat?"

To be honest, I don't think the effective equivalent to quick-time events is a good solution to AI fights. Once or twice as a gimmick, maybe, as it is with Protean that's fine. I mean, he uses his Power Syphon at most once every minute. Now take the fight with the dual Virgil Durays. There is an Airstrike going ALL THE ******* TIME!!! And Fusion and Jane aren't any better. If one isn't rumbling the other is pulsing CONSTANTLY.

Far as I'm concerned, typical platformer boss stages would be what I'd envision as proper encounter design. Seer 0001 in Praetoria kind of has that. You fight her, then she vanishes and sends in TEST, then you fight her some more. MegaMan games are pretty good about this. As bosses get damaged, they develop new attacks and their existing attacks become more complex, they shift forms, they swap locations and so on.

I've always wanted to see, say, a Nemesis encounter where you start out fighting him, then he runs off and sends soldiers after you and closes a breakable door, then you have to fight him with PFF on that you have to break down generators to bring down, only when he goes down to 50% he turns them back on and summons more soldiers. That sort of thing. I'm not sure how capable the game is of handling this, but that's how I envision a cool AV fight, not a series of quick-time events.

100% chance it won't get fixed is exactly what I'm batting at now. Forcefields custom bubble graphics are still misaligned, the female "with weapon" run animation still plays one slow loop at the start, Build Up without a weapon still puts you in a "fake" combat stance that's actually the neural stance, using the Build Up animation while hovering can still override combat animations, the introduction to Oranbega still happens in a cave map and NOT Oranbega, that hole in the map in that one Office room has still not been fixed and so on and so on.

I'm sure you have more faith in the development process than I do, but to me it seems like we're being governed by Neuron - keep churning out new stuff and to hell with the broken old stuff. As long as it doesn't stop the game, leave it in.

Personally, I've always found the Demon Summoning whip attacks to be horribly stiff and unappealing, feeling nothing at all like a real whip and more like a Simon Belmont extendotentacle ball on a chain. This is more of an animation issue than an FX issue, but if we ever DO get a full set of whip attacks, I'd like it to look a LOT better than that.

The primary way to know you're a role-player is when you don't refer to your characters as "toons." A "toon" is an inanimate object, an abstract construct of concepts and ideas without a soul in it, so to speak. A character is what a real person in a story should be, a person with his or her own backstory, personality and identity that isn't broadly describable by what he or she is: a "toon," but rather what his or her role in the story is: that of a character.

Semantics aside, I've never considered myself a roleplayer, as I've never felt the need to ruin my game experience for the sake of staying "true" to a character. When I'm determined to tell a character's story with no limitations of any kind, I sit down and quite literally tell that character's story through text as a written work. When I get into City of Heroes, I get into it to play a game. A game about MY characters, certainly, but a game nonetheless. Where the game allows me to make decisions, I will make the ones appropriate to the character at hand, but I won't look to make extra decisions by playing against game systems.

Your example would horrify me, for instance. I tend to want to focus on one character at a time and one character only. If ANYTHING happened to prevent me from playing that character, then that's a meta-game obstacle that, if insurmountable, makes me stop playing the game entirely. And if I stop playing the game against my will too many times for too long, I stop playing the game permanently. Same with "delete on death," same with "natural human" builds and so forth. Sure, I've gone on record as refusing to use Stamina (when that were a choice) and refusing to use Inventions and refusing to enter the rat race of Incarnate grind, but that's mostly because you can make a decent character without all of that crap. If I can't make a decent character, then I don't play that sub-par character regardless of how much I like the concept.

Unless we get ANYTHING ELSE besides Incarnate crap, I don't think I will be.

What horror? That's awesome!

If Praetoria would be a ghost town unless people are FORCED to start there under certain conditions, then the expansion has officially failed at its primary stated economic purpose - to entice new players to a game with very low turnover. The idea of Praetoria was to offer a new, BETTER low-level experience, so if people are so appalled at Praetoria and so resistant to playing this content without being forced, then there's a fundamental design that strongarming people isn't going to solve.

The problem with flight emotes is with how they're rigged. BABs was VERY uncomfortable allowing emotes to override basic animations, so I believe he rigged them so that they could only ever override the animation for flying forward, which is the loop which starts AFTER you're done leaning forward into it. It's still less clunky than how it was originally, which is to say you had to fly forward for four seconds, upon which point one of the four flight poses will be randomly chosen for you, and those did not include the original default flight pose. They are a MASSIVE kludge that's as unwieldy as it is make-shift.

In this regard, you are correct. This is best done as power customization, and in a larger sense as customization for our basic movement animations. When I say "basic movement animations," I mean the animations with which we jump, run in all four directions, fall from a jump, drop off a ledge, fly in all four horizontal directions, fly up, fly down (which currently has no animation associated with it, you just float down combat-ready), run with a rifle, run/jump/fly with a right-handed weapon, with a left-handed weapon, with a shield, as well as all the transition animations for landing, swapping directions, taking off, landing and so forth. There's a lot there to customize, put it like that But I'm confident it can be broken down into a not-too-cumbersome interface.

What you have to remember is that there's every chance that base movement animations CANNOT be customized. Ever. They're built into the system. However, we have the precedent of powers which can override these. Even before Ninja Run and Beast Run, we had a power which overrode the animations we used to move - Hover. Many people forget that Hover once used to use the same "perpetual backstretch" flying animation as Fly, until BABs admitted it looked goofy at low speed and swapped it for the upright Hover, which ONLY plays when you use a Hover or equivalent power, but does NOT fly when you are given a flight status buff without a power to swap your flight animation, such as Group Flight or Energy Group Flight.

What this means is that if we want to customize our running, jumping and flying animation, we may need to always run a "Custom Movement" power that has no actual buff or debuff stats, but alters our basic movement animations and is customizable at power customization. Sprint isn't a good power for this, as it has a cost and isn't something one can be expected to run constantly, and Walk isn't a good place as that has power suppression and a speed debuff on it. We'd need a new Inherent power available to everyone at character creation and customizable along with primary and secondary sets. At least that's how I envision it.

See, the problem with this is that the list of slash commands IS HUGE! Also, some of the commands in there are actually system commands, like "/lightmaplodscale - Set lightmap LOD scale." I don't even know what that means, but you can set it from a keybind. A few commands are also not meant to be called via macros, as well, such as /camrotate, the command to initiate camera rotation independent of model orientation. The descriptions on some of those are also vague and unhelpful, like /lfgset which tells you that it "Sets your "looking for group" status." The thing is that the "status" is on a geometric progression over 2, so it goes 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and then loops again after that for the various flags.

The thing with binds (and macros are just an extension of the binds system) is that they're actually quite complex and require a finer understanding of their internal operations to use properly. For instance, I have what I call a "walk around" bind which sets my character to constantly walk around a target, usually with Walk turned on (and usually on a girl ). This is done via a simple bind of "++left$$++follow" bound to a button. However, if you try to do it the other way around as "++follow$$++left" then it won't work, because moving left breaks follow, while following does not break moving left, which is set to ONLY break on a explicit call. Furthermore, + and ++ operators are used to toggle settings.

A +command is set to 1 when you hold down a bind button and set back to 0 on button release. A ++command is set to 1 on button press and then set to 0 on the next button press, and then set back to 1 thereafter, allowing you to toggle it on and off. All movement commands are toggles, in the sense that they you move your character by activating movement commands and leaving them on until your deactivate them on button release. Anything you do which requires movement, such as trying to bind flight positions, will need to work on that principle, and that principle is never explained anywhere that I've been able to find officially. I know about it because a person on the forums told me about it.

Of course, if you CAN design a macro/bind making window that cut out some more dangerous or unusable commands, gave better explanations on the existing ones and had an extensive tutorial to explain about quoted statements, $$ concatenation, + and ++ toggle commands and so on, then yeah, I don't have a problem with it. I certainly wouldn't complain about such a thing. I just suspect it would be a HELL of a lot of work for something that can be fixed with a better in-game help system which included a list of all slash commands and tutorials on how to use them.

Oh, on the other hand: If such a window allowed me to type in binds longer than 255 symbols, then I AM SOLD!!!

I trust you are joking? Setting aside the... "Problem" of including a full-scale Blaster nuke in a Scrapper Epic set, five ranged attacks is far removed from the framework of Epics that Scrappers get access to, which tend to be two ranged powers and three utility powers. I built my Pistols Epic around the Mace Mastery Patron pool, actually, which constitutes three attacks, a utility power and a control power.

Time Bomb as it stands right now is garbage. Whoever designed it was SO AFRAID that anyone would actually, you know, use the power that he decided to kneecap its utility so bad that what is ostensibly an AWESOME power has been reduced to a power you can almost never use, and in the chances you get to use it, you're better off using Trip Mine anyway. If Time Bomb's usability issues are fixed, then the power would very easily become the set's true T9, because it's a power with shy of a nuke's damage that doesn't drain you completely.

I went out of my way and did more than most to try and salvage Time Bomb and use it for SOMETHING, and yet all the time I felt like I was cheating myself when doing so. It's just badly designed. Redoing it into something akin to Omega Manoeuvre would be nice.

I misspoke. It's hard to kill, but it TIMES OUT too fast. The pet only has a 60-second life span, which means I can only ever really use it for one fight, two if I hurry. I simply have to spend that absurd amount of endurance very often if I want to get any mileage out of the power.

You're offering solutions to make the power more awesome while keeping much of its current cost, that's what I'm referring to. At the opportunity cost that Gun Drone has right now, I'd expect it to be WICKED AWESOME! The problem is that if it were that, then it would simply become too awesome to use, and I'm not a fan of that. Again - I'd rather have a mediocre power at a mediocre cost than a huge power at a huge cost.

Again, I wouldn't be opposed to making Gun Drone not suck, but I want to focus on making it less costly to use first and foremost.

Buff Sprites. OK, let's go with that. Can we have an option to turn off the buff sprites on our end so they don't clutter an otherwise visually pristine character with information I don't want to know about anyway?

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Also, I have another effects bug for you to do with customization:

Willpower -> Rise to the Challenge's "FX in PvP only" option doesn't suppress all effects of the power. It suppresses the continuous effects, but there is another one - when you get near an enemy and RttC first catches a target, it gives out a greenish ring of light, I suspect to signify that it's working. This should be suppressed with the FX in PvP option, but isn't, and I keep seeing it and it keeps bugging me, because it's an incredibly unappealing effect, and one that I can't actually recolour to the best of my experience.

Can we get rid of the ring of light on Rise to the Challenge that plays when an enemy comes into buff range?